Next Battlefield Is A "Reimagination" Of The Series
Next Battlefield Is A "Reimagination" Of The Series
After Battlefield 2042 came up short, it looks like EA is shaking things up for the next game.
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I am still annoyed that 2042's bog standard BF launch (buggy piece of shit more or less killed it.
Yeah, the game was barely playable. That is "normal" for BF games and has been true since at least 3 (I am pretty sure I remember a retail copy of 1942 being massively broken but can't be arsed to verify). But whereas other franchises or companies have their defenders (I still don't understand how Ubisoft convinced "gamers" to advocate that Ubi MP games are going to be horrible at launch but amazing a year later...), BF mostly sets off one of the last remaining fanboy wars as the CoD and CS and OW/Valorant crowds needed to go hog wild on The Enemy.
I forget which podcast it was (might have been Bombcast? Although I think Danny O'Dwyer was also pretty sour on 2042 at launch), but I'll (sadly) always remember the conversation. Your bog standard "hosts shit on how horrible Battlefield is" by basically pointing out all the fundamental issues with Conquest that have existed since someone tried a pub game on 1942. And then one person pretty much lost their mind with "Yeah. Of course Conquest is shit. It has always been shit. That is why you play Rush instead. Rush basically fixes every single problem Conquest has and is actually good without having a full group of players on comms". And the response was basically "Well, if the mode was bad it shouldn't be in the game. So this game is really shit because..."
And... after about a year of patches, 2042 was REALLY good last December. The specialist system felt genuinely good and was the best balance since BC2 (I hate the emphasis on making medics losers with SMGs. Give my girl an LMG!), albeit with horrible menuing. And then we brought back the class system in a way that mostly just improved menus while ruining balance...
I dunno. It is clear Battlefield just has no place in modern gaming. The BF crowd mostly became milsim sickos or migrated to CoD (which added vehicles?). So the crowd left who want a "slightly realistic" shooter with a focus on combined arms is REALLY small. So Dice need to find ways to broaden that which... mostly just gets the crowd who don't want to deal with vehicles or long range combat or whatever. While ALSO pissing off the small faithful. Battlebit is doing a good job of being "milsim-light" but that game is fully dependent on people "overlooking problems" because it is an indie game. So time will tell how long it lasts and how long matches are still fun where everyone is joking around rather than getting sweaty.
And just because it IS EA's "We fucked up so bad that governments got involved with our lootboxes" Dice: The battlepass gets a lot of crap. But it was probably one of the best in the industry. The actual gameplay features (new weapons and I think specialists?) were all part of the free version and you could grind those out just by playing the game casually for a week or two at the start. Or a day or two near the end when you have so many backlogged challenges that you are getting like five ranks just for running 10 meters. The paid version never at all seemed worth going for but... that was Dice's problem, not mine.
Players have been getting less and less patient with disaster launch and thus hated the game which is known for disaster launches. A few games get away with it but since Cyberpunk or maybe even Fallout 76, the general concensus is that a broken game is not worth the time, not even if it gets better later. Games that get away with it usually have some saving grace, like Jedi Survivor being playable but having unplayable performance on PC. Even then, it pretty much lost the PC crowd. BF 2042 was unplayable at launch on every platform, had no redeeming qualities and it even tore out core parts of the game, like the class system, in favor of systems that can be indefinitely monetised. In a game that costet AAA money.
The only reason Ubisoft is getting away with the "it'll be good later" thing is that a) they invented it in the AAA space with Rainbow6Siege and b) they actually stick to these games for a long time. EA gave 2 years for Star Wars BF2 to sort its shit out, put out a new release of the game with all the cosmetics in it and the the next week announced that they no longer support it. Neat. Meanwhile, Ubisoft has not only stuck with R6S, but also developed a new anti-cheat system so it doesn't die to cheater and are still sticking with it. Another Ubisoft title, For honor. The game was okay at launch but playercount wise it was DOA. Yet, the game is still getting updates and new content regurarly 5 or so years later. THAT is the difference. EA dips on the first sign of losing money while, for all the things I despise Ubisoft, I gotta give props to them for sticking to their games for long time.
Also, Battlebit has shown that BF has a place in the modern gaming, EA/Dice just refused to just make a BF game for the past almost decade. They made something that resembled BF with WW1 and WW2 paint, then a piece of turd, but not a single BF game.
There has been this narrative of "Gamers won't accept buggy releases" since the 00s when coverage of games began to extend past the review (because prior to that: Reviewers expected games to be broken in pre-release and never talked about it after).
Its a load of nonsense and always has been. Because, as you yourself justified it
. Games that get away with it usually have some saving grace, like Jedi Survivor being playable but having unplayable performance on PC.
and
they actually stick to these games for a long time
Which is the real thing. It doesn't matter how buggy a release is. What matters is how much people like the company behind it.
Which, like I said, is kind of the secret to Battlebit. It had a MASSIVE launch because... Battlefield is fun as hell and different types of FPS players/streamers can still migrate their skills over. But, because the Battlebit Devs are a small team and it "looks indie", people cut it a lot of slack. Which, again, translates to acceptance.
- EVERYONE hates EA so people who play those games are pissed off and at each other's throats. Which makes for a really negative vibe and means any time you die, you get angry. I popped back in to BF4 a few months back and holy crap was everyone incredibly toxic... about a game they had been playing for ten years
- A good middle ground is Warframe and Digital Extremes. The community has been getting increasingly angry at DE (in part because of influencers who are sick and tired of playing the game that made them financially viable), but you get those weird shifts of "Ha ha. Something broke and we are trapped on a loading screen in Railjack. Keep an eye out for Sevagoth" to "FUCKING DE BREAKS FUCKING BUGFRAME ALL THE TIME". And that can be the difference between "ha ha, I hope I keep my drops" to "Well, I'm done for the night"
- And then Battlebit where people are generally incredibly positive about the game... ableit often by being negative about BF (the bar is low). And that means that when you get downed, you start joking around on voice chat and get a feeling for who is old enough to remember Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers and who is probably too young to be playing the game at all. But it means that you don't care about getting killed by a sniper from a kilometer away after sprinting for three minutes since spawn because you have a grin on your face over someone pretending they are a 40k Commisar
It's probably a thing where it's cyclical of how much people are accepting of broken releases based on parameters like 'when was the last huge broken launch?' and the current generation who didn't experience broken launches sunddently entering the gaming space.
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