Battlefield 2042

[Nutri]

The Xmas emblems/images and tags also have placeholder names if you select them on your playercard. Even for English.

[willtron]

But hey, EA Q3 earnings call on Tuesday so we'll hear the executives talk about underwhelming sales and maybe start talking to investors about how they're going to try to fix the game. Hopefully around that same time DICE will have a plan forward finally and will say something since coming back from the holidays.

Investors don't give a shit about the franchise. BF will move to Ripple Effect, DICE Swe becomes a support studio, Portal goes F2P is my predicition.

Depending what Ripple can do in a year will depend if BF gets canned or not.

[Edge-]

Investors don't give a shit about the franchise. BF will move to Ripple Effect, DICE Swe becomes a support studio, Portal goes F2P is my predicition.

Depending what Ripple can do in a year will depend if BF gets canned or not.

Your prediction is what all the current rumors are so it's fairly safe, but we'll see once they decide to say anything.

And investors do care. Sure it's not as key to EA's success as something like FIFA, but it's still a major launch of a tentpole franchise for them, one that comes out every 2 years or so. Missing sales targets on that is big, because those sales estimates factor into their forecasts and failure to reach those, even with an otherwise strong quarter, often results in share prices going down.

[willtron]

Your prediction is what all the current rumors are so it's fairly safe, but we'll see once they decide to say anything.

And investors do care. Sure it's not as key to EA's success as something like FIFA, but it's still a major launch of a tentpole franchise for them, one that comes out every 2 years or so. Missing sales targets on that is big, because those sales estimates factor into their forecasts and failure to reach those, even with an otherwise strong quarter, often results in share prices going down.

They care about the franchise as far as the share price going the correct direction. I can't remember which bank it is, but one of the american ones has 308k shares in EA, do you really think they care about BF?

[Edge-]

do you really think they care about BF?

The quality of it? No, not in the slightest.

It failing to meet sales targets potentially resulting in EA missing their expected revenue/share price targets? Yeah, they care about that shit. That's literally what these calls are for.

[Edge-]

https://www.ea.com/games/battlefield...-to-season-one

"This could have been an email"

Radio silence is over and...it's meaningless. Legit, this is a 100% pointless post that says nothing. No real apology or acknowledgement of the game being fucked and their silence being frustrating. No information on a new direction or plans they have. No information about anything at all, actually. Just, "we'll work with you to improve the game." and restating that stuff like the scoreboard and VOIP are on the way. At least the scoreboard will show deaths and some additional information because their UI designers don't know what they're doing and need to crowdsource designs/feedback from the community.

Only "new" information - Season 1 ain't happenin in March, it's delayed to "Summer", and if you bought a bundle that included S1 you get some cosmetics.

Exciting.

Man, as much as I want the game to actually improve I'm kinda getting a lot of value watching DICE implode as a developer as the studio regresses in seemingly every possible way with this installment.

[aevitas]

Man, as much as I want the game to actually improve I'm kinda getting a lot of value watching DICE implode as a developer as the studio regresses in seemingly every possible way with this installment.

Yeah it must be nice to see someone's passion burn to ashes.

It's not the developers, EA is notorious for completely destroying studio's and then shutting them down after a game failed. Do you really think DICE decided they wanted BF to become a hero shooter, or did EA demand it because hero shooters might make more money with cosmetics?

I don't know if you ever read the Kotaku articles from Jason Schreier, but as far as I'm aware almost every developer disagreed with what they were forced to do in games that failed hard.

EDIT: DICE of course has some blame but it's mostly the leadership, but these are probably deep enough in EA's butthole to see what their dinner was last night.

[Edge-]

It's not the developers, EA is notorious for completely destroying studio's and then shutting them down after a game failed. Do you really think DICE decided they wanted BF to become a hero shooter, or did EA demand it because hero shooters might make more money with cosmetics?

No, by all accounts most of this is on DICE. Earlier bombs from BioWare were almost purely on them vs. EA forcing them to do X or Y.

EA may have had a hand in the initial BR focus for the game, but everything since is DICE. Their own devs were shit-talking on social media about how the game was "way ahead of schedule" and how "trust us, fam" and other garbage. They knew the quality of the build. Not to mention DICE has apparently let Frostbite spin out of control to the point that nobody at EA likes working with it - even their own teams - and that DICE has shown zero awareness since the bad launch.

Yeah, I do think DICE wanted to change up the BF formula a bit when returning to a more modeern setting and tried things like specialists. No, they're not remotely "heroes" from a hero shooter. Yes, it does also track with many design decisions from previous games and even Battlefront 2, though they are getting worse.

I don't know if you ever read the Kotaku articles from Jason Schreier, but as far as I'm aware almost every developer disagreed with what they were forced to do in games that failed hard.

He hasn't written for Kotaku in like, 3 years dude. And IIRC both his pieces on Anthem and ME:A while at Kotaku primarily placed the blame for the games issues with BW management and leadership blowing years of work on nothing, not EA meddling. EA is shit in many ways and for a lot of reasons, but they're not always the bad guy all the time.

I'm hoping we get a piece from him or one of the other actual games journalists about how shit went so sideways during development and just what the fuck has happened internally at DICE since launch.

[Zorachus]

DICE can make up for this, make a brand new Battlefield 6 game, using the Unreal 5 engine, and have it be the true successor to BF4.

[Edge-]

https://twitter.com/battlefieldcomm/...60643945152512

In which DICE delays the scoreboard update and it will now be releasing in March, 5 months after launch.

At this point EA needs to take the game away from DICE and have the studio spend its full time trying to make Frostbite not total ass, and hand BF off to Ripple or another studio. This is beyond a joke.

And they should probably invest in some gamedev bootcamps for DICE, because it seems like they could use some training.

[Pratt]

Back at launch I swore I wouldn't get the game until they added a proper scoreboard but at 40% off I'm not sure I can hold out till March, which probably actually means more like May.

[Edge-]

Bonus points: They pushed a fairly big hotfix live today, seems like it was upwards of 1GB depending on platform.

What's in the patch? So far literally nobody knows because DICE hasn't posted any notes or given any indication that they will be posting notes.

I wonder if that's another thing they abandoned and have to figure out how to do from scratch all over again.

EA, seriously, give this game to PopCap or something. They've got experience workin on shooters.

- - - Updated - - -

FYI: If you're on PC in the EU, ignore the ToS update forcing you to waive your right to a refund after two weeks. It should not supersede EU consumer rights laws.

[Graden]

FYI: If you're on PC in the EU, ignore the ToS update forcing you to waive your right to a refund after two weeks. It should not supersede EU consumer rights laws.

Unfortunately, I have like 50 hours played time...there's no hope for me.

[Nutri]

DICE can make up for this, make a brand new Battlefield 6 game, using the Unreal 5 engine, and have it be the true successor to BF4.

Dice made the Frostbite engine. I highly doubt any game coming from Dice will be something else than Frostbite.
Next to that, the game being so poor isn't the fault of the engine used.

[dlld]

Dice made the Frostbite engine. I highly doubt any game coming from Dice will be something else than Frostbite.
Next to that, the game being so poor isn't the fault of the engine used.

It seems likely that the people that built and knew how to work the Frostbite engine are gone from DICE/EA along with most DICE veterans by now, and I've heard reports that it's pretty difficult to work with as EA has been forcing many other developers under them to use it. So put the lack of expertise in the engine in the company and it being troublesome to work in from the start ontop and you got a shitty work situation.

This would be remedied by using UE5 as it is probably the easiest engine to use out there and got pretty good support from what i understand but, that would mean losing a huge cut to epic so they will never do it beyond a last resort.

[Edge-]

https://www.reddit.com/r/battlefield...s_glitches_of/

Holy shit this is hilarious, flight is so busted. At this point the memes are absolutely the most enjoyable part of the game while DICE stays silent and the game continues to see players leave.

Honestly, it seems like whatever new version of Frostbite they're working on somehow made it impossible to use any previous work so they functionally rebuilt everything for a BF game in 18 months (well, not everything, but most of it) and now they're having to continue to do deep development work that should have been done years ago.

It's only been a week since their blog post, but given the continued silence from them, the random server restart today that caused downtime (is that a thing for FPS games outside of actual updates?!), and how hilariously busted the game continues to be in many regards, I'm skeptical they'll even be able to hit a summer date for the start of S1.

- - - Updated - - -

It seems likely that the people that built and knew how to work the Frostbite engine are gone from DICE/EA along with most DICE veterans by now, and I've heard reports that it's pretty difficult to work with as EA has been forcing many other developers under them to use it. So put the lack of expertise in the engine in the company and it being troublesome to work in from the start ontop and you got a shitty work situation.

Basically yes. DICE built it and still work on it, but EA have a team dedicated to it nowadays as it's used across almost every internal title (minus Respawn games and FIFA on Switch). Reporting is that it's hell to work with, and it seems like EA's bet on a single, unified engine for all their games isn't paying off in the longterm like they'd hoped, and Ubi may have had a better approach with multiple in-house engines tailored for different types of games.

This would be remedied by using UE5 as it is probably the easiest engine to use out there and got pretty good support from what i understand but, that would mean losing a huge cut to epic so they will never do it beyond a last resort.

Epic takes revenue out of sales after various thresholds, so honestly given that 2042 didn't sell well it'd probably be cheaper than expected.

But I doubt there's the technical capability to do this, or the interest in spending the immense amount of time. I'd be very curious to see what kinds of discussions are going on with the CTO/Frostbite tech teams at this stage, as Frostbite seems to be a fairly persistent problem across EA games nowadays.

I miss when it was a premier engine capable of stunning, impressive visuals and a crazy level of destructibility that helped make it stand out. I get it, it's harder to stand out now since there are a lot of excellent game engines with impressive features, but Frostbite is increasingly a "boring" engine with nothing remotely unique/compelling in it on the user-end.

[KrayZ33]

I recently saw an animation comparison between BF2042 and BF1/BF5.

That little, 10 minute long video, was the *perfect* example as to why BF2042 is a big pile of shite.
All these little details that are simply missing now. I fucking hate it when these companies have a big mind-wipe and start from scratch as if they didn't know any better.
The franchise is dead now (for me). Can't believe it.

I simply can't trust them anymore.
If BF3 came out now, it would still be a stunning game and be a lot of fun. It wouldn't look "awesome" but still "okay". It would still be immersive as hell and the sounds and gameplay is simple yet very solid.
How the hell do you make a game *that* much worse when it's basically 1:1 the same and from the same company.

I wish BF4 came out now and it would be more... fresh.... I'd love to experience the first 200h of that time again.

[Attackrabbit]

First battlefield game i owned was BF:Vietnam, got well into that and then loved BF2 when it arrived, enjoyed Bad Company 2 (especially Vietnam DLC) and then kind of liked BF3 and 4 but every single release seems to be less enjoyable than the last until we arrive at the festering pile of garbage that is 2042. I really don't understand how you can make a game worse as time and technology moves forwards :s

[Edge-]

https://twitter.com/_Tom_Henderson_/...78191180922882

Over 60,000 words of feedback from 350 team members have been provided to EA on "the opportunities and challenges" surrounding Battlefield 2042's development.

There have been 25 workshops over the past 3 weeks to receive in-person feedback.

More soon.

Apparently DICE is preparing to enter production for this game that's been released for 3 months, big improvements! I hate that we still get the majority of information/communication from Tom, a known leaker and non-employee of DICE, rather than from the CM team that continues to say nothing despite committing to improved communications and feedback at the start of the month.

I'm hopeful that this means they've got very big changes in mind that they'll supposedly be announcing with a roadmap at the end of the month, but honestly I can't say I'm remotely optimistic. Would have been great to see this as a more transparent process with more engagement with the community, but we'll see.

And I didn't know Vince helped set up Ripple as well, but knowing that like...yeah, maybe if DICE can't figure shit out hand the game off to them to take the lead on. Vince may already have a studio with 5 games to run, but I trust him to set up a solid studio capable of picking up work on a franchise like BF.

I guess now we just wait for unpaid, unofficial CM Tom Henderson to give us more updates that should be coming from the paid EA community managers.

- - - Updated - - -

https://www.xfire.com/ea-acknowledge...e-post-moterm/

And it's live. TLDR as I read through...

DICE spent over a year overhauling Frostbite to the point where it's "basically a new engine" which puts a lot of the technical issues in context.

Partial blame falls on the pandemic and WFH, but I don't put much stock in this.

Apparently they had a ton of positive feedback so feedback on bugs/issues from the public wasn't as important.

It was then revealed that Battlefield 2042's bug count ratio got to "historic levels for a DICE game" and mock reviews prior to launch were in the "high 70s to low 80s".

Big ooph on the bug levels, and whoever they should probably find a new outfit for mock reviews.

Following the game's launch, DICE rolled out its Day 1 and Day 0 patches to get the bug count down further. On this, Miele continued and said that Battlefield 2042's launch and patches meant "the game was stable" and "the early critical reception was good". However, according to EA, things took a turn, and that turn was clears throat,​ the surprise release of Halo: Infinite multiplayer (I wish I was joking).

According to Miele, the comparison between both games was not favourable because Halo Infinite was a very polished title whereas Battlefield 2042 contained bugs and wasn't as polished.

...I hope this isn't their takeaway, BF2042's issues have nothing to do with Infinite, which had its own problems (and still does)

Inadequate early player testing limited feedback so they thought they were doing better than they actually were.

Complete restructuring of development teams, which should be fun and exciting.

Overall, seems like they're still missing some big elements and didn't talk too much about the current major issues.

I was hoping this would leave me more optimistic but...I'm still on team "Give the game to Ripple, already." at this point and have lost confidence in DICE.

[Nerraw]

My biggest surprise here is that Xfire still exists. DICE is gonna DICE.