Battlefield 2042 is not the game anyone had hoped it would be. Since launching in November last year, the game has managed to disappoint the people that made it, the people that wanted to make money from it, and the people who just wanted to play the damn thing.
DICE EA's futuristic military shooter is, simply put, a mess. Since launch, the game has been packed full of bugs and server issues. And with a lack of any meaningful fixes or communication, fans have made their displeasure known through negative reviews and a rapidly vanishing playerbase. Earlier this week, 2018's Battlefield V had 10 times the concurrent PC players as the latest instalment. That, obviously, is not good.
Now, EA has finally opened up about what it thinks went wrong. In a special "town hall" meeting held with employees across the company, the publisher discussed Battlefield 2042's many shortcomings and the numerous events that it feels led to its downfall.
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According to an in-depth report from Battlefield insider Tom Henderson for Xfire, EA chalks up Battlefield 2042's failure to a few key factors: the pandemic, developers working from home, and the apparently unexpected success of Halo Infinite's launch just a few weeks after Battlefield 2042 released.
"Add up all of this new innovation, all of this ambition for the new project, and then you add a global pandemic halfway into the project, where the game teams had to work from home, we ended up with more new variables in development than we have ever experienced before", EA's chief studios officer, Laura Milele explained.
She added that the bugs in Battlefield 2042 reached "historic levels for a DICE game" as a result, and the much more polished Halo Infinite only made it look worse.
EA also lays a portion of the blame at the feet of the Frostbite Engine, the engine that the publisher uses for the vast majority of its video games. Time that would otherwise have been spent shining up Battlefield 2042 and ironing out the kinks was instead dedicated to preparing Frostbite for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, apparently.
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The report ends on a rather ominous note, suggesting that the Battlefield 2042 development team will be restructured for a "more streamlined development process". It's not entirely clear what this means, or where Battlefield 2042 goes from here.
Featured Image Credit: EATopics: Battlefield 2042, Halo, Halo Infinite, Dice