Battlefield is back to it's crap

 

It was a long a troublesome road but over the course of many years Battlefield 2043 finally developed to a point of being considered serviceable by it's playerbase. (Some even called it good!) All it took was a total dissolution of player trust through an abominable support cycle that shed players with each misstep until only the already invested could stand to put up with it! Yeah, pretty sure for all their trials and tribulations that game didn't exactly end up 'growing the brand' at all, but at least the team conveyed their willingness to stick out through their mistakes and fix them. Just as they had already made clear with the whole Battlefront 2 debacle. Maybe at some point they can reach the point of not making the giant mistakes to begin with. That'd be some character development!

But by god, in order to learn the very first thing anyone must do is acknowledge where things went wrong and move on from there. So where exactly did 2043 go wrong? Well, launching unfinished wasn't exactly the greatest look in the world. Doubling down on the arcade-style flimsiness of progression, the surprise hero unit replacements to character classes that somewhat dissolved the identity of the otherwise grounded casual-simulator war game- the bugs, the lack of content. All really the symptoms present from the fact the game bought hard into the Live Service angle. Not that previous Battlefields didn't maintain support cycles before, but 2043 was the first to identify itself as a live service- and I think in pursuing that development cycle, things started falling apart.

The very concept of a Live Service is predicated around the idea that a development team can create a steady stream of revolving content that ties players to the evolving product over an extended period of time, during which they can slowly bleed the audience for all their worth through wear-down tactics. Strict Battle passes that demand constant attention, roadmaps that keep players expecting the next content drop, and regular blogposts all create the impression of a living community that players are involved with. It all sounds fine on paper but after years of this in action all I can see is the cynical and calculated nature of it all. Besides- we haven't yet confronted the logistics of how exactly one creates a content train in order to fuel these services.

You can't just make fresh content from scratch when the game is launched, the season model means you need the next polished batch of content within the first three months of launch else the antsy Live Service lovers will assume your entire development team was wiped out by an asteroid. So content that was original tipped to be in the finished game gets held back, and maybe plans are intentionally stretched out so what would have been a complete feeling full game now becomes a shell that is slowly stuffed over the course of the next year and a half. There is your prototypical Live Service life cycle and there, in a nutshell, is what happened with Battlefield 2043. And EA wants to do it all again.

Wants to. Remember that. It's not that they're just slipping down the same path to repeat it all again like a child revisiting their trauma unwittingly onto the world- they are proudly regurgitating their past mistakes on the belief that if they just do things the exact same way again- this time it will work! Pretty sure there's a quote about repeating the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome... that it's super smart! Professional fake human Andrew Wilson said as much in a bold headline that is doing the rounds. "Tremendous Live Service" were his exact words, as though the man were a malfunctioning mister handy robot who's corrupted language banks had erased the term 'pile of crap' and was forced to chuck in an alternative.

Actually- to be specific he said it would be "Another" tremendous live service, which I think is just the cherry on the top that too many are missing out in their coverage of this- because that says literally everything you could ever possibly need to know. They have learnt nothing from the past and consider the general disdain their last game still maintains, despite it's current well-enjoyed state, as a net win for the brand. As we've already established, learning from your mistakes requires acknowledging them, and I guess that must be a uniquely human trait considering that Wilson finds that concept utterly alien to him. How can anyone expect the next game to be better when this is the message they're putting out into the world?

It's also being called 'the largest Battlefield in history'. So get prepared for 3 maps at launch, all so ungainly huge that you can't hold a proper skirmish in any of them, and that being the sole justification for the comment. Gone are the days when you can expect a bevy of ultra detailed maps with giant level-loutions that would change the makeup of the map significantly if anyone took advantage of it- here are the days where Battlefield are lagging behind Warzone and wondering what they can do to get some of that sweet market share back. And don't even think about returning some of the complex and rewarding weapon mastery progression bars from the Battlefield 3 and 4 days- you'd be absolutely nuts to expect that to be considered 'growth' in this franchise.

All in all, EA seems to be in a race to try and win back their title as worst company in America, and although they have some stiff competition I'd say that with Andrew Wilson at the helm- anything is possible. (You go secure that sick L, Andy! You've earnt it, you little scamp, you!) And as for one of my favourite war franchises that can never catch a break? Well, I guess you had a good run for a few years there over a decade ago. That's probably why there are so many small scale indie games basing themselves off those years of the franchise and not the modern years. Funny how that is, isn't it? But who's shocked exactly? I sure ain't.

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.

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...

The quality of gaming AI and bots

Machine or man?

The gaming culture is one of ebb and flow, fads and trends, habits that come and go. Sometimes that is for the best, and sometimes it's for the worse, but either way, it makes gaming and game design a world in constant flux. To pull out that Bennett Foddy quote again, "It's like building on drying concrete." We all have those eras of gaming that we wish we could return to, times that we can point to and go "There! They had the right idea with that one." But time moves ever onward. That cannot prevent some wistful folk, like myself, for sparing a nostalgic thought about what was and what might be had certain trends played out differently, with that in mind, let's talk about AI.

No, I'm not talking about the traditionally accepted definition of AI (Which can be more accurately defined as 'super-intelligent AI') but rather the collection of algorithms and processes that make up the mind of a computer; it's 'Artifical Intelligence'. In gaming, we commonly use the term 'AI' to refer to the handling of bots and NPC's by the software, it's a catch-all term that encompasses their behaviour, reaction and believability. A game that would considered having 'good' AI, would be one wherein the NPC's make appropriate use of their tools, navigate their environment succinctly and pose an actual threat to the humans; whereas a 'bad' AI would be the type you see running into walls and standing around waiting to be shot.

In the early days of gaming, AI wasn't too much of concern for programmers as their games were a lot more simplistic in scope. Enemies didn't really need to be programmed with a wide range of possible actions and route planning algorithms, they just had to operate a simple patrol task with the player's one job to be to avoid them. It was in this vein that famous video game bosses such as Super Mario Bros' Bowser, resorted to little more than jumping up and down and shooting fireballs every now and then. The only real challenge on the player's part is jumping over the Koopa king and hitting the axe-switch to plunge him into lava. Difficulty ramped up as patterns became more unpredictable and/or erratic, which is why many a player still has nightmares about the Hammer Bros from Super Mario Bros 3 and the Gorgon heads from Castlevania.

Games gradually evolved throughout the years, however, and so too did people's perception about what made good enemies in video games. In my opinion, the real watershed moment was when 3D world's became a thing with the advent of the Nintendo 64. Suddenly, AI would need to navigate a whole 3D environment and it became difficult for Developers to get away with simple patterns for the enemy AI. Now they had to code in path-finding and write in extra rules to determine line-of-sight and determine when to use certain abilities. The old guard method of planning would be to have enemies attack the moment they rendered on the screen or whenever the player got too close, now games consoles had become so powerful that this was unfeasible, enemies could be rendered from far away and players could navigate in 3 dimensions, requiring the system to evolve.

This really started to take route in the early 2000's when Developers began to expand the sorts of games that they could make. On of the biggest games of the time that boasted about it's AI's capabilities would have to be, possibly the first game I ever played, Metal Gear Solid. That was a game which ushered in a whole new genre of play, stealth, and with it a whole new set of requirements when it came to coding enemy AI. Patrolling guards had to follow their routes, sure, but they had to be able to react to their situations in a way that felt dynamic and realistic. Should they become alert, they needed to comb the area in search; if someone held them up with a gun, they needed to freeze in fear of their life. This revolutionized the way that people viewed AI and laid the ground works for where it would evolve next.

From this point onwards it became something of a point of pride for developers to boast about the cool new AI that their games had to offer and boast about how clever it was. Battlefield 1942, for example, had one of it's key selling points rest on the strength of it's bots and their ability to mimic real life opponents. (Isn't that weird? A purely online game that teases the offline components.) This trend caught on too, with future online games like TimeSplitters putting considerable effort into ensuring that their offline play was just as exciting as their online play. During this time it was actually feasible for an offline gamer, like I once was, to buy the newest multiplayer centric game under the knowledge that I wouldn't be left out.

One might have thought that this influx of innovation would be never-ending considering the huge jump forwards in software tech in the years since, however that has not been the case. It seems as standard AI procedures (AI good enough to hold their own against a human) became less of a novelty and more of the norm, there grew less of an incentive to strive for improvement in this general area. Games stopped boasting about how smart their AI was and some multiplayer titles started forgetting about AI Bots altogether. (COD has never had AI bots in their multiplayer as far as I know.) I guess that creating the perfect online opponent was too close to literally cloning gamer brain patterns for Devs to continue down that road. (Although, some of the best advancements in the development of general AI have been made in Video game settings. Maybe these game companies are selling themselves short.)

In the modern age, the only time you'll hear a big fuss made about the quality of AI is when something truly spectacular has been achieved. Who remembers the reveal gameplay demo for 'The Last of Us' when we saw Ellie dynamically react to a situation when the player was in trouble? It was an incredibly impressive showcase and one that should have, in a perfect world, sparked interest in bot development for the future. But it didn't. The same was true for the impressive AI systems behind the Xenomorph from 'Alien: Isolation'. With a reputation for being the 'perfect organism', Creative Assembly knew that they had to do something more imaginative with their Alien beyond giving it a patrol schedule, and so they designed two AI 'storytellers' to manage it's behaviours. One storyteller would give the Alien's AI clues as to where the player was, simulating the 'it's always nearby' paranoia from horror movies, whilst the other would send false clues to distract the alien, ensuring it wasn't always on the player and making it's movements difficult to predict. Despite the creation of this ingenious system, 'Alien: Isolation' was not the spark to revive the AI trend.

So is the concept of great AI complexity dead in the world of gaming? Not quite. Some games have started to look into bringing bots back into multiplayer games, like Battlefront 2, and advanced AI scripting is slowly becoming more of a talking point thanks to pioneers like 'The Last of Us part II'. But perhaps what we really need is a huge leap forward in the technology to really fan the flames of creativity once again in the minds of creators and push the boundaries of what can be possible. I've seen AI demos in simulated environments that go so far as to start simulating the action/reaction motion of human emotions, effectively creating artificial wants and needs; the least we can do in gaming is create an AI that chooses to take cover once and a while.

In defence of: Cutscenes.

Put that controller down for a second.

Wanna know what grinds my gears? All of this lambasting culture around the art of video game cutscenes does. It really drives me nuts. I'm not talking about a few people who dislike a certain type of lazy cutscene or one that imbues a confused tone, I'm talking about a wide part of the gaming community (Emboldened mostly by reviewers and journalists) who feel is it their duty to try and exorcise cutscenes from gaming altogether. It absolutely astounds me that such an innocuous and, occasionally, positively transformative practise is treated so brutally by people who seem to consider it a 'lazy storytelling tool.'

To play devil's advocate, I do understand where this sentiment spreads from. Afterall, Video games are meant to be games, right? You play through the interactive portion, complete your objective, score your points (like the wider media likes to say) and then promptly switch of the console the moment that the credits roll. That's how games used to be, back in the days of the Atari, and that is the way that they should always be, right? Perhaps I'm being a tad facetious there, but you can see the root of my ire. People want to treat video games like it is it's own form of media and therefore cannot borrow some of it's elements from similar forms of media otherwise it's "Cutting corners" or "being unimaginative."

Allow me to shatter this idea that people have about gaming; it's not a brand new artform that materialized the second someone invented Pong, it is an evolution of several art forms that collate into something distinct. It borrows from the visual storytelling that one can find in paintings, drawings and Film, with the audible storytelling from film, radio and music and, occasionally, the written storytelling from books. There are a few unique aspects to gaming, such as the concept of interactivity and the way that immerses the player into the world, but this is just the backbone of an organism made of several parts.

None of this is to say that there is no such thing as lazy cutscenes in video games that take from the experience, of course they exist. Just as we moan when we see a wall of text at the beginning of a movie telling us what we should know, (or clap, if its in Star Wars)  there can be some erroneous uses of cutscenes that do more to harm one's immersion rather than aid it. The key is balance and quality of content. Balance, in assuring that the most important element of a game (the gameplay) holds up and that you don't start seeing cutscenes as a 'reward' for pushing through the game (if you're playing the game just to see the next cutscene, then your priorities are clearly out-of-whack.) ; and Quality, in ensuring that the artistry behind the scene borrows from the medium that mastered visual storytelling (Movies) as much as possible and doesn't just become an exposition dump.

"But why are you so passionate about this particular topic?" You may wonder. Well, it stems from the same source that fueled my passion in the 'lore' blog; I live for context. Every part of an immersive journey is shaped and made by it's ties to context; without it, everything becomes meaningless. Playing a game for the sake of gathering points or reaching the end screen is fine enough; heck, if the game is good enough I will even play for the sake of playing, but I cannot feel like part of that world until you begin to make it real in my head or allow me to do so myself. Just look at 'The Bells' from Game of Thrones Season 8; (Spoilers; as if that matters.) that entire series dropped the ball in it's storytelling to such a degree that nothing felt like it mattered anymore. As a consequence, a visually spectacular scene (the burning of King's Landing) lacked all emotion resonance and just became a 30 minute stunt show. I remember checking the time on my phone during the scene, wondering how big this bleeding city is. Establishing the correct context is paramount to making a story.

Cutscenes are another tool towards establishing that context. They allow for the focus of the game to be taken away from the action for a second and give you moment for your characters to shine through and your stage to be set. Some games, such as Assassin's Creed, try to do away with traditional cutscenes whether out of artistic choice or to save on resources. As a result, Assassin's Creed has to rely on exposition delivered while walking around the environment listening to someone else. Reviewers hate this too, claiming how these games are all just walking down the street listening to someone else talk (An incredibly reductive comment in it's own right, but still a somewhat valid criticism.)

The truth of the matter is that game companies could relegate all of their conversations to occurring in-game, but in many instances this would sacrifice the pace of the game. (The biggest point of contention for these critics.) When you are in the middle of action gameplay, that action is the central point of your attention and everything else is secondary. When someone is talking and explaining important things to you, it is easy to ignore some context if that isn't the only thing that the player is focusing on; this is the reason why some of the later COD game's stories get lost in themselves.

"But doesn't pausing the action for a cutscene also cut into the pacing?" Absolutely. If you misplace them, just like anything else in the creative process. If you are in the middle of a shootout and you cut away to a peaceful scene elsewhere, that would rob the story of it's pace and urgency and throw you off your game, just like it would if that happened in any movie. Most game writers and developers are cognizant enough not to do that and instead insert scenes during lulls in the action. Critics could then argue that such a measure would elongate lulls and stagnate the action, to which I would have to refute that such a stance fails to account for the medium at play.

You see, there is another aspect that separates video games from movies, their length. Games can be 20-30 hours longer than a movie, maybe even 80-100 if we're talking about an RPG. In all of that time, it would insane to maintain a pace that even resembles the structure of pacing in a movie. In film, once you hit a rhythm you need to ride that as long as possible, maybe even until the end; In games, that rhythm should ride you onto the next big narrative event before things cool back down. It would be tiring and desensitizing to try and maintain that pace for the full experience and would harm the overall story. Just look at COD and Battlefield, they always fall into this trap in their single player campaigns and everyone one comes away remembering them as adrenaline-filled and shallow. You need that variation in the pacing in order to keep things fresh.

Ultimately, cutscenes are not a detriment to video game storytelling but an incredibly vital component. It may be trendy to throw that, and other lore establishing devices, under the bus whilst pining for the simplicity of 'the good old days', but one needs to remember that the art of Video games has evolved substantially since the Atari days. When we recall what it was about bar-raising video games, like Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid, that pushed the medium forward, we can see it was the maturity and deftness with which they handled and delivered a compelling narrative. As new experiences shape the way that games are made I doubt we will be seeing less of cutscenes, but more elaborate and groundbreaking ones as we push the art of visual storytelling forward. (and subtly replace movies.) Oh, and for the record: Say what you will about Metal Gear but Snake Eater's cutscenes are all sublime.