Why was Battlefield 2 such a great game, and where and how to get it now (2018)

If you have never played Battlefield 2, then you definitely missed on something. BF2 was the pinnacle of the large scale fps. Today, when you start Battlefield 4, you pretty much only see snipers, engineers and people playing on their own, apart from a few exceptions. So what made bf2 so great?

Great maps

If you played BF2, you probably played the famous strike at Karkand map, which was a map that was pretty balanced,with a lot of flanking routes, and not too many vehicles, plus different sizes for the map, the 3 points one being by far the best and most popular. They were well balanced, and didn't feel like empty deserts (most of them) where you had to walk for 10 minutes to get from 1 point to another, like in BF2142.

Remember this? With one spawn point on both hills for the US.

Medic was king

The best players used to play medic, because it was mostly self sufficient, with almost instant full heals, which meant that new players had a chance to get revives all the time. The medic had a pretty good weapon, the m16 or the AK, both being among the best weapons of the game. I used to play with a squad of full medics, with pretty much made us invicible.

Hesitating to revive your mates because you know they will die again

Surprisingly high skill cap

While most FPS nowadays are either like cs go, with aiming being the most important thing, BF2 had this thing we mostly only see in old "arcady games" called "dolphin diving". This made great players virtually unkillable by newbies, and made knife fights absolutely insane, especially on servers with no sprint fatigue.
The weapons felt pretty good and sometimes took some time to adjust to. There was no health regen, but this was no problem considering the abundance of medics all around the place.

Tanks and airplanes weren't OP. (overpowered)

Thanks to the antitank class and other well placed AA, vehicles weren't absolutely unstoppable, and there was always a way to stop them, unless the player using it was absolutely insane. the point were mostly all accessible with helis if you were skilled enough, while some were tank free, which allowed you to avoid them if you did not feel like dealing with the big armored death vehicles.

Each faction (DLC or not), felt very unique in their own way, whether it was the weapon or the comms.

Every faction felt great, and none felt much weaker than the others (except the arab sniper, the dragunov was awful). You also had an alternate weapon for each class, which was sometimes locked depending on the server you play on, which was the same one no matter which faction you were playing on.

thats a lot of stuff !

Even after the servers shut down, people created a revival mode.

Yeah, you heard it right, you can still play it. I dont know if there are still a lot of people playing, but you should probably get to it asap !

Edit: I popped on the game's discord, and apparently the game is far from dead, and the community is even growing. Of course it's not Fortnite, but it still feels good to know that one of your favourite games is still going.

Their website, and the discord :

https://www.bf2hub.com/

https://www.bf2hub.com/discord

Here is also a video that shows you how to set it up : https://youtu.be/hB4zbs_rLFw
(thanks to shark93 for the suggestion)