http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... corruption
If you haven't seen this, it's really something to behold.
For me, BF1942 was pretty lame except for desert combat. And even then, I couldn't believe how bad the performance was. I mean, 640x480 @ 40fps. Wow. That's bad. BF2 was a hundred times better here, although I still thought the game wasn't so great, especially when the coolest vehicles - apaches - had had their control scheme from DC fubared. DC had phoenomenal copter control, even if it took a while to learn it.
I think that ultimately what really killed BF2, for me, was that modern combat isn't very balanced or fun by nature. For instance, fighters are just too bloody fast to be fun to fly. I mean, if you fly in a straight line you can either go slow enough that you can shoot at stuff BUT are also going to plow into the ground, or else go so fast that you can't shoot at crap and you hit the invisible map border in 0 seconds flat.
Since BF2142 is set in a time period where the technology is a complete unknown and realism doesn't exist because there's no point of reference, I think there's some chance that maybe DICE will pull off a half-decent game. With total creative freedom and a team of good developers, anything's possible, so that's a +1 for potential.
On the other hand, the publisher is EA, so -5 for a 10 minute dev cycle and total lack of patches or customer support.
