Battlefield 2042 makes me sad

 Where is my Battlefield at?

What happened man? Just what happened to the single greatest online first person shooter (that wasn't Destiny 1) of all time? Me and the Battlefield franchise don't yet go all the way back to the intimates of creation, and with how blasé Electronic Arts are towards game preservation, I'm probably not going to go and break my back trying to figure out how to find and play the formative Battlefield games like I do with some series out there. But I have been a believer ever since I stumbled upon Battlefield 3, a game I had heard songs of praise about for years, and fell in love. That game felt like a shooter for the more mature audience, even though the very concept of playing make-believe war is inherently juvenile. Whilst Call of Duty was brass, repetitive and increasingly vapid, Battlefield oozed depth, high skill ceilings and tactical cohesion. So if that's the heights this series was hitting in 2011, how in the hell is Battlefield 3 still the best thing DICE and EA has made ten years later?

I didn't get the chance to play Battlefield 4, although people have differing opinions on how much of a step forward that was, and some said it was fine but not an evolution. Now at the time that wasn't really an insult, because you must remember that COD was renowned for doing the same song-and-dance year in and year out, we'd been beating into believing that's just how games were nowadays. (We thought the innovation ceiling had been hit or something.) When Hardline came out, however, that was when the first jarring moment hit the community and everyone had to take a second to process what we'd just received. I think everyone was at least curious about the hard shift to a cops vs robbers aesthetic, if not exactly happy about it, and most wondered how the complexity of guns, classes, attachments, leveloutions and progression angles would fit into such narrow parameters. Answer: they just didn't. Yeah, Battlefield Hardloned changed the formula into an arcade style shooter and ditched a lot of it's complexity outright. It was jarring, but then was Hardline really a concept that would have supported all of the fiddly bits? Nah, that was more of a spinoff game, the next Battlefield would push the series forward, right?

Well then came Battlefield 1 and... look, I will meet you round the back of KFC at four in the morning and fight until my bones are splintered mush to defend my love for that game, alright? It's inexplicable, the game is almost even more arcadey than Hardline, but there's just something about it I resonate with. Maybe it's the concept of a World War 1 style multiplayer game, maybe it's the maps I loved, maybe it's the janky titan vehicles, maybe it's the kitschy campaign, I don't know- 1 just rocked for me. But was it Battlefield's next big game which exploded forth the formula and made up for the cop-out sequel which was Hardline? No, it was a step down again from what 4 had done four years previously. Had the complexity of 4 made it into Battlefield 1- wow, then we'd have been looking at a whole other game entirely! But all those 'what-ifs' and 'supposings' were moot, because next Battlefield would be going into a full integer sequel with 'V'. Okay, we're making the cookie cutter jump to roman numerals, not exactly a confidence booster in the creativity behind this entry, but still, that's a game that has just got to bring back the Battlefield soul, right?

Yeah, Battlefield V was a disaster. A return to the World War II period of FPS games, only somehow with a thimble of the amount of customisation that any other game of the period was doing. Game modes that felt like they didn't belong with the maps they were shoved into. (You know what I'm talking about, those unique-objective-based modes just weren't fun to play with) A total lack of any recognisable or iconic World War 2 setting out of some contradictory desire to tell the 'lesser known' conflicts of the war, whilst simultaneously defending the lack of historical accuracy behind "Well, it's out interpretation!" (Which makes it the worst of all worlds then?) Progression was striped, classes felt bare, maps kind of sagged, FPS basics felt off. This felt like yet another spin off, but one which was called Battlefield V now so we couldn't use that excuse anymore. And then we saw 2042.

I'll admit to falling for the marketing like a lot of others did, even without that prior connection to the much acclaimed 2142 to piggyback of. I saw the impressive map scale, the tornado, the action and went "huh, this looks like it must be good." Not to mention the stats being thrown about that this game would feature 128 people maps- how exciting is that? I always loved the feeling of being part of some huge war which only Battlefield seemed to really capture to any authentic degree, so all of these rang like check boxes bells to my ears. But, unbeknownst to me, it would be that very ambition which would be this game's, and our wallet's, undoing. Because yes, you've heard the rumours and seen the memes, Battlefield 2042 is going up to bat for the accolade of the single worst launch that any Battlefield game has ever had. (I feel bad for those dreamers who thought Battlefield 3 was the start of something magical)

As we look at things right now, Battlefield has aggrieved it's audience so much that it's entering the ranks of the worst user reviewed game on Steam and other review aggregate sites. (By number of poor reviews, not the score of the reviews themselves. There's not much lower to go than 1, afterall.) And the reason for this backlash is pretty apparent; the game is a pale imitation of what Battlefield should be. It's hard to pick a place to start with issues, but we can start with the map sizes, which are so ungainly big that one can expect to walk for several real time minutes in order to reach an objective before dying and having to do it all over again. Spawn points are borked and wide in the open for players to be shot at when loading in. Weapon bloom is twisted so that bullets miss people in direct crosshairs. There's a pitiful number of guns to choose from which amounts to just under half of Battlefield 4's collection and that's not helped by the fact they're split between 'specialists' and not 'classes'. There's no scoreboard. Lobbies aren't persistent. Destructibility is an afterthought. Bugs haunt every inch of the experience. There's no campaign. Every match ends with a specialist saying something tone deaf and cringey as their 'catchphrase'. ("Don't be upset, things just work out that way!") It goes on and on.

Which has led to the obvious deduction being made. Something we don't have to wait until the in-depth investigation report to confirm. Quite obviously, just as with that awful COD game from a while back, this was designed as a Battle royale before DICE had a last minute change-of-heart. Think about it, the too big maps, works for a BR. The lack of Scoreboards and Persistent lobbies, don't need those for a BR. The cringey end-of-match quips, closer to Fortnite's style. No campaign, as BPs don't use them. ('Fortnite: Save The World' is a joke) And as for the bugs, terrible voiced lines, bad weapon bloom, messed up explosive damage, poor hit detection, uncontrollable map rotation, Cyberpunk 2077 graphical downgrade on legacy consoles, inability to dive underwater, lack of backwards prone, uninformative damage splash text, lack of meaningful progression, poor levolutions and general lack of polish... well that just screams- "we had less than a year to slap this together, help us!"

So what we're left with is an embarrassment being sold for full price which is, more likely than not, going to scare away anyone who was passingly interested in this game and result in a record loss for EA. Because, once again for the people in the back, there is no sensible reason to rush out a game that isn't finished to launch. It ruins your reputation, costs you sales, demoralises your team, and wastes everyone's time; so why in the hell is it EA's calling card these days? And to be fair, other companies are renowned for this too, but EA make an art out of this, they love this crap. It all just makes me think my offhand joke about how EA secretly hates the gaming market and want to actively ruin it, is closer to the mark than I thought. At the very least, as we Battlefield fans tend to do, we can retreat back to our respective favourite classic we still enjoy whilst the servers are still running and pretend it's 2011 all over again. (Because the modern day holds nothing for us.)