What we want from Battlefield 5

I love Battlefield, and Battlefield 4 in particular, but it will be forever tainted by its many technical issues at launch, many of which weren't solved until recently. We already have reservations about Battlefield: Hardline, which is coming out in March, but regardless of how it turns out, it'll always be just an offshoot from the main, numbered Battlefield games. The real return to form the series needs can only come in Battlefield 5, and this is what we'd like to see in its inevitable release.

Remember B Company

The stories in the single-player campaigns of Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 are confused, boring messes. They chase the far too serious and already outdated Call of Duty formula of substituting personality and quality writing with relentless, explosive set pieces designed to distract from the fact that the game doesn't have much of a story or character at all.

Single-player should learn from and teach multiplayer mayhem

The only thing more annoying about the single-player campaigns in Battlefield is how linear they are. Sprinting down a hallway and headshotting vaguely foreign bad dudes is antithetical to what makes Battlefield fun: big, open levels, a huge choice of guns and vehicles, and endless possibilities on how to approach each encounter.

There are very brief glimpses of more open-ended gameplay in both Battlefield 4 and Battlefield: Bad Company, and they're great. Let me choose if I should attack an enemy town by parachuting in from a helicopter, or by ramming a buggy laden with C4 through the front gates. Single-player should pitch me on Battlefield's signature multiplayer mayhem by teaching me some of these more quirky strategies.

A stable launch

Now that it's pretty much fixed and stable, Battlefield 4 is one my favorite games ever made. It's a shame that it took DICE about a year to get to this point. Sadly, experience taught me to expect Battlefield games to launch poorly, but Battlefield 4's launch was so bad, to this day it distracts from what is fundamentally a terrifically designed game.

DICE needs to take its time and come out of the gate with a game that people can play and recommend to their friends on day one. If that means we'll have to wait an extra year or two for the next game, that's fine. We can wait. Battlefield 4 is finally good, has a ton of content, and Battlefield: Hardline is just around the corner. No need to rush. The next Battlefield game needs a stable launch to restore confidence in DICE's ability to deliver on the very fundamentals of multiplayer more than ever. It will be far more valuable to the series than any deadline it hopes to meet.

No more meat grinders

If the narrow corridor is antithetical to Battlefield in single-player form, making it a multiplayer map staple feels like nothing short of cruelty.

I suspect that small levels with choke points where two 32-player teams pound each into ground beef are popular on servers because they're the fastest way to unlock new weapons, but that doesn't make them fun. This is a problem that began with Battlefield 3, and, amazingly, became even worse in Battlefield 4. A Battlefield map without open areas, vehicles, and with an average lifespan of two and a half seconds is just another Call of Duty. We already have enough of those.

Community moderation

Whenever I see someone say something nasty in Battlefield 4's in-game chat I take a screenshot. Soon, I'll have to buy another hard drive just to store them all.

Push for eSports

I find the rising popularity of e-sports around Dota 2, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive fascinating from a cultural and business perspective, but I couldn't care less about watching the actual broadcasts because I'm not hugely into playing those games.

I am, however, hugely into Battlefield, and the idea of a professional 32-player Battlefield team sounds incredibly exciting to me. You'll never see the full potential of what good teamwork can accomplish in Battlefield if you jump into a random server, but imagine what a team of pros could do if there was some real money on the line. Spotters calling in airstrikes, forward teams rushing to capture points on buggies and ATVs, tanks rolling into bases while a sniper on a hill across the map takes care of any infinitary with RPGs, a commander coordinating all of this with airdrops and artillery support.