Redfall, Cyberpunk and Potential

 The promise unspoken

What is the one thing worse than a steaming pile of irredeemable Saints Row 2022? Any game that is just as decrepit but had at one time the potential to be something more than it ended up being. I mean that's the one thing constantly hanging over the heads of the young, isn't it? The 'potential' of what they could be coming up against whatever way they've disappointed their elders today- those who live their own disappointing realities vicariously through the admonishment of the next generation on. But I am slipping wildly off track for the moment, let me refocus. Every game started with a great dream of what could be, and most every one that made it to market fell somewhat short of that promise. That's just the natural consequence of designing anything, afterall. But the dream of the creator is an unattainable high, it is the game's job to create the dream of the consumers- but that doesn't make that pinnacle any easier to hit, oh no! And the consequence for missing that peak is certainly a hell of a lot louder.

We talk about games that are fantastic all the time, and whisper curses at the worst of the worst that sully our memories to even linger; but it's only sadness that tinges the disappointments. Sighed wisps of cheers never voiced, praises never lifted and hearts never soared. We can almost see, behind the cobwebs of reality, the ideal that was promised, or which we conjured in our minds- and like a floating knife it's handle seems so real to clutch- only to prove intangible. The failure of a game is something that will forever hang over it like a cloud. The terrible could never have made it in the first place, pretending otherwise was delusional from the start; but we have expectations of our hero companies. We believe in Dice, in Arkane, in CDPR, such that the output regularly just seems to boggle the mind with how wrong it all is. No one can quite make sense of ruined potential.

Battlefield 2042 is perhaps a prime example of this idea being that it was not only going to be the next title to carry on the storied Battlefield legacy, but it was also tying into one of the most cult classic entries in the franchise that hadn't even gotten lip service in years by that point- Battlefield 2242. A sci-fi style Battlefield game like no other since, invoking that name was a signal to the player base that this game was going to go back to what made the franchise great. Complex maps, in depth progression and grand scale conflict. And of course the result was a half-finished battlefield title with blandly designed maps, an ill-fitting 'operative' player system reminiscent of COD Warzone and a whole heap of bugs and disappointment. After whipping the fanbase up into an absolute frenzy, this was about the worst case scenario for everyone involved- not least of all through Dice who shattered the last vestiges of hope that non-diehards had in their bodies. 

And in a somewhat similar vein we have old faithful in the Cyberpunk 2077 debacle. What can I say that you don't already know? This game promised to be Deus Ex stretched out into an open world, with all that immersive sim goodness on a grand scale. Branching narrative, interactive city space, progressively updated multiplayer- Cyberpunk 2077 wanted to be everything at once. Or more specifically, it wanted to be the GTA that even Rockstar couldn't make. And it wasn't that. The game is good, and I think the writing and performances are excellent, but the world lacked any of that immersive interactivity which was promised, the multiplayer was cancelled and the narrative branches were cut off the tree. For everything the team promised this game would be, repeatedly up until the final few weeks before launch, Cyberpunk will live on as a disappointment of cataclysmic proportions.

Which brings us back around to Redfall. Whilst not in itself a very fascinating concept, Arkane are a studio renowned for their complex and thoughtful approach to design when it comes to the games that they make and the worlds that they build. Whether it's robust gameplay systems or sprawling multi-faceted level design, Arkane are typically a developer you can rely on to put out quality games that will appeal to the immersive sim lover out there to some level. Even at their most dubious, such as Deathloop, it's more the direction of the game that rubbed me and some others the wrong way, not the quality of the game in of itself. That same gratis cannot be extended towards Redfall, however, for it's utterly unambitious and generic presentation that rivals Ubisoft in it's contrived nature. There's nothing of the creative flair to design that made Arkane famous here, and consequently nothing of the studio's soul and reputation. It's actually something of a wonder that a game like this could even have been made in the modern year.

Oh, but did I even mention 'Mass Effect Andromeda'? Yeah I'm going back to the past now with a game that tried to revive the legacy of the relatively recently concluded Mass Effect trilogy. As I always insist, I think Mass Effect Andromeda played it far too soon to follow up on what ME3 set-up, and that was somewhat clear in a game that neither matched nor pressed above the scope of the previous title. What was a sprawling galaxy spanning adventure was condensed into a narrow lens with barren worlds and a scant few alien species to get involved with. The narrative branches were lacking, the gameplay fell for the trap of making 'adaptable classes' which basically just melded every playstyle into on amorphous blob. Andromeda has glimmers of Mass Effect's glory in it's body, and the ambition of what they wanted to do seems to have run aground with the time available and the size of the team who worked on it. A sad disappointment, that one.

You see, potential is a swirling pool of feasibility muddied by a veil of dreams and expectation. Oftentimes the very concept of which can be the tool of disillusionment that taints what we expect and sullies the product. I think that objectively, Fable III is a pretty decent game with some solid gameplay ideas, like 2 and 1 before it. But like 2 and 1, Fable III had the spectre of expectation built up be the words of Peter Molyneux ruining each experience before they begun. I think Fable III suffered from those promises going unanswered for so long that fans just rallied up to take it out on an alright game like that one, lambasting it for potential that the game could never honestly have achieved, because of the illusions created by another. The same could be said for 'Dragon Age: Inquisition', which was sold as a successor to 'Origins' but ended up being more similar to Mass Effect in it's style and presentation. Not bad, just not what was promised.

Meeting potential is as much an art of wrestling with the audience as it wrestling with oneself, because the very idea of 'potential' is as ethereal as a dream. You can't realistically compare one piece of art with the success and achievement of another and insist that someone should be able to create something just as important or exciting because that standard has been proven as possible. Art is twisting and shifting and implacable; if you try and limit it down to definitive values then you suck all the life out of the craft and end up being Ubisoft. And no one wants more Ubisoft's in the world. (I shudder at the thought.) Still, it is the very inner force of 'potential' that drives us to be the best that we feel we can be so as to not waste what is said to be at our very fingertips. My lesson? Be guided by potential, not battered by it's heft.

Is Battlefield 2042 even a real game anymore?

 Are we real?

If a tree falls down in the middle of the deep woods with no one around to here it, did it really fall at all? An asinine and feebleminded thought experiment digging at some nascent shadow of solipsism and determinism; besides I've got a better one. If you release an online focused live service designed to last several years full of regular players, content update drops and consistent community, but the game falls far enough of the map to have no more than 1 player at a point in time, then is there really anything live about the service you're providing? That example I just gave wasn't any hypothetical, although it wasn't actually about Battlefield 2042 either. In actuality that was a distant cousin of Battlefield called Babylon's Fall, another game that evacuated in the bedsheets and will never live it down, but we can definitely predict 2042 is going that direction given EA's apparent desire to just sweep this new mistake under the rug and forget about it.

But before we look at what's up with the biggest embarrassment of 2021, I want to talk about the biggest embarrassment of 2022, Babylon's Fall. All because of some wildly firing neurons that have convinced me that this  Battlefield and Babylon's Fall  futures are linked in a downwards spiral of destruction. That 'Single player' thing? Didn't last for very long. And it was also tracked through Steam tracking charts, which means there was probably another console player someone who's activity went invisible and unnoticed, ruining the poetry of the moment. Still, even with those stipulations this is a horrifying achievement for any game to hit so soon after launch. And do you know what the game's creators are doing about it? (Aside from looking about nervously at the all the recently cleared office space within the Square Enix HQ.) They're trucking along making future chapters of content for the game. 'The spice must flow', sure; but into the machines of an average of 20 to 30 computers a day? I mean I suppose those players have to feel pretty special having an entire game studio tirelessly making content solely for their exclusive group; but I can't imagine the Platinum Games account is going to be having fun book keeping come the end of the quarter.

Things aren't that bad for Battlefield yet, Steam charts even have it's numbers seeing average daily users of around 1,800 people! (That's four whole digits!) Although that's pretty shameful against Battlefield V's 4500 and Battlefield 1's 3800. In it's 'hey day' this would be the sort of series that would average tens of thousands for it's active title, compete with the likes of Call of Duty for series activity and remain forever on the front of the public stage for the robust quality of it's gameplay. But this year even COD, which was considerably better, turned out to be a mess and all the normies got forcibly displaced into the new lands of a game that didn't care or babysit for them. They ended up refugees for Elden Ring instead. So in that sense I guess I can say that Battlefield's failure did provide some positivity for the world: it made casuals play a game absolutely not made for them and make a lot of them realise that they liked it. And it even made one certain TV reviewer out himself as a total weirdo! (It's seems like Battlefield is good at everything except being a game.)

And DICE haven't jumped ship or anything either. (Nor have they entered hibernation in order rustle together tiny 6-month long hiatuses like 343 have been trying out recently in Halo Infinite.) We've had promises from the team ensuring that they know they done goofed and are 'pretty please' hoping the audience can make enough suggestions to fix it. Of course, writing the check is one thing, but actually cashing it when we're talking about an online game that some self-respect-free people are actively playing, is another. DICE had to start adding in revamps to the map one badly placed ship-container at a time rather than just taking the whole game offline for a day and going to town. And that's probably because DICE wisely knows that the second people are reminded that there are literally any other games in the world right now, just by having Battlefield not load up for even a single day, DICE will likely have lost that active number forever. This game has no retention value. (Damn tiny gamer attention spans, the bane of enterprising grifters everywhere!)

Recently we got a great example of how little EA consider Battlefield 2042 a viable avenue for their business during a communication with investors where the game was not only completely absent from the topic list, but was also mysteriously absent from EA's list of active titles. (In it's place, they stuck 2018's Battlefield V, which makes a little sense given the numbers.) Reports say that the game is considered a 'miss' and despite lip service that the team are devoted to bringing back the "core Experience", (that was literally the sales pitch for 2042 during marketing, don't pretend you even know what that means!) it's clear that the company is really moving to just wipe that game from their memory and put their hopes on the next one. The next couple of years are just casualties of this launch, Battlefield as a franchise is hitting the mattresses. 

So what future is there for Battlefield 2042 on it's own? How is it going to serve as the apparently not-featured, non-active, face of the franchise until 2024 at the earliest? Cyberpunk 2077 is another game that fell like a comet on launch and even after all that time fans are still splitting hairs about whether the patched and improved current game worth their time right now, or if it ever will be, considering the grand unachievable dreams that we all were sold on. The question is whether the game is even ready for new content yet, and think 2042 is in much the same state. It's clear that the community have outright rejected the direction that DICE took for the game, and the company have responded by actively trying to rewrite their mistakes as quickly as they can. But in haphazardly rewiring this Battle Royale wannabe into a traditional tactical multiplayer shooter, they're burning up the precious honey moon months of a live service where the player base are smothered with enough content to reassure them that this will be their home for next two years or so.

If I were to purpose a 'worst case sceanrio' supposition: we might have to ask ourselves if its in DICE's best interests to continue with Battlefield at all. I say this because despite the growth in talents, software capabilities and player hardware, the Battlefield games of the last 7 years have been several steps down from what Battlefield 3 and 4 offered. Of course, the games themselves look prettier; but what is that worth when there's no core progression angles to encourage me to grind, no plethora of viable gunplay options to keep match-ups exciting and no distinct level-to-level gimmicks even on the same stratosphere as Battlefield 4's Leveloutions? Know that these criticisms aren't at all exclusive to Battlefield 2042, which was such a mess it hardly functioned as a game at all. Even the finished iterations of Battlefield 1 and V don't hold a candle to DICE's heyday, and I think there's enough precedent to challenge the wisdom of leaving DICE in charge of a franchise they seem increasingly incapable of keeping on top of.

Now of course I'm not suggesting scrapping Battlefield or anything. Despite recent attempts to kill it off, I think the multiplayer gaming landscape would be worse of if COD became the undisputed champions of their field. Turbulence in contested waters always leads to rising tides. But I wouldn't be distraught if EA bought someone else on board to just change up what this worn and tired series has been doing recently. I don't know exactly who that someone could be per se, but if insider reports are to be believed than Vince Zampella is a name going around a lot in the offices right now. The mind behind Respawn Entertainment's recent success with Apex Legends (Still haven't forgiven them) and Jedi: Fallen Order. Maybe Respawn can bring their Titanfall talents into Battlefield and make the franchise great again. And where exactly would that leave DICE? Well Star Wars Battlefront 2 could do with some more content...

Battlefield 2042 goes under 1000- they need a plan of action

 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.

Battlefield defeats the cheaters

 Don't be sad. Sometimes it just works out this way!

So what's up with Battlefield 2042 today? You know, I have to say it's not exactly fun to be going around talking smack about Battlefield in my household, especially when my dad is an addict to one of the earlier games and would love to talk your ear off about how he's the number 70-something in the entire world on the leaderboards. (Yes, that is actually true. I wish I had that sort of dedication to even a single one of the games I play.) As such it becomes difficult to find a receptive ear to dog on Battlefield to, even with the total dogs dinner that DICE and EA made of the latest release. So I'm going to change my tune. I'm sure there's something more positive I can talk about regarding this game and I just need to find it. Hmm... what about the fact that they've finally managed to curb the number of cheaters that frequent their game! That's a good one... oh wait, now I know what they mean by the phrase 'double-edged sword'.

A recent update from one of those cheat engine provider groups is making headlines for an achingly sad reason if you happen to be someone who likes the Battlefield games. (Guilty) I don't know how exactly it is that cheat engine providers can be brazen enough to have easily accessible forum posts detailing their activities without being sued into oblivion; but this is the world we live in. (Minor copyright complaints are much more important, I'm sure.) And what was this post? Why, it was a declaration of defeat! Huzzah! An 'Industry insider' by the name of Tom Henderson, who has some posts on Dualshockers, recently tweeted out an image from a discord chat apparently detailing a cheat-mod provider who is declaring the discontinuation of Battlefield 2042 mods from their subscription store. Key stated issues: the actual performance of the game is hindering the cheat menu and the lack of people actually using the cheats is low as people are leaving this game like a sinking ship.

Now I'm only somewhat sure that this is legit, Tom Henderson seems to be real enough but the Discord image is lacking some important context and the person making this update doesn't even appear to be a moderator or admin on their own channels, or at least doesn't sport the telltale flairs. (I mean, I don't know Discord etiquette but that seems kinda odd. Unless the whole stigma surrounding 'discord admins' has grown so bad people are avoiding the tag like the plague, which seems plausible.) But assuming this is true and not just a creative way to dog-pile on Battlefields' downwards spiral, then doesn't that just make for a perfect summary of the 'mission failed successfully' meme? I mean heck, nobody likes bottom-feeding wastrels like cheaters clogging up the game lobby, polluting the airwaves of society, so their exodus is welcome for sure; but what a backhanded way to make them exit.

I mean it makes sense: what we've got here is a Battlefield game that quite obviously was slapped together in record time after a drastic change in direction ended up ruining the vast majority of preproduction and early development work. Either that or the Battlefield creators have discovered a fetish for being humiliated. (I hear that's a thing, you never know.) The fact the thing crashes, is full of bugs, lags on most last gen consoles; it's fair to say that a wall-see-through hack might become useless with sufficient slowdown, or an autoaim bot. And if I were a pathetic waste of muscle tissue who was sad enough to actually spend some money on cheats and mods, I might be pretty peeved at the payoff. If you think about it, this is more of the cheaters protecting themselves from the potential vitriol of their customers. And let that be a lesson to all people; association with DICE and EA will bite you; stop giving them money for it.

It's all been a bit of nightmare on DICE's end, with this little bittersweet cherry on the cake just hammering that home. Somewhere in the depths of their mind I'm sure some higher-up 'currently hiding under their desk' sat there and genuinely thought this disaster game would just float by and out the door with only the usual amount of disappointment; but the gaming community is feeling spicy with this one. People have just started to get over Cyberpunk 2077 and they need a new head to scalp; Battlefield was just at the right place at the wrong time. (And with the wrong amount of effective development hours spent on the project.) Things are so bad that people are actively watching, and constantly updating everyone on, the slow decline of Battlefield 2042's player base as it lags behind Battlefield V on bad days and is slowly sinking to maybe even fall under Battlefield 1. Which is a travesty; Battlefield 1 is actually a sick game, it should be higher than both of those games by right.

Of course, as these situations usually go, it's the development team who are feeling this worse than anyone else. Certainly worse than the managers who devised this disaster game to come out at the tippy top of Q4 so that everyone would abscond on holiday and the devastated community who just essentially got ding-dong-ditched by their favourite war game franchise will stand around in bemusement at the pile of cow dung in the place of their promised 'gamechanger'. Fleeting tweets have whipped around here and there of staff feeling frustrated about the work which went essentially nowhere as well as the weight of the disappointment falling on their shoulders for all they've done. It's a sad cycle, and one with no heroes and muddy morals. But if there's one thing for sure; it's that none of us would want to be in DICE's shoes right now. Well- actually I imagine having a salary is nice; maybe it would be worth the heavy vitriol...

The worst part, at least from my perspective, is how deep the damage is; this isn't one of those ugly-duckling stories like we look for from similar disaster artistry. Just like with Cyberpunk 2077, the flaws with this game are deep and intrinsic, and beyond the help of patches and bandaids on the gaping maw of a wound which is this title's missing facial cavities. The theory I subscribe to is that this title was very clearly shaped up to be a Battle Royale, built and poised to cater to overly large maps, no squad functions, and an insufferably cheeky-chipper attitude to it's characters; thus the shell left when all of that was randomly pulled is probably such a tangled mess of orphaned code strings and nowhere system triggers, now in an active game, that it'll be an absolute miracle if all that can get cleaned up and smoothed over in the next year. Pairing in scoreboards, squads and good writing is far too much to ask for ontop of all that. (Too much of a 'legacy feature'.)

But do I feel bad for DICE? Why would I- they've won the dream and are rocking a cheater-light ecosystem now! But seriously, the struggling slimmer of humanity left inside me roils at what could have been and vibrates with the pain of those on the development team who truly gave their all; whilst the cold exterior which makes up the rest of my being sees only a million dollar company be upset that they've not printed another hundred million for their shoddy work. As I said, muddy and murky morals running around right now. It just sucks that, given the nature that DICE unfortunately established for themselves, it's going to be several years of waiting until we can put this mess behind us and start preparing to be disappointed by the next Battlefield title. God, what a strange dance modern gaming has become.

The Unfinished Menace

 You don't know the power of corporate deadlines!

What if you found yourself trekking through the deep Appalachian wilderness at 11pm at night in search of a tiny wooden cabin like one does on a free weekend. What if you found that edifice, mottled and windbeaten, doors wide open and cracked on their hinges like a broken gaping maw. What if your horror movie reasoning led you into this cabin off the edge of society, and crouched beside the lampshade in the living room, you find a heaving, seething mass in the corner, all bones and taut skin, gurgling something intelligible and bestial. Your heart catches, but the thing hears you anyway. It stretches it's long white neck and slowly turns around to reveal- the face of a stick figure. Two lines for the eyes and one half moon curve for the mouth. Turns out the monster didn't have time to be finished before it was set loose on society. It would kind of kill the mood a bit, wouldn't it? You would have a hard time taking it seriously as a threat, and if you can't even do that then perhaps the entire purpose of this horrific visage has been ruined, has it not? Well, can you see where I'm going with this?

A fashionable trend has emerged in the recent years, one that some of the truly fashion-forward were already lightyears ahead of (Bethesda, you daring trendsetters) but which has now finally caught on with your average QVC watcher; unfinished releases, in all their piece-meal glory. Because why sit down and actually finish the product and clean to an acceptable state to the audience, when you cut a corner in order to squeeze into the end of yearly financial report. Sure you're going to hurt your reputation, your ultimate sales numbers, probably your future sales numbers, the pedigree of talent you're likely to snag in the future, and just the general respect of the entire industry; but, you know, gotta make those black numbers in the ledger look big! That's a... worthy exchange? None of this is new. I'm not blowing your mind with this take and it's something that has been bubbling away for a while, this trend towards the unfinished. But something about these past 2-3 years has been- just egregious. It's getting much worse, and I want to talk about it.

I think a big one that we tend to forget about for some reason is Anthem. (Never forget, ya'll) A game which, honestly, it feels like no one wanted to actually make. Here Bioware spent several years and too much money sitting on their hands trying to figure out what they even wanted to make whilst EA got more and more upset until they forced out a launch. Now Bioware were no slackers here, they immediately jumped on the Todd Howard defence ("It's not about how your game launches-" etc.) but people soon found the game was almost empty at it's core when you peeled away the faux excitement from the developers, honestly there was little driving potential behind it. This is perhaps the gold standard of the Unfinished Menace, because at no point did Bioware manage to convince the world that they had a plan beyond "Get it out and hope everything works out" and how did that end up for them? Well the game's development just got effectively abandoned for a year before EA officially killed off hopes for a do-over. That's right, Bioware literally sat down and asked if they could just make the game again and start from scratch. I ain't no fan of EA, but I genuinely sympathise with the utter gall they had to endure through this game's entire life cycle. Let this be an example of the worst case unfinished scenario.

And then we have Cyberpunk, at perhaps the other end of the spectrum. I don't like to talk about Cyberpunk much these days because of how badly it hurt me, but seeing them be listed under the potentials for best RPG of the year in Geoff Keighley's game awards just severely triggered me. Best action game and I'd have been fine, but best RPG? What a joke. This is a game that was sold on the premise of 'it'll come out when it's ready', which held true until overconfidence took over and the team at CDPR backed themselves into a corner that they didn't have the resources, staff numbers or time to get out of. What people got was a game utterly unrecognisable to what was promised aside from in visuals, and even then those visuals were what the highest of the high-end consumer could achieve exclusively. The role playing was lacking, the character choice faded away after the prologue, the depth of the city was non-existent, the game just wasn't done; but the game wasn't a total mess either. (at least, not when it was playable.) This has allowed CDPR to quietly pivot the goalposts and pretend that this considerably more vapid 'FPS with extra flairs' style Far Cry game was the goal all along, however seeing as they're up for RPG of the year it seems that the deception did fool some of us, eh Geoff? Consider this the "misdirect ending" for the unfinished game narrative. 

Grand Theft Auto The Definitive version, or whatever the stupid name of this thing was, is the most recent example. (tied with the rest upcoming on this list) A game made by GTA porters who have a history of questionable choices, much of what The Definitive Edition got wrong could be attributed to either laziness or not enough time. (I suspect a little of column A and a lot of column B) Overall the problems sum up like this: AI upscaling, porting inferior mobile version back into PC and consoles and questionable artistic choices. Rockstar have already started tackling a lot of the issues and the latest stupidly big patch shows us that Rockstar-proper doesn't mess around when it comes to their reputation. But it still shows as a rush to finish the polish of a game that they already sold for full price, which isn't the best possible look, now is it? Definitely still ongoing, but I've actually developed a bit of faith that Rockstar might actually make up the difference for Grove Street Games' botched unfinished mess. (An unfinished remaster/remake- how has the industry sunken that low?)

Another big one has been Battlefield 2042, the game to break a thousand fan's hearts. After months of effortless hype built from straight lies, including an interview where they bold-faced claimed that this game was taking the best elements from 3 and 4 and adding new things ontop of that! (Funny, I seem to remember both those games having SCOREBOARDS) The game is a mess, contentless, empty, poorly designed, lacking destruction, you've all heard the spiel. The most sensible reasoning behind this has also been the saddest, people think this game was built to be a battle royale and had to have those systems gutted at the last second for whatever reason. Basically meaning that the mess of a game we now have is due to emergency smashing together of an unfinished product with insides that weren't designed to go with it. A victim of chasing the trends gone horribly, though predictably, wrong.

And finally we have Battlefield's more excitable twin brother, COD Vanguard. A game which is being received much better than it typically would just because the competition is a total dumpster fire this year, although it's still selling the worse than the series has in about 14 years, so you win some you lose a lot. The missing content here comes from the disaster of a mode that has been married with COD games for nearly years now, the Zombie mode, which seems to have been getting worse and worse over the years. Even with that general warning that we weren't exactly heading towards a grand Zombies renaissance, the pathetic lack of grand Easter eggs, strongly themed maps, exotic random weapons or really substantial gimmicks of any kind, was certainly unexpected. Yet another full price game coming this year with a severally wanting package.

These are the games that have flooded the market over the past few years, normalising the belief that products don't need to finished before they're rushed out of the door to an audience, and every consumer out there should find that concerning. Heck, I have no problem with companies like Larian taking the slow approach and releasing their stuff in early access so that they narrow in everything perfectly and learn how to improve the gameplay with the audience, because that's upfront and cooperative, but selling a complete experience as a pipe dream and then spending the next few months trying to patch the leaky ship whilst grumbling about how poorly all your hard work has been received; that's crazy to me. At this rate, the label of 'AAA' should be ripped from the industry entirely, as it no longer indicates a game with polish behind it but just a higher budget potential trainwreck. (In that case; god help the new 'AAAA' Perfect Dark game.)

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.)

Battlefield: We're doing future now. But not TOO much future.

'The Next Generation of First Person Shooter' sure looks familiar...

What are you talking about: "Call of Duty has a competitor"? No, I'm pretty sure they're the defacto first-person military shooter franchise, what with their COD: Modern Warfare Remake, followed by Black Ops: Cold War and a little bit of Warzone sprinkled in there just to scoop up those extra little billions. Hmm? Think back to 2018? Actually, now that you mention it I do remember playing a game set in World War 2 that wasn't COD WWII. Yeah, it was sort of fun for a little bit but entirely lacking in meaningful progression and so I got bored after a couple of weeks... just as has been the case with the entire franchise ever since after 4. Yeah, of course I remember Battlefield; but by god does it feel like they didn't remember us. Do they have any idea how long it's been? Three Years! What were they doing?

Battlefield 2042's reveal was, as always, leaked before delivery so we could all let out our collective sighs of disappointment early about the setting. No, they're still not going back to that really cool 2142 setting they did back in 2006, the one that people have been begging them to revisit for years. Instead we're looking at a game set kinda in the future, as in 'just future enough that we don't have any backlash for our half-baked story and any potential contemporary parallels; but just contemporary enough to still be boring.' Battlefield: 2042? What's the point? Everyone still uses conventional weapons, most vehicles look pretty much identical, the maps don't look all that special... it might as well be 'Battlefield: Next Tuesday'. But I'm not about to judge a Battlefield game only for a shaky setting, (but it is still getting judged hard for that) there's a few good things such a setting implies and I, for one, have managed to work up just a sliver of excitement. Just a tad. Nothing crazy.

So with the Battlefield 2042 reveal trailer, the team have made the bold decision to move away from the cinematics masquerading as gameplay model that colourised Battlefield 1 and V's reveal. Does this mark a general change in overall direction, or just a riposte to the extreme negativity around the V trailer? Hopefully a bit of both. Which isn't to say that the trailer isn't still full of cinematic action to the point where it get awfully dull by the 2 minute mark, but at least they're gracious enough to admit that it's definitely not real gameplay and that the gameplay is coming presently. But honestly I doubt I'll follow up on what the gameplay has to offer unless it's truly transformative, I'm just curious how a modern Battlefield markets itself in an industry that's been owned by their competition for 3 years now; the answer: Copy them.

Now I don't want to point fingers here, but I think it's abundantly clear that in some way the Battlefield devs wanted folk to watch this and think "Huh, this looks like Warzone." All the gameplay was chaotic action with no sense of battlelines and tactical actions, usual Battlefield trailer fair, but coupling the constant action with the various scene changes really trigged my "this looks familiar" alarm. It's almost as though they're trying to instil the subliminal message that all these varied locations and battles are happening simultaneously without breaks on the same map. I'm sure that's not actually the case, as Battlefield remember how much it didn't work out for them last time they tried a Battle Royale mode, (The balancing was terrible) but they're still painting that subconscious illusion for instant recognition brownie points. I see you, mr marketing man; you're tricks and gambols ain't smooth enough to trick this casual!

But that isn't where I take umbrage with Battlefield 2042 right now, truth be told. I've already told you my issue, albeit as something of a joke, but I'm actually serious about it; the setting doesn't make sense. What's the point of setting your game in the future if it's not far enough on for you to take advantage of any speculative technology? Even games that just graze the future are usually envisioned with the sort of wild imagination we want out of our games, but this just looks like a completely modern day game with no design intent to imply otherwise. I mean, I guess they show a futuristic robot dog but- that's the Boston Dynamics dog with a gun on it's head. That thing exists today. Also, Boston Dynamics hates it when people make imagery of their AI robot as a weapon of war, so this is pretty disrespectful on the Dev's side. (Even if it's a fully accurate representation of what those dogs will be up to in a decade or two.)

I mean there's other subtle little details, but they're not really big enough to be cool. I saw some guns with that oversized barrel attachment that people seem to think is 'futuristic'. (It just looks cumbersome) There's this one scene this a snowplow which... looks really angular and... has weapons on it I guess. There's a bit with a rocket being launched... I mean we have rockets nowadays but... I guess they don't get fired everyday... Oh, and there's a tornado at the end of the trailer. My guess is that was an artificial weaponised tornado or something, but that wasn't made clear in the slightest and very well could have just been a natural disaster. Where's all the fun future tech? Seriously guys, 'Ghost Recon Future Soldier' was more ahead of the curve than this, you're putting me to sleep here. Unless the gameplay reveal is hiding every creative future item in it's footage (which, I admit, could be entirely possible) I'm going to call this a distinct failure of concept out the gate. Great start.

And yet that doesn't matter. Not really. Because the big news here, the real big news, is that with a return to a contemporary setting, DICE have literally no excuse to not know what guns are anymore. Do you remember that extended period of three Battlefield games straight where there were only about 20 guns in the entire game because DICE couldn't be bothered to research the armaments of the time? Thus laid the groundworks for a hopelessly lacklustre and depthless level/weapon progression system which paled in comparison to Battlefield's very own previous offerings. Battlefield 3 and 4 featured actual progression that tied towards your most used weapons, granting you attachments for using that weapon the more you used it and hit milestones. Now DICE have to go back to those systems or else they'll literally be a laughing stock seeing as how the slightly depthy progression system and the weightier gameplay is currently all they have on COD right now. (Vehicles are anyone's game now, buddy!)

I just think it's a shame we couldn't get creative with our future war game, it's makes me wonder if there's any creative heart left in DICE under that war game grind. I mean the villains are reported to be the Russians again, are you serious? Russians are the villains of every modern war game ever- heck, they're the enemy of each of Battlefields own contemporary games already! Make it China or something. (Oh wait, guess they can't because they want that Chinese bloodmoney) Then how about killer clowns, give me something! At the end of the day the fans are excited at least for the return of their war game so that's great for those that have started to feel a little abandoned for a while now. In fact, I do tend to prefer Battlefield's gameplay more than COD's so I'm somewhat happy about this too. That still doesn't make up for this whole reveal being a little underwhelming right now... Hope the rest of E3 is up from here... Oh wait, there's no campaign? DICE better have some rabbit up their hat right now...