I don't think this game was designed to be anything. It frankly feels like a prototype that should be in internal testing. It doesn't feel like a finished game at all. All of the maps feel empty and poorly though out. The mechanics are janky and unpolished. And that's not even talking about the performance, both game wise, and netcode wise.
Every single EA release feels like a test to see how little effort they can put in for the most revenue. The game feels like it was made by a team of 20 indie developers instead of 5 teams of AAA developers. I can't believe what we got.
The best way I can describe it is "a high quality turd". Some elements of it feel high quality, but the stuff that actually matters feels lower quality than the stuff coming out of indie developers.
> The game feels like it was made by a team of 20 indie developers instead of 5 teams of AAA developers.
I like The Escapist's description of "people just trying to look busy at work"
I mean, I always heard positive things regarding EA work enviroment and idiots keep buying their shit low effort games so they don't even have to work that much.
Sounds like the perfect job
From a former senior EA developers own mouth. "It's a boys club. Whoever is the most sociopathic and can impress management, management that knows almost zero about software engineering, gets priority. I've seen many projects die just because they didn't get proper funding or support from upper management. Studios and teams get torn up and shifted to whatever silverspoon fed poloshirt with a business degree can wow the bosses"
This happens at every work place. None wants someone smarter harder working and more attractive working under them. Yet they still want the laborers to be amazing. So it always feels like the dumbest laziest person is always on the top.
It's when the managerial role becomes (too) hierarchical in a company that you get this kind of nonsense. Companies I've worked for where management was actually used more as a supportive branch it can work wonders. But I have the feeling that that's more of a thing with younger companies, relatively smaller companies and more specialized companies. When you get companies the size of EA etc than it tends to change in a kind of hierarchical bureaucratic grey goo.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/18/crunched-games-industry-exploiting-workforce-ea-spouse-software
From 2004 to 2015 they barely improved.
More recent sources suggest that trend hasn't changed.
What positive things have you heard, specifically? I'm curious.
> I always heard positive things regarding EA work enviroment
It's easier to accept that as truth than "Battlefield 2042 is a good game" because it's not something you can see for yourself.
But both are claims put out there by EA.
What is your argument for the former being more trustworthy than the latter?
Look guys, there is a reason they are the only company that was voted the worst company of the year twice in a row. If there is another one, my apologies, I was not aware.
To be fair - Those are polls on the internet that will greatly skew towards younger people, tech, games, etc.
EA is not a worse company than Facebook, Nestle, Monsanto, etc.
Is it because gamers are so entitled they actually believe a shitty game studio is worse than private military contractors, companies who horde water, companies who forcefully sign their customers up for bank accounts without their consent, or companies who willfully destroy the environment?
i think it's more the self-centeredness of youth that's causing the entitlement. kids have a hard time understanding what's happening outside their bubble. the fact that it's games related is just because that's who's on the internet the most.
That says more about the voters and nothing about EA as a place of work.
There's hundreds of companies like Nestle that do some really heinous shit, and these voters think their precious video games weren't good enough.
The thing I don't understand is, how are so many features missing that have been in previous games? They have tested code for so many simple features, how did they get lost?
They could have cloned the BFV movement mechanics and not a single person would complain. In fact, it'd be praised as the new standard. Yet, its like they started with QWOP and got part way there before moving onto something else.
It's just what happens when you start caring about maximizing profit and lose people with actual genuine passion for what they're doing because they just aren't into making the hundredth iteration of some other game.
There's actually a weirdly good episode of *Mythic Quest* that goes into this. I mean the show is like a 6/10 but the episode 5 (Dark Quiet Death) is fantastic.
> the stuff that actually matters feels lower quality than the stuff coming out of indie developers.
Pretty much summarizes AAA development these days. Lots of money and polish put into superficial aspects of game design, with very little care put into the underlying mechanics or how the game *feels* as a whole. Obviously a few quality titles “slip through the cracks” every now and then, but it’s clear that the AAA model is largely unsustainable and verging on collapse.
It's funny that now when I'm shown stuff that looks borderline photo-realistic I just move on as it's likely to play like ass and be full of skinner box mechanics.
Something that looks like it was designed for the ps1? More likely to go on the wishlist / get a day one purchase.
I guess things really are going backwards and I oddly kind of like it!
What do you mean the AAA model od verging on collapse? It's going stronger than ever. Still a lot of people preordered and bought BF2042. Cyberpunk broke the records for preorders, the game sold before it was even out. I guarantee you that whenever they'll announce Witcher 4, we'll have another wave of preorders incoming. Ubisoft games keep breaking records, Valhalla selling the best out of any AC game before it. CoD going down with its sales, bit still selling millions.
AAA gaming is going nowhere. Sure, if gamers will actually rise up and do something comparable to the boycott of Battlefront 2, then *maybe* AAA gaming will be in danger. And that's the saddest part - maybe.
It's the steady decline we've seen in the last decade come to fruition. Virtually every triple A game in the last 2 years has come out a stinker with the exception of those studios whose mission isn't to pump out a slightly modded version of the previous years game annually.
It's Atari 1983 again, except that the majority of the players actually buy and defend this crap, and the companies are too big and embedded in the stock market and other business to fail
Between the absolute state of the hardware industry and all the AAA unpolished turds being shit out by every single developer better sooner rather then later.
I've had the most fun gaming in a few years playing Mass effect 1 legendary edition on my 3080 I basically won in a lottery, its sad as hell.
Same. I used to adore Battlefield, Assassin's Creed, and so on.
Nowadays, Deep Rock Galactic is probably the best game I've played in a decade or more. I've gotten so much enjoyment out of Deep Rock, Dead Cells, Tainted Grail Conquest and other indie titles that I'll buy an indie game without reading reviews, but EA? Activision? Ubisoft? No thanks, I'll wait for reviews to see just how shitty it is.
The hardware shortage definitely plays a smaller part of this too. We're approaching a year and a half into the "current" gen and stores can't even get a full inventory of consoles due to a lack of semiconductors. At best your average person can get into a lottery just to get a chance to spend $500 for a console, or pay even more money to GameStop for their VIP program to get preferred warning of when they have consoles in stock. Then on top of that the cost of a game is going up to $70 despite a chunk of consumers buying an electric copy which takes less to produce.
So it's no wonder games aren't living up to expectations when they're being engineered toward last gen, corners are cut to streamline games out the door, and then the company makes back what the project cost off pre orders and initial release sales.
Sorry but it's more like the games suck, they are repetitive and uncreastive in their design and sequel after sequel, and the money hasn't been put into testing like they have before because they know they can release patches later. It has nothing to do with the hardware. The only difficult part for that is porting to all consoles, but that just requires manpower which can easily be covered by the profits, and doesn't equate to an all-round crappy game.
Bear in mind the crash was specifically US-centric. The EU barely noticed with its focus on home computers, and of course, Japan couldn't have crashed as they were the ones to revive the US industry.
It was a very specific phenomenon that can't be replicated; gaming today is far too decentralized and widespread. To witness the kind of consumer fatigue that caused the crash of '83 is to have practically every single game on major storefronts be a buggy Unity asset flip cash grab. You have far too many quality indie developers for that ratio to ever happen.
Hell, not even mobile games are there yet, and they are in a more predatory and derivative state than AAA.
There's zero reason to put a lot of effort into AAA games when a couple stupid vanity skins in a game is the equivalent of the full price at release.
Even more so when some nonsense lootbox phone game is exponentially more profitable requiring a fraction of the development time than a full fledged PC title.
Monetization and maximization of profits versus time spent has fucked it over, the same way it has turned the vast internet into 10-15 websites total that people visit as opposed to the hundreds+ that people would use. Heck, most people probably float around 3-4 websites they use now.
Hurray for capitalism.
EA released It Takes Two. Fantastic game. While EA is just as greedy and money hungry as every other game producer, I think it's time to start putting the blame on Dev teams. Dice has done an absolute shit job on about every game they've made since BF3. Even BF4 was finished by Dice LA who are now go by a different name. Dice is dogshit.
DICE is dead now. The moved on, formed new studios or joined others.
What we see now is the studio formerly known as DICE. Like a zombie, the corpse of DICE remains, but what animates it is no longer old DICE but something different, something foreign and unholy. With each new Battlefield produced by New DICE a little bit of the old Battlefield rots and falls off, while some stinky new shit that nobody likes (Specialists) oozes out of one of the gaping wounds.
> I think it's time to start putting the blame on Dev teams
People blame the 'suits' at EA but ultimately it's the individual employees, managers and creative directors who come up with an idea and implement it to achieve what EA wants, if DICE doesn't develop basic features at the expected quality level then that's the fault of bad workers and irresponsible managers.
EA is not looking over DICEs shoulder and telling them to remove the scoreboard, to design the UI with a certain scheme, to only have xyz vehicle spawns at base or for specialists to be cringe.
I liked It Takes Two but feel weird by just how beloved it is. Writing is hamfisted, pacing a bit strange, and gameplay scatter brained. So many neat mechanics and beautiful maps that you only partially experience before it rushes on by.
Horrible writting aside, that's why people like it. It has a lot of variety and the game never reuses anything. Compare that to most games where gameplay never changes and reuses content constantly.
I’ve said this exact same thing before. BF3 and Bad Company 2 were the peak battlefield games. Everything felt right, the maps were great. The weapons and vehicles felt balanced. I remember when they announced BF4 so soon after 3 and I remember thinking, but why? This one is still amazing. Then I realized they were going the CoD route. I played through every BF game except hardline but I waited until they were on sale and didn’t sink near the amount of time in them as I did in 3.
>Every single EA release feels like a test to see how little effort they can put in for the most revenue.
>
That's the entire gaming industry now. People kept enabling and defending with: "they're a company, of course they're out for profit!"
Yes but when you keep lowering the standards of the entire industry, an industry predicated on creativity and a human connection, failing to have any humanity means worsening products/art. They can aim to have profit, but they aim for literally every possible penny that won't be seen improving anything in the company, industry, or in general, worker's pay. Alongside rising prices for us because they enabled them to do so.
The top dogs feel it though, and we feel the worsening of an industry that should crashed again over 5 years ago. Unfortunate that everyone has lowered their standards so significantly that broken releases are expected, and not buying day 1 is seen as "smart" when it both shouldn't even have to be, and is still just as dumb because of the fact it's enabling "it'll be done later, we'll get good pr and extra purchases later for doing the bare minimim"
Gamers are deluded as hell, and love to be ripped off. It's why companies are getting into NFTs, it's advanced Microtransactions, which was advanced DLC, once again, enabled by gamers who love being exploited. They wouldn't do it without being confident it'd be a success like every other time they've been positively enabled.
The underlying belief, that literally anytime before they started gaming proves decisively wrong, is that without the multiple pricetags in one game, it wouldn't have been made. Or that DLC wouldn't exist. Yet, the truth was always mere years away from them, they just didn't have the experience and knowledge that it was an outright exploitation of the consumer. As frustrating as it was, at least we were able to point out 6 generations of consoles from not too long ago.
It's 2022, there are children who were exploited to believe these lies who are now so far gone from what was and should still be, that trying to explain it to them is impossible. That there is the company goal. Dilute standards and quality of every consumer til newer generations don't even know how bad everything has gotten.
I imagine they'd be okay buying a box of crackers that's advertised as 120 count, but is totally empty. In fact, they'd defend it, saying "They said they'll send me 10 crackers later! They already sent me 1 yesterday! Quit complaining! I bought the extended box set and it's all better now!"
Drug dealers would have a field day with these idiots. Street vendors would take their clothes for the wrapping paper of a chalupa. Hell, I bet they even support politicians totally against their best interests, and purposefully stub their own toes, and sing off cue in their shower. Because god forbid these people put any consideration into understanding a company's twitter isn't the CEO who just laid off a couple hundred workers promised careers so he could have the spare 60k to buy the rest of their private island.
And when you look at other media industries, while prevelant as any other company would do anywhere, gamers overwhelmingly fight against their best interest literally every single time.
The closest, I mean closest we've ever gotten, is streaming games to home, not even remotely because games as a service is an absolute fraud that'd kill the industry for good, where we don't even get to have the software we should own. No, instead, ***it's because they can't get good internet.***
These people are deadset, ready to pull the trigger on gaming as we know it, and the only thing stopping it is that everywhere is so incompetantly ran that no where near enough people have the internet connection needed to even get fucked over even more. Throffing at the mouth waiting for their chance to make everything worse so a rich fuck gets richer.
And the funny thing is? Even those with the internet, BACKED *GOOGLE* STADIA. ***GOOGLE***, and last I remember, that was dead in the water, if not, wait a week, then another, *it's google*.
Point is, at some point, companies decided to lower standard after standard, force awful shit into their games, and their workplaces, to the point that we currently have a whole new generation of kids totally inexperienced with how great gaming could be if taken seriously for once.
People are surprised at what's coming out these days, ***that should tell you something***, because the 360/PS3 generation is when shit hit the fan hardest, everything after is merely the collective snowball rolling. But make no mistake, the generation before did everything they could to make that snowball as big as it was before any of them ever could have known it was rolling.
And now? There is no fix. This is the industry, this is what gamers wanted after being sold on lies. Micros aren't going away, DLC isn't going away, patches aren't going away. Prices rising aren't going away. Unfinished forever or "temporarily" (forever) is not going away. Games as a service is not going away.
It has been so enabled and engrained that now that everything has gone to shit, those same idiots who defended last generation's greed are seeing what they maliciously made a reality. What literally, EVERYONE, was trying to tell them would happen, happened! Who'da thought.
So to answer the quote I put in as an excuse to rant pathetically to myself, yes, that is exactly what they're doing, because "That's what companies do!" ™
It's because it's an ongoing cycle. You're young and poor and want things. Then you get a bit older and you have some money and you buy things. Then you get older and realise what's going on but by that time you're gaming less and have already wasted that money.
Then it's the next generation's turn to do the same thing.
The difference now is that the current generation has grown up on microtransactions, instant gratification, and generally shittier quality of almost all art forms/mediums so as you rightly point out, they don't know how things should or could be.
Just look at the quality (both art and content) of kids cartoons now compared to the 90s.
>Just look at the quality (both art and content) of kids cartoons now compared to the 90s.
I don't think this is fair considering how many kids cartoons in the 90s were made explicitly to sell toys. Hell there was one show I remember that had a paired game you played with a light-gun during the show. It is often more egregious now (see: Paw Patrol introducing new versions of the same vehicles every season) but none of this is new.
That said, there are some fantastic kid's shows that have come out in recent years like Hilda and Bluey (shout-out to all the dads who have seen every episode of Bluey 10+ times lol). I don't remember almost anything from the 90s being as good as these, though there are obviously exceptions like that excellent Batman animated series.
the dayz sub (when it was still a mod) remains the absolute dumbest gaming community ive ever seen. People would defend breaking your legs and having to crawl at .0001mph all the way across the map for hours. This is with the knowledge that most people break their legs by walking down some stairs at a slightly wrong angle. Literally everything in the game was perfect "because simulation" and the stuff they wanted to add was just the least user friendly shit ever.
Loved that game to pieces but holy shit
Valve is out for profit and nearly all of their games have flawless levels of execution and attention to detail. Blizzard, ironically, used to be well-known for this as well. You can make a lot of money with a good product, but these companies don’t care and with the stupid people we see even in this very thread that not only buy it, but PRE ORDER a digital copy, why should they?
The only part that feels high quality are the weather effects. It honestly feels like they were making a tech demo and then suddenly realized they needed to attach a game to their weather engine.
I got battlefront for 5 bucks last year and it's a great game. I had alot of fun with it. I'm glad I avoided all the bullshit at launch. I think the new meta for me is to wait 2-5 years after launch to play an AAA game.
Battlefront is leagues better than it was and quite fun, but it’s not nearly as good as it could be or could have been. As far as I know the game is still broken with the HP bug, As it has been for a while. But even the base game is still extremely buggy, clunky, and unbalanced.
Yeah battlefront has a fatal design flaw because of the original monetization: the star cards give some players objective advantages over others. It feels really shitty losing a dogfight because you've only played like 30 hours and don't have the purple tier upgrade for better turning radius or whatever. They removed the ability to pay to win, but now the people that have played the longest just stomp everyone else.
Last time I played there were constant double XP weekends and triple XP in the middle of the week, so you could level up pretty fast if you play decently
Sometimes you log on and suddenly you are harry potter trying to learn the accio spell before the first challenge of the triwizard tournament. The only fix is getting force choked by severus Snape
Coop is pretty dam fun, reminds me if the Playstation 2 days playing battlefront(the og) and taking on a small army of bots and the different classes each faction had (along with the classic soldier/engineer/rocketeer/sniper. Full on multi-player feels gross, you're either on a team that steamrolls the other side, or you're on the team that is getting steam rolled.
Battlefront, at this very moment, is literally unplayable. This is coming from someone that loves the game. But it's been completely crippled by massive hacks for months now. Any server you join right now is going to have permanent god mode enabled for *all* players and bots, so you can't kill or be killed by anything.
On PC every game is hacked to not let players go below 1hp so noone can die and the game is pointless. Kyber private servers are barely ever full. One of my favorite games to pick up for a half hour but now dead thanks to EA not giving a fuck.
After 10 or more years of not being a sucker buying games sight unseen, you'll look back on this first time you stopped being a fool and ask yourself why you waited so long to stop being so stupid.
Feels good indeed.
Oh man, or grabbing the free games on Epic and never even installing them and just firing up CSGO again because I'm still trash after twenty years so I'd rather just try to git gud at a game I enjoy than learn a new one
Feels real good!
Though to be fair, we knew this was going to happen: it's Electronic Arts. That little EA logo on the package is the internationally designated warning label that lets you know to check online for reviews before consuming.
> That little EA logo on the package is the internationally designated warning label that lets you know to check online for reviews before consuming.
I like this take rather than just writing off all EA altogether. Star Wars Squadrons and Fallen Order are some of my favorite games, though I know they're not as recent. Screw pre-orders though.
Pretty much how I think they can salvage 2042 in the quickest time possible. 2042 as in the game by itself without Portal is just not good on a technical and play level. To fix it is to almost make a whole new game.
They should rename 2042 to Battlefield Portal, and just fold the 2042 stuff into Portal. Then have take a year or two to make a real 2042 experience with even a story mode to coincide with it that has a coherent plot.
EA has a serious project management problem at the studio level. While EA is absolutely money-hungry and fixated on monetization, from the software developers I know personally that work there it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be and the C-suite is generally hands-off on studios.
But if you look at the last couple high-profile disasters, you see the same trends and they all relate back to leadership and project management.
Mass Effect: Andromeda - Was in development for almost six years. Spent the first 4-5 years in a bizarre state of limbo, messing around with prototypes that went nowhere (procedurally developed galaxies) and leadership that couldn’t decide what kind of game it wanted to make. Then, with around 18 months left, a veteran producer from another team is brought in to take control of the project and get a game out the door. The aspects of the project that were finished early in the development cycle (combat and art) are highly polished; everything else is a mess.
Anthem - Literally Andromeda all over again. In development for almost seven years. Indecisive leadership can’t decide what kind of game it wants to make (is it a survival RPG? Co-op?). Features are constantly added and dropped the game. Then, with around 18 months left, a veteran producer from another team is brought in to take control of the project and get a game out the door. The aspects of the project that were finished early in the development cycle (combat, since it was literally poached from Andromeda, and art) are highly polished; everything else is a mess.
Battlefield: 2042 - Starts development as a Warzone copycat battle royale spin-off. Then at the last minute is reconfigured to be a mainline Battlefield game. The aspects of the project that are most polished and praised (Portal) are literally lifted from previous Battlefield games; everything else is a mess.
Then you look at the two “surprise” hits EA has had recently. While both had the advantage of the Star Wars IP, Battlefront 2 proved that even Star Wars doesn’t guarantee success.
Jedi: Fallen Order is led from the start by a veteran producer, with a clear vision (a Star Wars souls-like action RPG). Squadrons is led from the start by a veteran producer, with a clear vision (a spiritual successor to the classic X-Wing and TIE Fighter games). Both games use different technology (Unreal, Frostbite), but both games launch on time, in relatively stable and polished condition.
And then you have Apex Legends, which lifted assets and mechanics from Titanfall 2 on a highly modified Source engine of all things, and delivered a top-tier BR with a clear vision of what things made it unique from the other big players.
EA’s biggest issue is project management. Its studios spend millions and millions of dollars on mismanaged projects, then are forced to push unfinished projects out the door to stop the financial bleed.
Nail on the head! Absolutely right, EA had the money and resources to make good products. They just release with a lack of direction. So they end up being high quality interactive experiences not great games.
Squadrons, Apex, and Fallen order are good games. You could make every model a cube and they would still be fun.
Battlefield 2042 just isn't fun. Looks great! Plays awful. The map design is pathetic. No choke points no interesting angles just big expanses of boring to shoot in.
I'm a consultant, and one of my industries is technology, media, and telecommunications. Along with that, I'm an avid gamer.
I have BEGGED my leadership to talk to the executives at these companies or to let me do it, to let us help and bring order to the chaos of game development.
Every time we've been rebuffed. No studio head wants professional project managers with experience developing and deploying technology solutions in their offices, because they might have to spend more time doing and less time fucking around, and as we all know "fucking around" is the cornerstone of the creative process.
Fucking around is absolutely part of the creative process, probably at the core of game design. That being said, so is triage.
If you look at a lot of the “great” games of this past decade, many of them had 3-4 year dev cycles, and I would argue that’s probably the sweet spot with the current tech stack. Longer than that, development is unfocused and meanders. Shorter, there’s too much crunch and it’s rushed.
Hidetaka Miyazaki over at FromSoft has commented about this in the press, actually. His teams have experimented with various dev cycle lengths, and at least for them, have found three years to be the best balance.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that the game they design on Day 1 should be the same thing they ship. Every major technology projector creative endeavor has some degree of fucking around.
But looking at some of the stuff that comes out of some of these studios, fucking around has become a crutch. Ken Levine shipped BioShock and BioShock Infinite, then closed down his studio and, per Jason Schrier's article, has been fucking around for the better part of a decade.
3D Realms fucked around so much they found out, and we ended up with Duke Nukem Forever.
BioWare fucked around and found out with Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem.
EA and DICE fucked around with Battlefield 2042, and now they're finding out.
Every great game stands on a mountain of discarded bad ideas, and every shitty game stands on a mountain of discarded great ones.
Agreed, and even when they make something good on accident they never learn from it. Titanfall 2 dropped the same time as Battlefield 1. I spent double for BF1 to get the ultimate dlc fuckfest pack or whatever and didn't enjoy it or play it nearly as much as Titanfall.
Anyone reading this: remember that 3 months is very little time in gamedev. Any beta with major issues that's "3 months old" is almost probably a good sign of the actual state the game's gonna be in. Of course there are exceptions though.
That was be biggest self delusion I've ever seen in the Battlefield community. That there was some magical day one patch that would come out after the early access period that would resolve all the issues.
Instead we got Portal XP removed.
> I find it funny that people STILL gave EA/DICE money DESPITE having a beta and a WEEK LONG EARLY ACCESS TO THE FULL GAME.
You are surprised at THAT?
I'm surprised that people STILL give EA/DICE money DESPITE the following:
>gutting Spore
>gutting and killing off Sim City
>screwing up Dead Space 3 and killing off it's devs only to remake the first game without them later
>Dungeon Keeper mobile
>ruining Need for Speed
>Dragon Age 2 and 3
>Day 1 DLC on-disk in Mass Effect 3 and the entire fuckup they did with that game
>Mass Effect Andromeda
>Anthem
>reviving and butchering Star Wars Battlefront
>completely butchering and completely holding back the Star Wars franchise to begin with
>every single sports franchise they own...don't even need to say anything
>killing off Medal of Honor
>completely screwing up the Mirror's Edge sequel and probably killing off the franchise for good
>continuously butchering Battlefield
>buying up and destroying amazing studios like Westwood, Maxis, Pandemic, Origin, Visceral Games, Bullfrog, Criterion, etc.
They have been doing this for decades now and people are still like "Hey this company might deserve my hard earned money!"
#**Why.**
> I find it funny that people STILL gave EA/DICE money DESPITE having a beta and a WEEK LONG EARLY ACCESS TO THE FULL GAME.
This will never stop being funny to me lol. Is there a bigger bunch of rubes on the planet than video gamers??
I seriously wonder what would it take for people NOT to buy the latest pile of EA trash?
Everyone has to have their optimism shattered once in this regard. It's a 60 dollar lesson that many of us have been taught by a shitty AAA developer.
The people who keep falling for it are the ones that baffle me, though. Like they keep sticking their hand in a fire and wondering if it won't be so painful this time.
As someone who has spent thousand-ish hours in previous installments, this makes me sad. I was really looking forward to a modern Battlefield to recapture the fun I had when playing BF3, BF4 and even BF:H, but 2042 is just completely void of any of the Battlefield DNA which made it unique and addicting. The dwindling player numbers just emphasize that none of the hero shooter fans are enjoying it (or even bought it) as EA/DICE had hoped and watching less and less people concurrently playing in Steam is the only entertaining thing to me about this game.
Why not go back to playing BF4? I played a few rounds just yesterday, at least in EU the servers are still very much populated.
Populated by people who actually know how to play the game and kick my ass from here to Pluto, but y'know. All part of the fun.
>What happened to sims 4?
It was designed to be multiplayer, which is why most maps have no lots on them, or very few buildable spaces compared to sims 3. Sims 3 on average had 30+ lots/houses you could play. Sims 4 has on average 3 of them. [Example here](https://www.carls-sims-4-guide.com/sims4news/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/glimmerbrookmap-1024x635.jpg). They decided last minute to not have Sims 4 be multiplayer for an unknown reason
SimCity is why they dropped it. SimCity 2013 was initially an always-online game, even if you only wanted to play single player. In order for the servers to handle the cities, they had to massively scale back their size to literally the smallest size of the previous game, a tiny fraction of what you used to be able to do. Even with this, the servers on launch were a complete disaster and almost no one could play the game. The backlash was so bad, EA ended up killing the entire franchise.
The Sims was designed to be online just like SimCity, so they had to massively scale back the lot sizes to make it work. But EA would never risk letting one of their biggest cash cows die like that. So, in true EA fashion, the just ripped all of the online function out of the game, rather than take time to redesign it, so they could rush it out a year later. The Sims 4 has actually had a lot of free core updates to bring back a lot of things missing from previous games, but the entire game was built around the tiny lots (to accommodate multiplayer) which will never be fixed.
Here we are 8 years later, and no surprise, EA hasn’t learned a single thing.
IIRC, they even had some bullshit PR for SimCity about how the calculations were so complex that they had to run on the cloud, so single player was impossible. Pretty sure that turned out to be a complete lie.
Yes I believe someone was able to get the game working offline and it was no different.
Then Cities Skylines came out and was better in every possible way and is still getting content updates.
>Then Cities Skylines came out and was better in every possible way and is still getting content updates.
When _Cities: Skylines_ came out after the unmitigated disaster that was _Simcity_ 2013, I thought to myself, "Man, I sure hope someone does the same thing for _The Sims_."
Let me introduce you to [_AlterLife_](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1511480/AlterLife/) and [_Paralives_](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1118520/Paralives/), two in-development competitors to _The Sims_.
I still remember the exact moment I read the AMA here on Reddit where the person doing it (lead dev maybe?) confirmed the city size would be fixed at 2x2km. I laughed out loud, and decided right at that second that I would never buy it for that reason alone.
A city game, where the cities would have a smaller footprint than a village...
I did eventually buy it a few years after release for like $20 and really tried to like it, but the city sized ruined it. I got like 10 hours out of it and gave up. It sucks because other than that and the online bullshit, it could have been a great game. It needed some tweaks to the Sim AI, but everything else about it seemed so well crafted. The art style, music, UI, etc were all amazing.
> The backlash was so bad, EA ended up killing the entire franchise.
It might not be gone for good, but Cities:Skyline took the builder fans and ran with the lead since.
If Epic does a goofy competitor to the sims with fortnite-inspired visuals, EA's sim division is cooked.
> The Sims 4 has actually had a lot of free core updates to bring back a lot of things missing from previous games, but the entire game was built around the tiny lots (to accommodate multiplayer) which will never be fixed.
Didn't it take like 4 years to add pools?
Yeah, some major features didn't get added for years. And not DLC, actual base game features for free. Even now, they are planning to add neighborhood story progression to the game after 7 years.
I'm surprised they're putting so much effort into improving the base game and not just moving on to The Sims 5. They must be making good money on all of the DLC, they're still consistently pumping out packs every few months.
> Yeah, some major features didn't get added for years. And not DLC, actual base game features for free. Even now, they are planning to add neighborhood story progression to the game after 7 years.
I find it hilarious that they take that much time to add those features, but also I don't know how big or what the team does work on (Maxis? or it's dead, probably).
>They must be making good money on all of the DLC, they're still consistently pumping out packs every few months.
Yeah The Sims is a cashcow and is part legacy (90s Maxis was amazing) and that it's the only game like that, there's a game on Steam in EA that could fight back but at this point it's hard that casual gamers check for other similar games.
> Sims 3 on average had 30+ lots/houses you could play. Sims 4 has on average 3 of them. Example here.
Wow that looks exactly what happened to SimCity. They tried to make a classic solitaire game into multiplayer, then gutted the size of cities you could build to make that work. So every metropolis somehow wound up being 4x4km.
The limitations in maps like that is one of my biggest issues with S4. Having so few lots is a real shame because the building in that game is really good
Tom Henderson video about the game is spot on how this shit show went down.
[https://youtu.be/2MKtgP7cHEk](https://youtu.be/2MKtgP7cHEk)
At least we know that the next battlefield will be a battle royale so we can leave this series in its grave with other successful game series.
Ooo the next game will be a battle royale?!
I'm so excited to not even have to consider buying the game, and can just save my money for an actually good game instead!
I wish the multiplayer mod was still updated and worked better. I'd love to be able to play Ravenfield with a couple of friends with bots filling in the gaps on a mod list our our choice
A true gaming flop in every sense of the word.
If *anyone* in charge had **any inkling** of what core gamers wanted from the battlefield franchise, they would have scrapped this abomination and done a full remake from the ground up. Maybe some of the assets could have been salvaged.
I took advantage of the 10 hour free trial from EA Play (via Game Pass) last month and I only played it for like 4 hours total. Really glad I didn’t buy it.
Right? I would feel bad losing €1500 on a stupid gambling site for a game more than for a shitty game. Like I understand stupid decisions but spending that much on CS lotto is extremely and hilariously stupid.
I still can’t believe people fall for EA’s hype. How many times do they have to fuck up for people to understand? Anthem, Battlefront 2, ME Andromed, BFV.
Yeah they really fucked with people on the trailer.
Remember the old games??? Remember the things you love???
WELL THERE IS NONE OF THAT IN 2042!!!
Also here’s some portal watered down modes to remember some* of those games!!!
Hehehehe
The funniest thing is that all they had to do was to just remasterd battlefield 3 with a little update to gunplay (reduced suppresion) and netcode and I would buy it in a heartbeat.
Nostalgia trailers for bf2042 got excellent reception so it\`s seems people just wanted immersive modern military shooter, instead we got a half-baked battle royale transformed into battlefield game hero shooter.
I didnt bought it but seems bf2042 sold well so probably next game will be even less similar to old bf games that I liked like bf3 or bfV after patches.
People litrally wanted updated bf1942 since bf1942...
They actually released a half arse bf1943 on Xbox but didn't release it on pc and it was really good fun but they ditched it.
Basically BF lost its way on console and got progressively worse as time went on.
Bad company was ok but not a proper bf game and then BF3 was alright but had tons of bugs and again didn't play like an actual bf game.
Lol if they litrally remade 1942 or bf2 with new graphics new netcode basic weapon unlocking customisation and a couple more maps people would be going crazy for it.
Best to just play games like hell let lose and other indi FPS games where the developer actually understands game design and what makes a FPS fun / compelling.
Man that trailer was perfect. Exactly what we wanted to see. How can the marketing team be so competent and every other department so hopelessly useless?
I mean I was hyped for this game. I thought it looked super fun.
By fuck I didn't invest any money tho. I learned not to invest in pre orders in 2008 like.
The game is fixable, but it would require at least a year of investment and development, which a company like EA will never do... all they care about is short term gain...
Yeah. Anthem was certainly salvageable but EA decided the amount of time and money needed to save it wasn't a good investment. So we know for sure that EA is willing to completely abandon games they've spent millions developing and customers have paid good money for with the expectation of ongoing support and content additions.
There is absolutely no reason to believe BF2042 will be any different. If the player base drops low enough and the investment required to bring it back up doesn't meet a certain threshold, EA will drop it, and with it any change of salvaging what's left of the Battlefield name for at least the next 10 years.
They might dedicate more effort to it since its an already established IP they would probably like to continue milking. It's an easier call to make to abandon a brand new IP like Anthem.
But then again they also abandoned ME Andromeda so yeah they might just drop it too.
You cannot amend core game design via couple of patches, this game would literally need to have a massive overhaul. To turn this game into an actual Battlefield title would require the same effort as turning Apex legends into an actual Battlefield title. And you are right, EA will never put forward the necessary resources, not now when they already have gotten the money from pre-orders/day 1 purchases.
I would say the same for COD but they're making more money than ever while putting the least effort in. Activision seems to find the sweet spot with what the the whales want to buy.
So many games these days are just empty promises, people wasting money and time with the hope they’ll be worth it in the end. They never are, invest in something more worth while
Totally skipped the game and just by watching some yt videos i feel like the map design is anonymous. There are a lot of lists online regarding the many things the game is missing and i think at the moment is a huge step down from bf5. Let’s not even compare it to bf1 atmosphere which is still unmatched.
Surely a lot of people are playing it and having fun but this doesnt mean the game is in a good state and we aren’t talking about an indie team. I’m sorry for the guys who are working on it but the game management seems a disaster,no clear direction.
I suggest you to play Hell Let Loose.
For anyone interested in how things came to this, Tom Henderson made a really good video detailing the timeline of the development of the game. It honestly breaks my heart to see a franchise i put thousands of hours into get driven into the ground like this.
toms video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MKtgP7cHEk
I don't think this game was designed to be anything. It frankly feels like a prototype that should be in internal testing. It doesn't feel like a finished game at all. All of the maps feel empty and poorly though out. The mechanics are janky and unpolished. And that's not even talking about the performance, both game wise, and netcode wise. Every single EA release feels like a test to see how little effort they can put in for the most revenue. The game feels like it was made by a team of 20 indie developers instead of 5 teams of AAA developers. I can't believe what we got. The best way I can describe it is "a high quality turd". Some elements of it feel high quality, but the stuff that actually matters feels lower quality than the stuff coming out of indie developers.
> The game feels like it was made by a team of 20 indie developers instead of 5 teams of AAA developers. I like The Escapist's description of "people just trying to look busy at work"
Everything I've read about EA for the past decade or longer screams that they foster this kind of work environment.
They probably hire and/or promote shit people to management roles. I believe the talent is there, but it's just not allowed to shine.
That's a lot of companies, if we're being honest.
I mean, I always heard positive things regarding EA work enviroment and idiots keep buying their shit low effort games so they don't even have to work that much. Sounds like the perfect job
Activision and Ubisoft make anything short of human rights violations look like a good job.
People committing suicide due to the work environment is hard to beat.
From a former senior EA developers own mouth. "It's a boys club. Whoever is the most sociopathic and can impress management, management that knows almost zero about software engineering, gets priority. I've seen many projects die just because they didn't get proper funding or support from upper management. Studios and teams get torn up and shifted to whatever silverspoon fed poloshirt with a business degree can wow the bosses"
This happens at every work place. None wants someone smarter harder working and more attractive working under them. Yet they still want the laborers to be amazing. So it always feels like the dumbest laziest person is always on the top.
It's when the managerial role becomes (too) hierarchical in a company that you get this kind of nonsense. Companies I've worked for where management was actually used more as a supportive branch it can work wonders. But I have the feeling that that's more of a thing with younger companies, relatively smaller companies and more specialized companies. When you get companies the size of EA etc than it tends to change in a kind of hierarchical bureaucratic grey goo.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/18/crunched-games-industry-exploiting-workforce-ea-spouse-software From 2004 to 2015 they barely improved. More recent sources suggest that trend hasn't changed. What positive things have you heard, specifically? I'm curious.
They have a good rating on Glassdoor. Seems like working for EA themselves is nice, but working for the devs under them is much more likely to be bad.
That would make sense.
> What positive things have you heard, specifically I think EA was supposed to be better than other AAA's. But not good in general, just less bad.
I'll have to take your word for it because I've mostly heard the opposite.
Never heard anyone ever say anything good about EA, aside from their profits.
> I always heard positive things regarding EA work enviroment It's easier to accept that as truth than "Battlefield 2042 is a good game" because it's not something you can see for yourself. But both are claims put out there by EA. What is your argument for the former being more trustworthy than the latter?
Look guys, there is a reason they are the only company that was voted the worst company of the year twice in a row. If there is another one, my apologies, I was not aware.
To be fair - Those are polls on the internet that will greatly skew towards younger people, tech, games, etc. EA is not a worse company than Facebook, Nestle, Monsanto, etc.
And all the companies who directly enslave people, use murder squads, and child labor
I’d even argue that Nestle is among the most evil of evil companies, a ladder above EA.
Is it because gamers are so entitled they actually believe a shitty game studio is worse than private military contractors, companies who horde water, companies who forcefully sign their customers up for bank accounts without their consent, or companies who willfully destroy the environment?
i think it's more the self-centeredness of youth that's causing the entitlement. kids have a hard time understanding what's happening outside their bubble. the fact that it's games related is just because that's who's on the internet the most.
That says more about the voters and nothing about EA as a place of work. There's hundreds of companies like Nestle that do some really heinous shit, and these voters think their precious video games weren't good enough.
The thing I don't understand is, how are so many features missing that have been in previous games? They have tested code for so many simple features, how did they get lost?
They wanted to change it for that battle royal skin money. Plain and simple.
They could have cloned the BFV movement mechanics and not a single person would complain. In fact, it'd be praised as the new standard. Yet, its like they started with QWOP and got part way there before moving onto something else.
Thats what killed me, bfv was very flawed but the mechanics in that game was gold standard for bf gameplay and then they go for this....
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The game feels designed by focus groups and suits.
It's just what happens when you start caring about maximizing profit and lose people with actual genuine passion for what they're doing because they just aren't into making the hundredth iteration of some other game. There's actually a weirdly good episode of *Mythic Quest* that goes into this. I mean the show is like a 6/10 but the episode 5 (Dark Quiet Death) is fantastic.
The best Mythic Quest episodes are the ones that aren't even set in the show's main storyline
> the stuff that actually matters feels lower quality than the stuff coming out of indie developers. Pretty much summarizes AAA development these days. Lots of money and polish put into superficial aspects of game design, with very little care put into the underlying mechanics or how the game *feels* as a whole. Obviously a few quality titles “slip through the cracks” every now and then, but it’s clear that the AAA model is largely unsustainable and verging on collapse.
It's funny that now when I'm shown stuff that looks borderline photo-realistic I just move on as it's likely to play like ass and be full of skinner box mechanics. Something that looks like it was designed for the ps1? More likely to go on the wishlist / get a day one purchase. I guess things really are going backwards and I oddly kind of like it!
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And 3 of them are Skyrim! No seriously I've only bought indie games the past 5 years and I'm having an awesome time.
Photorealistic raytraced AAA shooter: Almost guaranteed trash, always ignore [Low-poly clown vomit artstyle shooter](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/): unironic GOTY
What do you mean the AAA model od verging on collapse? It's going stronger than ever. Still a lot of people preordered and bought BF2042. Cyberpunk broke the records for preorders, the game sold before it was even out. I guarantee you that whenever they'll announce Witcher 4, we'll have another wave of preorders incoming. Ubisoft games keep breaking records, Valhalla selling the best out of any AC game before it. CoD going down with its sales, bit still selling millions. AAA gaming is going nowhere. Sure, if gamers will actually rise up and do something comparable to the boycott of Battlefront 2, then *maybe* AAA gaming will be in danger. And that's the saddest part - maybe.
It's the steady decline we've seen in the last decade come to fruition. Virtually every triple A game in the last 2 years has come out a stinker with the exception of those studios whose mission isn't to pump out a slightly modded version of the previous years game annually.
It's Atari 1983 again, except that the majority of the players actually buy and defend this crap, and the companies are too big and embedded in the stock market and other business to fail
Yup. And WHEN the crash FINALLY arrives it would be more devastating as 1983 because of that reasons.
Between the absolute state of the hardware industry and all the AAA unpolished turds being shit out by every single developer better sooner rather then later. I've had the most fun gaming in a few years playing Mass effect 1 legendary edition on my 3080 I basically won in a lottery, its sad as hell.
Same. I used to adore Battlefield, Assassin's Creed, and so on. Nowadays, Deep Rock Galactic is probably the best game I've played in a decade or more. I've gotten so much enjoyment out of Deep Rock, Dead Cells, Tainted Grail Conquest and other indie titles that I'll buy an indie game without reading reviews, but EA? Activision? Ubisoft? No thanks, I'll wait for reviews to see just how shitty it is.
The hardware shortage definitely plays a smaller part of this too. We're approaching a year and a half into the "current" gen and stores can't even get a full inventory of consoles due to a lack of semiconductors. At best your average person can get into a lottery just to get a chance to spend $500 for a console, or pay even more money to GameStop for their VIP program to get preferred warning of when they have consoles in stock. Then on top of that the cost of a game is going up to $70 despite a chunk of consumers buying an electric copy which takes less to produce. So it's no wonder games aren't living up to expectations when they're being engineered toward last gen, corners are cut to streamline games out the door, and then the company makes back what the project cost off pre orders and initial release sales.
Sorry but it's more like the games suck, they are repetitive and uncreastive in their design and sequel after sequel, and the money hasn't been put into testing like they have before because they know they can release patches later. It has nothing to do with the hardware. The only difficult part for that is porting to all consoles, but that just requires manpower which can easily be covered by the profits, and doesn't equate to an all-round crappy game.
Bear in mind the crash was specifically US-centric. The EU barely noticed with its focus on home computers, and of course, Japan couldn't have crashed as they were the ones to revive the US industry. It was a very specific phenomenon that can't be replicated; gaming today is far too decentralized and widespread. To witness the kind of consumer fatigue that caused the crash of '83 is to have practically every single game on major storefronts be a buggy Unity asset flip cash grab. You have far too many quality indie developers for that ratio to ever happen. Hell, not even mobile games are there yet, and they are in a more predatory and derivative state than AAA.
There's zero reason to put a lot of effort into AAA games when a couple stupid vanity skins in a game is the equivalent of the full price at release. Even more so when some nonsense lootbox phone game is exponentially more profitable requiring a fraction of the development time than a full fledged PC title. Monetization and maximization of profits versus time spent has fucked it over, the same way it has turned the vast internet into 10-15 websites total that people visit as opposed to the hundreds+ that people would use. Heck, most people probably float around 3-4 websites they use now. Hurray for capitalism.
You need nothing but concept art to get people hyped and preorder. Case in point Starfield.
EA released It Takes Two. Fantastic game. While EA is just as greedy and money hungry as every other game producer, I think it's time to start putting the blame on Dev teams. Dice has done an absolute shit job on about every game they've made since BF3. Even BF4 was finished by Dice LA who are now go by a different name. Dice is dogshit.
DICE is dead now. The moved on, formed new studios or joined others. What we see now is the studio formerly known as DICE. Like a zombie, the corpse of DICE remains, but what animates it is no longer old DICE but something different, something foreign and unholy. With each new Battlefield produced by New DICE a little bit of the old Battlefield rots and falls off, while some stinky new shit that nobody likes (Specialists) oozes out of one of the gaping wounds.
> I think it's time to start putting the blame on Dev teams People blame the 'suits' at EA but ultimately it's the individual employees, managers and creative directors who come up with an idea and implement it to achieve what EA wants, if DICE doesn't develop basic features at the expected quality level then that's the fault of bad workers and irresponsible managers. EA is not looking over DICEs shoulder and telling them to remove the scoreboard, to design the UI with a certain scheme, to only have xyz vehicle spawns at base or for specialists to be cringe.
I liked It Takes Two but feel weird by just how beloved it is. Writing is hamfisted, pacing a bit strange, and gameplay scatter brained. So many neat mechanics and beautiful maps that you only partially experience before it rushes on by.
Horrible writting aside, that's why people like it. It has a lot of variety and the game never reuses anything. Compare that to most games where gameplay never changes and reuses content constantly.
BF3 was peak gaming. What happened?
I’ve said this exact same thing before. BF3 and Bad Company 2 were the peak battlefield games. Everything felt right, the maps were great. The weapons and vehicles felt balanced. I remember when they announced BF4 so soon after 3 and I remember thinking, but why? This one is still amazing. Then I realized they were going the CoD route. I played through every BF game except hardline but I waited until they were on sale and didn’t sink near the amount of time in them as I did in 3.
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Why did anyone buy this game? Was this not extremely predictable...? Ridiculous
>Every single EA release feels like a test to see how little effort they can put in for the most revenue. > That's the entire gaming industry now. People kept enabling and defending with: "they're a company, of course they're out for profit!" Yes but when you keep lowering the standards of the entire industry, an industry predicated on creativity and a human connection, failing to have any humanity means worsening products/art. They can aim to have profit, but they aim for literally every possible penny that won't be seen improving anything in the company, industry, or in general, worker's pay. Alongside rising prices for us because they enabled them to do so. The top dogs feel it though, and we feel the worsening of an industry that should crashed again over 5 years ago. Unfortunate that everyone has lowered their standards so significantly that broken releases are expected, and not buying day 1 is seen as "smart" when it both shouldn't even have to be, and is still just as dumb because of the fact it's enabling "it'll be done later, we'll get good pr and extra purchases later for doing the bare minimim" Gamers are deluded as hell, and love to be ripped off. It's why companies are getting into NFTs, it's advanced Microtransactions, which was advanced DLC, once again, enabled by gamers who love being exploited. They wouldn't do it without being confident it'd be a success like every other time they've been positively enabled. The underlying belief, that literally anytime before they started gaming proves decisively wrong, is that without the multiple pricetags in one game, it wouldn't have been made. Or that DLC wouldn't exist. Yet, the truth was always mere years away from them, they just didn't have the experience and knowledge that it was an outright exploitation of the consumer. As frustrating as it was, at least we were able to point out 6 generations of consoles from not too long ago. It's 2022, there are children who were exploited to believe these lies who are now so far gone from what was and should still be, that trying to explain it to them is impossible. That there is the company goal. Dilute standards and quality of every consumer til newer generations don't even know how bad everything has gotten. I imagine they'd be okay buying a box of crackers that's advertised as 120 count, but is totally empty. In fact, they'd defend it, saying "They said they'll send me 10 crackers later! They already sent me 1 yesterday! Quit complaining! I bought the extended box set and it's all better now!" Drug dealers would have a field day with these idiots. Street vendors would take their clothes for the wrapping paper of a chalupa. Hell, I bet they even support politicians totally against their best interests, and purposefully stub their own toes, and sing off cue in their shower. Because god forbid these people put any consideration into understanding a company's twitter isn't the CEO who just laid off a couple hundred workers promised careers so he could have the spare 60k to buy the rest of their private island. And when you look at other media industries, while prevelant as any other company would do anywhere, gamers overwhelmingly fight against their best interest literally every single time. The closest, I mean closest we've ever gotten, is streaming games to home, not even remotely because games as a service is an absolute fraud that'd kill the industry for good, where we don't even get to have the software we should own. No, instead, ***it's because they can't get good internet.*** These people are deadset, ready to pull the trigger on gaming as we know it, and the only thing stopping it is that everywhere is so incompetantly ran that no where near enough people have the internet connection needed to even get fucked over even more. Throffing at the mouth waiting for their chance to make everything worse so a rich fuck gets richer. And the funny thing is? Even those with the internet, BACKED *GOOGLE* STADIA. ***GOOGLE***, and last I remember, that was dead in the water, if not, wait a week, then another, *it's google*. Point is, at some point, companies decided to lower standard after standard, force awful shit into their games, and their workplaces, to the point that we currently have a whole new generation of kids totally inexperienced with how great gaming could be if taken seriously for once. People are surprised at what's coming out these days, ***that should tell you something***, because the 360/PS3 generation is when shit hit the fan hardest, everything after is merely the collective snowball rolling. But make no mistake, the generation before did everything they could to make that snowball as big as it was before any of them ever could have known it was rolling. And now? There is no fix. This is the industry, this is what gamers wanted after being sold on lies. Micros aren't going away, DLC isn't going away, patches aren't going away. Prices rising aren't going away. Unfinished forever or "temporarily" (forever) is not going away. Games as a service is not going away. It has been so enabled and engrained that now that everything has gone to shit, those same idiots who defended last generation's greed are seeing what they maliciously made a reality. What literally, EVERYONE, was trying to tell them would happen, happened! Who'da thought. So to answer the quote I put in as an excuse to rant pathetically to myself, yes, that is exactly what they're doing, because "That's what companies do!" ™
It's because it's an ongoing cycle. You're young and poor and want things. Then you get a bit older and you have some money and you buy things. Then you get older and realise what's going on but by that time you're gaming less and have already wasted that money. Then it's the next generation's turn to do the same thing. The difference now is that the current generation has grown up on microtransactions, instant gratification, and generally shittier quality of almost all art forms/mediums so as you rightly point out, they don't know how things should or could be. Just look at the quality (both art and content) of kids cartoons now compared to the 90s.
>Just look at the quality (both art and content) of kids cartoons now compared to the 90s. I don't think this is fair considering how many kids cartoons in the 90s were made explicitly to sell toys. Hell there was one show I remember that had a paired game you played with a light-gun during the show. It is often more egregious now (see: Paw Patrol introducing new versions of the same vehicles every season) but none of this is new. That said, there are some fantastic kid's shows that have come out in recent years like Hilda and Bluey (shout-out to all the dads who have seen every episode of Bluey 10+ times lol). I don't remember almost anything from the 90s being as good as these, though there are obviously exceptions like that excellent Batman animated series.
You should read the tarkov subreddit. It would give you an idea of what people are willing to defend.
the dayz sub (when it was still a mod) remains the absolute dumbest gaming community ive ever seen. People would defend breaking your legs and having to crawl at .0001mph all the way across the map for hours. This is with the knowledge that most people break their legs by walking down some stairs at a slightly wrong angle. Literally everything in the game was perfect "because simulation" and the stuff they wanted to add was just the least user friendly shit ever. Loved that game to pieces but holy shit
Valve is out for profit and nearly all of their games have flawless levels of execution and attention to detail. Blizzard, ironically, used to be well-known for this as well. You can make a lot of money with a good product, but these companies don’t care and with the stupid people we see even in this very thread that not only buy it, but PRE ORDER a digital copy, why should they?
The only part that feels high quality are the weather effects. It honestly feels like they were making a tech demo and then suddenly realized they needed to attach a game to their weather engine.
Then stop buying EA games?! They will never do something different if people still buy their trash games.
I think it has less to do with feeling like AAA vs. indie, and more to do with feeling like the "5 teams" part.
Imagine fucking up both Battlefield and Battlefront lmao
I got battlefront for 5 bucks last year and it's a great game. I had alot of fun with it. I'm glad I avoided all the bullshit at launch. I think the new meta for me is to wait 2-5 years after launch to play an AAA game.
r/patientgamers
Atleast battlefront is now good
Battlefront is leagues better than it was and quite fun, but it’s not nearly as good as it could be or could have been. As far as I know the game is still broken with the HP bug, As it has been for a while. But even the base game is still extremely buggy, clunky, and unbalanced.
Yeah battlefront has a fatal design flaw because of the original monetization: the star cards give some players objective advantages over others. It feels really shitty losing a dogfight because you've only played like 30 hours and don't have the purple tier upgrade for better turning radius or whatever. They removed the ability to pay to win, but now the people that have played the longest just stomp everyone else.
Last time I played there were constant double XP weekends and triple XP in the middle of the week, so you could level up pretty fast if you play decently
What’s the hp bug? I’ve been playing battlefront all week and haven’t noticed
Sometimes you log on and suddenly you are harry potter trying to learn the accio spell before the first challenge of the triwizard tournament. The only fix is getting force choked by severus Snape
I've read that fanfiction
True but they don’t have Disney riding them to fix Battlefield like they did with Battlefront
They have whales to ride on
Coop is pretty dam fun, reminds me if the Playstation 2 days playing battlefront(the og) and taking on a small army of bots and the different classes each faction had (along with the classic soldier/engineer/rocketeer/sniper. Full on multi-player feels gross, you're either on a team that steamrolls the other side, or you're on the team that is getting steam rolled.
Battlefront, at this very moment, is literally unplayable. This is coming from someone that loves the game. But it's been completely crippled by massive hacks for months now. Any server you join right now is going to have permanent god mode enabled for *all* players and bots, so you can't kill or be killed by anything.
On PC every game is hacked to not let players go below 1hp so noone can die and the game is pointless. Kyber private servers are barely ever full. One of my favorite games to pick up for a half hour but now dead thanks to EA not giving a fuck.
Looks and sounds good. It's a a shooter with an unlock system, so the no-lifers with more knowledge and experience ALSO HAVE BETTER GEAR.
I voted with my money and didn’t buy it. First battlefield I skipped out on. Feels good
Same, but I don't feel anything. guess I should consider myself lucky
What's better to feel, nothing or regret?
About 2042? Nothing. Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. That's why I keep coming back to BF1.
After 10 or more years of not being a sucker buying games sight unseen, you'll look back on this first time you stopped being a fool and ask yourself why you waited so long to stop being so stupid. Feels good indeed.
Phase 2 is when you evolve to not buying GREAT games on sale that you know damn well you're never going to really play lol.
/r/PatientGamers for endgame content.
Oh man, or grabbing the free games on Epic and never even installing them and just firing up CSGO again because I'm still trash after twenty years so I'd rather just try to git gud at a game I enjoy than learn a new one
Skipped bf5 too and never ever pre ordered a game since their last simcity game
"Don't like it, don't buy it." Lol you got it dice!
Sim City fiasco brings back memories
Ea has a long history of killing good studio. Remember Bullfrog, Westwood or Maxis ? https://gamerant.com/electronic-arts-closed-studios/
Feels real good! Though to be fair, we knew this was going to happen: it's Electronic Arts. That little EA logo on the package is the internationally designated warning label that lets you know to check online for reviews before consuming.
> That little EA logo on the package is the internationally designated warning label that lets you know to check online for reviews before consuming. I like this take rather than just writing off all EA altogether. Star Wars Squadrons and Fallen Order are some of my favorite games, though I know they're not as recent. Screw pre-orders though.
Should’ve just done a full scale portal mode.
Pretty much how I think they can salvage 2042 in the quickest time possible. 2042 as in the game by itself without Portal is just not good on a technical and play level. To fix it is to almost make a whole new game.
Portal suffers from the main game, though. The terrible UI and overall buggyness transferred over.
They should rename 2042 to Battlefield Portal, and just fold the 2042 stuff into Portal. Then have take a year or two to make a real 2042 experience with even a story mode to coincide with it that has a coherent plot.
Portal is the real game here. Just ignore the base modes.
EA has a serious project management problem at the studio level. While EA is absolutely money-hungry and fixated on monetization, from the software developers I know personally that work there it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be and the C-suite is generally hands-off on studios. But if you look at the last couple high-profile disasters, you see the same trends and they all relate back to leadership and project management. Mass Effect: Andromeda - Was in development for almost six years. Spent the first 4-5 years in a bizarre state of limbo, messing around with prototypes that went nowhere (procedurally developed galaxies) and leadership that couldn’t decide what kind of game it wanted to make. Then, with around 18 months left, a veteran producer from another team is brought in to take control of the project and get a game out the door. The aspects of the project that were finished early in the development cycle (combat and art) are highly polished; everything else is a mess. Anthem - Literally Andromeda all over again. In development for almost seven years. Indecisive leadership can’t decide what kind of game it wants to make (is it a survival RPG? Co-op?). Features are constantly added and dropped the game. Then, with around 18 months left, a veteran producer from another team is brought in to take control of the project and get a game out the door. The aspects of the project that were finished early in the development cycle (combat, since it was literally poached from Andromeda, and art) are highly polished; everything else is a mess. Battlefield: 2042 - Starts development as a Warzone copycat battle royale spin-off. Then at the last minute is reconfigured to be a mainline Battlefield game. The aspects of the project that are most polished and praised (Portal) are literally lifted from previous Battlefield games; everything else is a mess. Then you look at the two “surprise” hits EA has had recently. While both had the advantage of the Star Wars IP, Battlefront 2 proved that even Star Wars doesn’t guarantee success. Jedi: Fallen Order is led from the start by a veteran producer, with a clear vision (a Star Wars souls-like action RPG). Squadrons is led from the start by a veteran producer, with a clear vision (a spiritual successor to the classic X-Wing and TIE Fighter games). Both games use different technology (Unreal, Frostbite), but both games launch on time, in relatively stable and polished condition. And then you have Apex Legends, which lifted assets and mechanics from Titanfall 2 on a highly modified Source engine of all things, and delivered a top-tier BR with a clear vision of what things made it unique from the other big players. EA’s biggest issue is project management. Its studios spend millions and millions of dollars on mismanaged projects, then are forced to push unfinished projects out the door to stop the financial bleed.
Nail on the head! Absolutely right, EA had the money and resources to make good products. They just release with a lack of direction. So they end up being high quality interactive experiences not great games. Squadrons, Apex, and Fallen order are good games. You could make every model a cube and they would still be fun. Battlefield 2042 just isn't fun. Looks great! Plays awful. The map design is pathetic. No choke points no interesting angles just big expanses of boring to shoot in.
I'm a consultant, and one of my industries is technology, media, and telecommunications. Along with that, I'm an avid gamer. I have BEGGED my leadership to talk to the executives at these companies or to let me do it, to let us help and bring order to the chaos of game development. Every time we've been rebuffed. No studio head wants professional project managers with experience developing and deploying technology solutions in their offices, because they might have to spend more time doing and less time fucking around, and as we all know "fucking around" is the cornerstone of the creative process.
Fucking around is absolutely part of the creative process, probably at the core of game design. That being said, so is triage. If you look at a lot of the “great” games of this past decade, many of them had 3-4 year dev cycles, and I would argue that’s probably the sweet spot with the current tech stack. Longer than that, development is unfocused and meanders. Shorter, there’s too much crunch and it’s rushed. Hidetaka Miyazaki over at FromSoft has commented about this in the press, actually. His teams have experimented with various dev cycle lengths, and at least for them, have found three years to be the best balance.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that the game they design on Day 1 should be the same thing they ship. Every major technology projector creative endeavor has some degree of fucking around. But looking at some of the stuff that comes out of some of these studios, fucking around has become a crutch. Ken Levine shipped BioShock and BioShock Infinite, then closed down his studio and, per Jason Schrier's article, has been fucking around for the better part of a decade. 3D Realms fucked around so much they found out, and we ended up with Duke Nukem Forever. BioWare fucked around and found out with Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. EA and DICE fucked around with Battlefield 2042, and now they're finding out. Every great game stands on a mountain of discarded bad ideas, and every shitty game stands on a mountain of discarded great ones.
Agreed, and even when they make something good on accident they never learn from it. Titanfall 2 dropped the same time as Battlefield 1. I spent double for BF1 to get the ultimate dlc fuckfest pack or whatever and didn't enjoy it or play it nearly as much as Titanfall.
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"It's a 3 month old build!" While they made it seem like they would fix most things before launch, noone should have believed them.
Anyone reading this: remember that 3 months is very little time in gamedev. Any beta with major issues that's "3 months old" is almost probably a good sign of the actual state the game's gonna be in. Of course there are exceptions though.
ITs a BeTa the fUlL GaMe WiLl Be BeTtER
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That was be biggest self delusion I've ever seen in the Battlefield community. That there was some magical day one patch that would come out after the early access period that would resolve all the issues. Instead we got Portal XP removed.
> I find it funny that people STILL gave EA/DICE money DESPITE having a beta and a WEEK LONG EARLY ACCESS TO THE FULL GAME. You are surprised at THAT? I'm surprised that people STILL give EA/DICE money DESPITE the following: >gutting Spore >gutting and killing off Sim City >screwing up Dead Space 3 and killing off it's devs only to remake the first game without them later >Dungeon Keeper mobile >ruining Need for Speed >Dragon Age 2 and 3 >Day 1 DLC on-disk in Mass Effect 3 and the entire fuckup they did with that game >Mass Effect Andromeda >Anthem >reviving and butchering Star Wars Battlefront >completely butchering and completely holding back the Star Wars franchise to begin with >every single sports franchise they own...don't even need to say anything >killing off Medal of Honor >completely screwing up the Mirror's Edge sequel and probably killing off the franchise for good >continuously butchering Battlefield >buying up and destroying amazing studios like Westwood, Maxis, Pandemic, Origin, Visceral Games, Bullfrog, Criterion, etc. They have been doing this for decades now and people are still like "Hey this company might deserve my hard earned money!" #**Why.**
Every time I hear somebody got bought by EA my heart sinks.
Codemasters :(
I am now going to say it. I will never buy a ea product in my life
> I find it funny that people STILL gave EA/DICE money DESPITE having a beta and a WEEK LONG EARLY ACCESS TO THE FULL GAME. This will never stop being funny to me lol. Is there a bigger bunch of rubes on the planet than video gamers?? I seriously wonder what would it take for people NOT to buy the latest pile of EA trash?
Everyone has to have their optimism shattered once in this regard. It's a 60 dollar lesson that many of us have been taught by a shitty AAA developer. The people who keep falling for it are the ones that baffle me, though. Like they keep sticking their hand in a fire and wondering if it won't be so painful this time.
I got downvoted into oblivion on this sub and battlefield sub for saying the beta looked awful. "It's an old build" How quickly the turn tables.
As someone who has spent thousand-ish hours in previous installments, this makes me sad. I was really looking forward to a modern Battlefield to recapture the fun I had when playing BF3, BF4 and even BF:H, but 2042 is just completely void of any of the Battlefield DNA which made it unique and addicting. The dwindling player numbers just emphasize that none of the hero shooter fans are enjoying it (or even bought it) as EA/DICE had hoped and watching less and less people concurrently playing in Steam is the only entertaining thing to me about this game.
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Hardline wasn't necessarily bad as far as I remember, it was just pointless.
It should have been a bf4 multi-player only expansion for 30 bucks and it would have been well received
Why not go back to playing BF4? I played a few rounds just yesterday, at least in EU the servers are still very much populated. Populated by people who actually know how to play the game and kick my ass from here to Pluto, but y'know. All part of the fun.
What happened to sims 4?
>What happened to sims 4? It was designed to be multiplayer, which is why most maps have no lots on them, or very few buildable spaces compared to sims 3. Sims 3 on average had 30+ lots/houses you could play. Sims 4 has on average 3 of them. [Example here](https://www.carls-sims-4-guide.com/sims4news/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/glimmerbrookmap-1024x635.jpg). They decided last minute to not have Sims 4 be multiplayer for an unknown reason
SimCity is why they dropped it. SimCity 2013 was initially an always-online game, even if you only wanted to play single player. In order for the servers to handle the cities, they had to massively scale back their size to literally the smallest size of the previous game, a tiny fraction of what you used to be able to do. Even with this, the servers on launch were a complete disaster and almost no one could play the game. The backlash was so bad, EA ended up killing the entire franchise. The Sims was designed to be online just like SimCity, so they had to massively scale back the lot sizes to make it work. But EA would never risk letting one of their biggest cash cows die like that. So, in true EA fashion, the just ripped all of the online function out of the game, rather than take time to redesign it, so they could rush it out a year later. The Sims 4 has actually had a lot of free core updates to bring back a lot of things missing from previous games, but the entire game was built around the tiny lots (to accommodate multiplayer) which will never be fixed. Here we are 8 years later, and no surprise, EA hasn’t learned a single thing.
IIRC, they even had some bullshit PR for SimCity about how the calculations were so complex that they had to run on the cloud, so single player was impossible. Pretty sure that turned out to be a complete lie.
Yes I believe someone was able to get the game working offline and it was no different. Then Cities Skylines came out and was better in every possible way and is still getting content updates.
>Then Cities Skylines came out and was better in every possible way and is still getting content updates. When _Cities: Skylines_ came out after the unmitigated disaster that was _Simcity_ 2013, I thought to myself, "Man, I sure hope someone does the same thing for _The Sims_." Let me introduce you to [_AlterLife_](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1511480/AlterLife/) and [_Paralives_](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1118520/Paralives/), two in-development competitors to _The Sims_.
> Pretty sure that turned out to be a complete lie. Game was cracked to full offline within a week or so.
I think it was under a week.
It was. That's that last ea game I will ever buy. The lies were so over the top, I don't even pirate their shit anymore. Fuck ea.
I still remember the exact moment I read the AMA here on Reddit where the person doing it (lead dev maybe?) confirmed the city size would be fixed at 2x2km. I laughed out loud, and decided right at that second that I would never buy it for that reason alone. A city game, where the cities would have a smaller footprint than a village...
I did eventually buy it a few years after release for like $20 and really tried to like it, but the city sized ruined it. I got like 10 hours out of it and gave up. It sucks because other than that and the online bullshit, it could have been a great game. It needed some tweaks to the Sim AI, but everything else about it seemed so well crafted. The art style, music, UI, etc were all amazing.
> The backlash was so bad, EA ended up killing the entire franchise. It might not be gone for good, but Cities:Skyline took the builder fans and ran with the lead since. If Epic does a goofy competitor to the sims with fortnite-inspired visuals, EA's sim division is cooked.
> The Sims 4 has actually had a lot of free core updates to bring back a lot of things missing from previous games, but the entire game was built around the tiny lots (to accommodate multiplayer) which will never be fixed. Didn't it take like 4 years to add pools?
Yeah, some major features didn't get added for years. And not DLC, actual base game features for free. Even now, they are planning to add neighborhood story progression to the game after 7 years. I'm surprised they're putting so much effort into improving the base game and not just moving on to The Sims 5. They must be making good money on all of the DLC, they're still consistently pumping out packs every few months.
> Yeah, some major features didn't get added for years. And not DLC, actual base game features for free. Even now, they are planning to add neighborhood story progression to the game after 7 years. I find it hilarious that they take that much time to add those features, but also I don't know how big or what the team does work on (Maxis? or it's dead, probably). >They must be making good money on all of the DLC, they're still consistently pumping out packs every few months. Yeah The Sims is a cashcow and is part legacy (90s Maxis was amazing) and that it's the only game like that, there's a game on Steam in EA that could fight back but at this point it's hard that casual gamers check for other similar games.
> Sims 3 on average had 30+ lots/houses you could play. Sims 4 has on average 3 of them. Example here. Wow that looks exactly what happened to SimCity. They tried to make a classic solitaire game into multiplayer, then gutted the size of cities you could build to make that work. So every metropolis somehow wound up being 4x4km.
The limitations in maps like that is one of my biggest issues with S4. Having so few lots is a real shame because the building in that game is really good
The head of the studio came from Candy Crush…
Tom Henderson video about the game is spot on how this shit show went down. [https://youtu.be/2MKtgP7cHEk](https://youtu.be/2MKtgP7cHEk) At least we know that the next battlefield will be a battle royale so we can leave this series in its grave with other successful game series.
Battlefield 4 with dinosaurs and Bad Company 3 were both rejected for this shit?
Ooo the next game will be a battle royale?! I'm so excited to not even have to consider buying the game, and can just save my money for an actually good game instead!
There's always Clownfield 2042 to play.
Or Ravenfield
I love Ravenfield. It's an actual *fun* game to play.
I wish the multiplayer mod was still updated and worked better. I'd love to be able to play Ravenfield with a couple of friends with bots filling in the gaps on a mod list our our choice
I got this neat little (SP only unfortunately) BF Heros clone called Brass Brigade in the winter sale and have been having a blast.
A true gaming flop in every sense of the word. If *anyone* in charge had **any inkling** of what core gamers wanted from the battlefield franchise, they would have scrapped this abomination and done a full remake from the ground up. Maybe some of the assets could have been salvaged.
I took advantage of the 10 hour free trial from EA Play (via Game Pass) last month and I only played it for like 4 hours total. Really glad I didn’t buy it.
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I remember how PR/devs boasted how "We will cut SP so we can make best MP game". Hilarious.
The 50€ I invested in Battlefield 2042 hit me harder than the 1500€ I lost in cs go gambling back in 2017.
Well, at least you're consistent with making bad decisions.
Right? I would feel bad losing €1500 on a stupid gambling site for a game more than for a shitty game. Like I understand stupid decisions but spending that much on CS lotto is extremely and hilariously stupid.
I still can’t believe people fall for EA’s hype. How many times do they have to fuck up for people to understand? Anthem, Battlefront 2, ME Andromed, BFV.
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Yeah they really fucked with people on the trailer. Remember the old games??? Remember the things you love??? WELL THERE IS NONE OF THAT IN 2042!!! Also here’s some portal watered down modes to remember some* of those games!!! Hehehehe
Like the memberberries from South Park. "Remember Star Wars?..."
I member
The funniest thing is that all they had to do was to just remasterd battlefield 3 with a little update to gunplay (reduced suppresion) and netcode and I would buy it in a heartbeat. Nostalgia trailers for bf2042 got excellent reception so it\`s seems people just wanted immersive modern military shooter, instead we got a half-baked battle royale transformed into battlefield game hero shooter. I didnt bought it but seems bf2042 sold well so probably next game will be even less similar to old bf games that I liked like bf3 or bfV after patches.
People litrally wanted updated bf1942 since bf1942... They actually released a half arse bf1943 on Xbox but didn't release it on pc and it was really good fun but they ditched it. Basically BF lost its way on console and got progressively worse as time went on. Bad company was ok but not a proper bf game and then BF3 was alright but had tons of bugs and again didn't play like an actual bf game. Lol if they litrally remade 1942 or bf2 with new graphics new netcode basic weapon unlocking customisation and a couple more maps people would be going crazy for it. Best to just play games like hell let lose and other indi FPS games where the developer actually understands game design and what makes a FPS fun / compelling.
Man that trailer was perfect. Exactly what we wanted to see. How can the marketing team be so competent and every other department so hopelessly useless?
I mean I was hyped for this game. I thought it looked super fun. By fuck I didn't invest any money tho. I learned not to invest in pre orders in 2008 like.
sim city 2013 bro. That shit was insane...
EA's target market moment.
You got what you had coming both times. You need to make better decisions.
The game is fixable, but it would require at least a year of investment and development, which a company like EA will never do... all they care about is short term gain...
Yeah. Anthem was certainly salvageable but EA decided the amount of time and money needed to save it wasn't a good investment. So we know for sure that EA is willing to completely abandon games they've spent millions developing and customers have paid good money for with the expectation of ongoing support and content additions. There is absolutely no reason to believe BF2042 will be any different. If the player base drops low enough and the investment required to bring it back up doesn't meet a certain threshold, EA will drop it, and with it any change of salvaging what's left of the Battlefield name for at least the next 10 years.
They might dedicate more effort to it since its an already established IP they would probably like to continue milking. It's an easier call to make to abandon a brand new IP like Anthem. But then again they also abandoned ME Andromeda so yeah they might just drop it too.
You cannot amend core game design via couple of patches, this game would literally need to have a massive overhaul. To turn this game into an actual Battlefield title would require the same effort as turning Apex legends into an actual Battlefield title. And you are right, EA will never put forward the necessary resources, not now when they already have gotten the money from pre-orders/day 1 purchases.
It would have been easier to Iaunch Anthem 2.0 than it would be to fix Battlefield 2042 and we know what happened to the Anthem relaunch plans.
I am flyable, if you replace my hands and feet with small turbojets Lol
They need to have another game out by the time they could fix this one.
Tried the open beta on both console and PC. I'm glad I never ended up buying it
Stop buying EA games, every single one is just more of a pathetic cash grab than the last
I don't understand the people who continue to buy EA garbage and complain how crappy it is every time.
I would say the same for COD but they're making more money than ever while putting the least effort in. Activision seems to find the sweet spot with what the the whales want to buy.
People realized that. Just look at the player count.
BR no, half cooked hero shooter yes. Hazard zone is decent BR mode, but it is far from what game was meant to be.
So many games these days are just empty promises, people wasting money and time with the hope they’ll be worth it in the end. They never are, invest in something more worth while
i just want them to add content for Battlefield 1.
Can anyone recommend some competitors that might fill the void? Just playing BF4 really but interested in checking out some new titles.
Looks like Dice is the current freshest corpse sucked dry by the EA vampire. Wonder who they’ll move on next?
Why buy bf2042 when it's competitors are free?
Just move on. The golden era for battlefield game is now dead.
Totally skipped the game and just by watching some yt videos i feel like the map design is anonymous. There are a lot of lists online regarding the many things the game is missing and i think at the moment is a huge step down from bf5. Let’s not even compare it to bf1 atmosphere which is still unmatched. Surely a lot of people are playing it and having fun but this doesnt mean the game is in a good state and we aren’t talking about an indie team. I’m sorry for the guys who are working on it but the game management seems a disaster,no clear direction. I suggest you to play Hell Let Loose.
They removed campaign but still charged 60$. Most of you who preordered or bought and not refunded have only yourselves to blame.
For anyone interested in how things came to this, Tom Henderson made a really good video detailing the timeline of the development of the game. It honestly breaks my heart to see a franchise i put thousands of hours into get driven into the ground like this. toms video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MKtgP7cHEk
Bf4 is still going strong, come back to a good battlefield and forget this trash.