Everydev report to the panic room!
What is it like to walk across a totally empty active Battlefield? I suppose that's something Battlefield 2042 players know intimately given that their game recently sank lower than the 1000 player mark on Steam for the first time in it's brief history. Just to labour on this point a little: One of the selling points of Battlefield 2042 was the max player match-up of up to 128 players duking it out simultaneously; which means that for a time on Steam there wasn't enough players to support 10 full match-ups at the same time! Now of course, I assume most matches launch with considerably less than full lobbies, especially today, so there could have been a decent number of matches; but no one is getting to experience this game as it was meant to be played and that disappointment is strangling the player base out of the product. Isn't a car crash an fascinating thing to watch?
I know it's another update in an inevitable and obvious fall-from-grace; but golly, it is so surreal to have this happen. It's like watching your parents getting divorced at a young age, when you're not exactly privy to all of the arguments and struggles, because it just feels like a force outside of your recognised and recommended world view. I did not for a single second ever even entertain the idea that one of the world-wide mainstays of the video game industry would slip off in such a spectacular fashion, pull themselves into a noose of their own creation and just choke themselves out in the public square for all to gawk at. It's grotesque and revolting, but also stunningly bizarre. Imagine if it was Fifa that was falling off the wagon. Or COD? Heck, COD put out a lukewarm game in the same year as Battlefield and got praised for it; maybe in pure reaction to how much of a dog's dinner BF2042 truly was. I guess a sinking ship raises the tide for everyone else, too.
And at this point I think it's unofficially positive what happened. Just looking at the badly designed, too large maps; the popcorn cheese on all the operator personalities, the lack of devotion to the established grim lore, the lack of basic scoreboards at launch, this was a Battle Royale at some point in it's life, definitely. What I can't figure out is why the change was made, and why it was so last minute. I mean, I know I claimed that EA saw the tend of the industry and decided not to try and compete in a clogged market but when I really confront that belief I have to argue with myself. "Really? EA would absolutely be hubristic enough to think they could climb to the top of a stuffed market!" So what possible force called for the BR to be stripped out of the game, and how soon was this before launch? Do you think those initial marketing material, celebrating the Battlefield people, were made when this was still a BR? Who made the choice to cut the past?
My suspicion is thus; at somepoint the concern raised to the devs that in order to keep a BR rolling with regular updates, the team would need to station a substantial team to keep this thing running; a bigger team than it takes to maintain a typical Battlefield live service. Maybe the office was suffering from an exodus of talent. We know back in 2018 DICE reported how 10% of it's workforce had left and the company hasn't seen any significant successes since then so perhaps that trend kept up. Maybe when it was first purposed, DICE had just enough bodies to run the BR idea for as long as they wanted, and employee number bleeding just naturally scrapped the viability of that idea the closer the team got to launch. Without any sources it's hard to back that guess up, but it's the only real idea which makes any sense to me. Because otherwise DICE gutted a game moments before launch for no good reason, and I can't rally behind that.
In recent weeks DICE have publicly come out to ensure the loyal few who remain that they haven't abandoned development just yet; meanwhile behind the scenes we've already heard that development for the next Battlefield is underway, so I guess they're still talking out of gritted teeth. Still, if we ignore the fact they're planning their out whilst committing to keep the ship afloat, we can instead look to the strength of their actions to affirm just how crafty the team that remain are. And they have, in a directed communication to the fans, accepted that the game had huge problems and that this needs to be worked on piece by piece. Brave enough to admit, even if it comes a little late for my taste, but how is that going to actually play out?
Map changes! After the obviously necessary work that had to be done to fix things like the missing UI elements and clean up a few, but crucically not all, of the bugs; map fixing was decided to be the next biggest step. Because all the maps are too large and lacking in tactical mainstays like cover-at-important choke points. (and terrain destructibility; but we're not getting that so there's no point moping about it anymore than necessary.) Fixing all of these maps up and getting them up to snuff is actually a huge undertaking, and in many instances would demand a total reworking of the whole area. Heck, most maps need to scaled down by orders of magnitude in order to keep the battle clean. We're looking at maps the size of the Fortnite island when a slightly bigger spread of Operation Metro would be much more effective. But I don't think changes like that are even remotely in the cards, so we'll have to swallow incremental additions in the meantime.
Speaking of incremental: how about those storage containers, am I right? In their defence, cutting off large angles does improve the gameplay spread and throwing down storage containers in the middle of empty fields and solar farms is an inelegant, blunt, but effective way to do that. It's also embarrassingly minute. Why didn't the team work on reforming an entire map and then show their work to the public, rather than drip-feeding mediocrity so that they could be laughed at for it? I know that the argument is: "Well, that could take months. What are the community going to play in the meantime?" To which I say: I dunno, whatever they're playing right now, because is isn't currently Battlefield! There's no playerbase left to satiate, and the only chance that Battlefield has of winning back some small pride is to change literally everything and then do a soft relaunch of 2042 to drum up a sliver of that hype again. Otherwise this is going to be a slow, and painful, death.
I don't mourn for Battlefield as much as I should, and maybe that's because we know another is on the way. Also, I already know that game is going to be a bare-bones wasteland of a title, but it's going to at least stick to it's genre and come out playable so enjoyment starved Battlefield fans are going to flock to it and defend it like the second coming of Christ. I hate to use crass terms like 'battered wife syndrome', but lacking a synonym there really is no better simile. Honestly, my blunt and unsolicited advice to the DICE Team? Kill 2042 right now and put all the to-be-wasted effort into the next Battlefield, make it the successor to 3&4 we need it to be and don't, for the love of everyone and everything, in and around this earth of ours; put in NFTs. Dear god, no.
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