I found myself laughing a bit at the news released last week from the EA internal Town Hall meeting concerning Battlefield 2042. EA finally placed some blame concerning their release of the latest installment of the Battlefield franchise. In true upper management fashion, the blame was placed on decisions and not on those who made those decisions. It is also worth noting that there is nothing said about whether they should have held the game back to iron out the issues that led to the bad launch.
The town hall style meeting didn’t only deal with Battlefield 2042 but none of the rest of the news was leaked to my knowledge. The executives didn’t just point out the issues with the game but they also spent time talking about where the game is going and the future of the series. It seems like they still do believe in this iteration of the game and the franchise as a whole which is heartening.
The meat of the leaks all came from the mouth of Laura Miele, EA’s Chief Studios Officer. She pointed out that EA and many instances of hits and misses (we are looking at you Andromeda). She pointed at the launch of Battlefield 2042 as one of the things they can chalk up to a miss.
The Frostbite engine seems to be something that is on the chopping block for the studio as they start moving some development back over to Unreal. Frostbite was the engine that was poised to take EA into the future. It was also one of the reasons they touted for buying DICE. The problem is that Frostbite is an older engine that is notoriously difficult to work with especially for facial reactions that are so important in action games. It works great if you are making games that have gorgeous environments where you are shooting people that are covered nearly head to toe in gear but not so much when you want to see subtle changes in expression.
Miele commented that the studio basically needed to go back and update the existing Frostbite engine so, according to her, it was like building an engine from the ground up.
Another reason for the subpar launch was the global pandemic which hit during the halfway point in the project. We can all understand why this caused such havoc for the development of the game. Nobody would hold EA to the flame because a global pandemic caused issues for a multinational corporation that needs to share large assets across the world and managing teams across time zones and local laws. There was a lot that went into making this game during that time and we all feel for the team and the hard work that went into making the game that they did. But, players don’t need to forgive management for digging their heels in and deciding not to delay the game, which leads nicely into the final point.
The game had an unprecedented number of bugs. Miele stated that the team got a lot of feedback about bugs and other areas of the game that weren’t up to DICE standards according to players but it seems like they focused on the positive feedback from players who told them “Battlefield is back.” The game ended up releasing with a Day 0 and Day 1 patch but the experience was still too buggy to be considered a 1.0 game.
The final reason she gave for Battlefield 2042’s rocky launch was Halo Infinite. She compared the much anticipated free-to-play shooter to Battlefield 2042 saying, “[Battlefield 2042] was not favorable because Halo Infinite was a very polished title whereas Battlefield 2042 contained bugs and wasn’t as polished.”
I feel like this is a quote that is going to follow her around for a while but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t true…mostly. Halo Infinite also had a lot of bugs holding it back but overall it did feel more polished than Battlefield 2042 because of the historic number of bugs in a Battlefield game.
It is totally understandable that a game of this size and scale would have issues being developed in the middle of a pandemic. What is unforgivable is the studio’s decision to hold to their launch date. The executive team at EA could have taken these factors under consideration and delayed the launch of their game. They could have fixed the unprecedented number of bugs. They could have also given their game a little bit of breathing room from the launch of Halo Infinite.
I was really excited for Battlefield 2042 because I haven’t played a Battlefield game since Battlefield 4. When I played the game on my aging PC during the beta tests, not only the bugs but the technical requirements left me struggling with the game even on the lowest settings. I could have played the game on my last generation consoles but that would have been a stunted experience because of the limited player counts.
I did end up playing the game on my PC after the launch for a few hours because I had access because of the 10 hour free trial on Game Pass. While it did play better than during the launch, there were tons of bugs and performance issues that might have been happening because of my PC or because the game itself was buggy so it just turned into a bad experience overall and it soured me on the game. I would like to go back to it at some point in time but being unable to get my hands on a new console or a new GPU at this time also keeps me from going back to check things out.
I hope that EA learns from this experience. I hope that investors learn that bad decisions can be made by teams and executives alike and I think the worst decisions made for Battlefield 2042 were made by the people who sit a long table and not by those who sit in front of computer screens.
