So, impressions after playing the beta for quite a few hours today and yesterday.
Firstly, the Operation Métro map sucks. I mean, really, who came up with the idea to make that the beta map? There's no vehicles and the Métro sections of the map are horribly chokepointy.
Anyway, other than that, the game plays really well, I like the gunplay and general 'feel' of the game and I think it'd play a lot better with vehicles and larger, less linear maps. I did get to play the large conquest map for about half an hour before the server kicked me out, though. Unfortunately, the server I got into was very laggy, and half of both teams were camping the jet spawns, so it wasn't very exciting. I especially like the suppression mechanic they put in, when you shoot at someone in cover their screen gets blurry, their health stops auto-regenerating and they aim worse. It actually works really well, it's really useful to lay down suppressive fire with a machine gun, since whoever is being suppressed will aim significantly worse, making them an easy target for you and your team mates.
However, the beta is still terribly buggy at times, most of it is just visual bugs like animations not playing or parts of the weapon floating half a meter from where it's supposed to be. There are some really annoying gameplay bugs, though, especially the issue with ground collision. One server I played on had ground that wasn't solid in some places, which led to people getting stuck underground, being able to shoot others with impunity. The bug seems quite common in lesser forms as well, where you sink down into the ground up to your waist, having to climb back up again. Just an hour or so ago I had an enemy swimming around inside the ground really fast, killing a crapload of people. Hopefully they fix these bugs before release, but I'm a bit sceptical, TBH.
Finally, Origin is completely meaningless, it doesn't do much of anything and is just there to inconvenience you with more stuff you have to have installed on your computer. Also, whose idea was it to have the server browser run in a web browser anyway? It's not that it's bad per se, but it opens up so many possible problems that could have been avoided with a normal in-game server browser. For example, I run Nightly (64-bit Firefox) which the browser does not support (no where does it say which browsers are supported, mind you), so I had to install a 32-bit Firefox. Not too bad, but still, it's an extra step of potential problems for people who have no idea what they're doing.
Despite all the bugs and inconveniences, I think it'll be a great game, in the end, so I pre-ordered it earlier today. Here's to hoping that it's less buggy by the 27th of October