That's the problem with games where the first bullet point to promote is bigger is better. No other shooter promotes bigger maps and bigger player counts like EA does with BF. When the key point is bigger is best, they got to force themselves to scale up everything even if they cant handle it.
Ya, I know COD has giant Warzone maps for BR mode, but their tried and true MP is still focused on classic 6 vs 6. Yes they got the adjustable 8 vs 8 or 10 vs 10 option, but most people still stick to classic map sizes and 12 people matches. I dont think the average size of these maps have changed in 10 years (they were definitely smaller in the COD4/WAW days).
I'm sure Activision could had forced COD over time to be mandatory 12 vs 12 or 16 vs 16 by now. But they havent.
This is so damn true. In BF1, they had two different modes for their wildly popular Operations mode. One had 40 players (20 v 20) and the other was 64 players (32 v 32). Same maps and objectives, just a larger player count. The 64 player mode was just a chaotic grindfest with way too many players all converging in a tiny sector resulting in grenade spam and bottlenecks that mimic'd WW1's trench battles but it was simply not fun to play an entire 30 minute round on the same 10% of the map because it was impossible to advance.
Now the 40 player mode still had the grenade spam and against a good team, you could get bogged down on some of the harder sectors, but it flowed much better. Everyone loved it. It made BF1 so fucking popular it sold 20 million units.
Around a year in, they had to remove one of the two modes because of a shriking player count and they decided to keep the larger modes. It's like they didnt even play the game themselves. Reddit was on fire. They didnt care. I left the game because I no longer felt that I could be the difference maker that I once was in 20 v 20 matches.
When BFV came around, they replaced the operations mode with a bullshit mode and completely destroyed everything good about BF1, the best selling game in franchise history. Why? Because they listened to angry youtubers who hated the more arcadey feeling BF1 but ended up going back to it after realizing BFV sucked without that arcadey feel. Now i see the same youtubers go back to BF1 and make youtube videos declaring that it is still amazing. GTFO.
CoD doubled down on Modern Warfare after COD4's success with it. Every game after that had the same arcadey feel and 15 years later, we are still using the same formula and mechanics. DICE threw it all away after finally hitting CoD numbers with BF1. I will never understand this studio.
P.S I have mentioned this before but this studio is so stupid that their solution to fix grenade spam was to make grenades automatically restock essentially giving everyone MORE grenades. It is by far the dumbest thing ive ever experienced a developer do.