I'm thoroughly enjoying BF3, whether on my own or not. However, playing with someone I know really does make it exponentially more enjoyable. My brother has his own gaming PC a couple of metres away from mine, so we sit back-to-back and play together, coordinating our attacks and so on. For example, recently I was Recon (sniper) and he was Assault (medic). He spotted an enemy sniper and, on his count, he suppressed the enemy sniper from one angle while I took him down from another angle. I got the kill (obviously), but he was also awarded for "Suppression Assist". Sometimes we both go Assault (medic), and revive each other whenever we go down while pushing forward through the front-line.

VoiP makes a huge difference if you can't be side-by-side (or back-to-back), but I think the lack of VoiP outside of parties (you can set up VoiP within your party) is a somewhat smart decision as it avoids CoD's (or XBox's in general) notorious foul-mouthed child syndrome. Once you attempt more than that you have to deal with players wanting to block some players but not others, some assuming others should be able to hear them when they're actually blocked, and even more frustration as the players themselves can rarely agree on how accountable they want to be with each other.

In the end, though, I believe this video is specifically addressing single player. Things like "you're leaving the play area" have been common place and useful ever since the first Battlefield (1942), but I think the video is specifically addressing its use in making an open-appearing world linear (which does happen in BF3's singleplayer). Modern games (especially in the CoD vein) also tend to be too quick to help the player out, removing a sense of achievement, and even frustrating players who feel they could've figured it out themselves given more than 5 seconds to think about it.

I think the big cross-hair thing is more directed at console shooters, and PC ports of console shooters. [hyperbole] A first-person shooter designed not to be stupidly hard on console is automatically relatively boring on PC because it doesn't take advantage of mouse precision or verticality. [/hyperbole]