In today's earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson says he has been playing the next Battlefield game with the development team and it will be a "tremendous live service."
Likewise. Helldivers 2 has proven there’s some life left in the otherwise moribund live service category, by doing something different and most importantly fun.
Somehow I think battlefield will fail to learn anything from Helldivers success and end up churning out another over monitzed, rather dull, addition to the category.
Battlefield has probably been in development for 4 years now and their C-Suite doesn't know shit about dick. That ship turns like the titanic - It's going down.
Yes in that there is a new battlepass every month with new guns and armor to unlock.
No in that you can earn the battlepass with in game currency and never have to give them more than the $40 that the game cost to have a ton of fun.
Beyond that - They've taken live service games to a better place. There's an ongoing galactic campaign and the individual missions you run contribute to galactic objectives which have real consequences in game. They have a dedicated "Game Master" like a DND Dungeon Master who decides when to release new units, what happens when we succeed and how to punish failure.
Because most people aren't in places like this. Most people don't care about what the companies do, if they even know. I work next to a guy who buys the new call of duty every time, hates it, and buys the next anyway. Because it's call of duty. He doesn't care about mergers, or shutdowns, or what an Activision is.
He plays his games and that's it. Folks like us, who are concerned with how the sausage gets made, we're not big enough to make a difference.
It will be said to influence the decision of people who are new to the gaming scene and haven't been repeatedly burned. Not everyone is a doom scroller like us.