Steam (and PC in general) just lends itself to indie games more, which is good. It could do better, but overall there's a lot of great games that get the recognition they deserve. Triple A finds most of it's success on consoles, where they can easily market it on the front page of the console, rather than just on the store.
But PC is (unfortunately?) really getting mainstream now, so we are starting to see a lot morals thrown out the window by consumers just to play the latest AAA slop too.
Overall scope was set by EA, they wanted a more mainstream shooter to compete with the likes of Call of Duty, so they could jump into the seasonal content/battle pass grind. But the devs made all these little individual decisions that add up.
Yeah well too bad that ship has sailed as well. Such a shame, BF2, BC2 and BF3 were quality games, just needed a modern take of one of those instead of whatever this is we got.
The best thing is back when Battlefield was Battlefield, it would self-regulate because most people played on self-hosted servers, so cheaters and bad actors were taken care of swiftly. But now they want their own control to put shitty bots and SBMM in the game, so here we are.
This whole game is a case of the devs making bad decisions and then instead of changing them decisions, they apply the quickest bandaid fixes they can.
You are right thats what it would be called, but it doesnt do anything to be a "spiritual successor". It's just a modern copy of it, even worse in places, definitely in terms of quality. I wouldnt be surprised if the assets are just from a marketplace. I left some more thoughts elsewhere in the comment thread and they certainly love their "modern technologies", with AI generated art ingame.
The game is incredibly poorly made, with clipping textures and models everywhere, animations are horrible, performance is terrible, it's hazy and blurry, there's AI imagery all over the place.
It's a cash grab at best. You just have to spawn into the lobby to immediately know you just bought an incredibly low quality game.