Re: I was looking forward to this one... :(
*small voice* - I'm quite enjoying it.
I've bought everything from VietNam onwards, although 1 and V only got a small amount of play.
I like the modern-ish periods and BF4 is still filling servers to this day.
I feel a lot of the criticisms out there are unfair. Hiking across a map is part of the game (and punishment for letting your squad die). I don't need a bazillion weapons and mods.
Now easier to get useful addons (no week of trying to snipe with ironsights to get a useful scope, while being picked of by those already with it etc).
Being able to swap from a set of gun mods in game is a great improvement.
Portal has the scope to be incredible.
Some stuff I'm ambivalent about, like the new class/specialists.
I like the flexibility - but it's now harder to at a glace work out what the people around you can do.
The special skills is fun (but clearly a mechanism to screw more money out of us later)
Some stuff I hate, but can be fixed. Big gap for me is the lack of tighter/smaller maps (and low number of maps in general in the main game), end of match stats.
The bugs - last patch managed to prevent you from looking left and right.. (until you deleted your local config, which forced you to sit through videos and intro-bot-mission again).
Some stuff I hate they're not going to fix (the f'in 'specialists' posing and catch-phrasing between rounds) - actually the general menu system is an unintuitive mess.
If you want to give it a go, signing up for a month of EA Play gives you 10 hours - which is enough to decide if it's for you.