“Clearly, we didn’t go wide enough with different player segments…”
I’ve been saying this for years with these longstanding franchises. These studios do early invite-only testing with these hardcore players and streamers, who frankly seem more concerned with getting into the industry or maintaining a good relationship than actually providing honest feedback, and that causes the developers to get results that don’t represent what the general audience is going to think.
I agree with some of this, but I wouldn’t include ‘hardcore’ into the explanation. Who you or I define as hardcore may well be very different - for me many of the things that would make this game ‘hardcore’ were excluded(like a scoreboard or local-admins), so blaming any of this on the hardcore having their sway seems pretty implausible.
Yes, i shared this feeling through the read too (though, in fairness, the author might be integrating his interpretation into his article)
Lol, so which is it? Did you not go wide enough, not go deep enough, or didn’t bring players along with you? (which sorta suggests you did go wide and/or deep, but just didn’t, y’know, show them). It’s a big fucking catch-all that says absolutely nothing.
I dunno, the funny thing about all of this is having to fish through the verbage to figure out what they’re really saying. And the stupid truth of it is, they don’t care - they just want to say enough words to convince enough people that they really do understand, and that the teams and people should continue to be employed, and that customers should buy a future product again, and/or should be content with their purchase.
The reward was this skin:
Why even bother, if you’re gonna lean in that direction everything about this game is ‘problematic’. And I fail to see the reasoning behind removing the mission but not stripping it from anyone who unlocked it already - it’s either offensive or it isn’t.
tl;dr: turns out, giant flat maps with no cover and no thought given to player flow might not be great, especially with 128 players!
Unfortunately, it’s like putting a bandaid on a trauma patient a month after they died. And it’s just one of many, many fundamental problems with the game. Just like Anthem, they’ve been way too slow to address problems and the game is already dead before they even started talking about fixing them, let alone actually releasing those fixes.
Last I looked, BF2042 had a little over 1,000 players on Steam. It’s dead.
Holy shit, all of these points should have easily been identified and addressed in design, or at least early prototype play.
This is basic level design 101 shit.
This isn’t something you fix six months after release. It calls for a radical redesign of all the levels.
You may as well just build a new game.
It’s insane to me how badly they messed up this fundamental aspect of team shooter design.
I still don’t even know why they had to go to 128.
64 on the latest consoles would still have been a huge improvement over earlier console Battlefields and would almost certainly offer better performance across the board.
96-100 would have been my absolutely maximum.
The simplistic notion that twice the players must mean it’s twice as good. I know several former Battlefield designers were similarly baffled, since 128 players was something they toyed around with in BF3 and found it to be crap.
128 players can work for sure, but the game design didn’t adjust for doubling the player count. Then you add on top the wide open barren maps with no flow from point to point and it just made everything so much worse. Then on top of that you make it so everyone can have anti-vehicle rockets or proximity sensors and it just really added the cherry on top.
Bad decisions compounded by bad decision after bad decision.
Don’t forget that everyone has the ability to spawn an armed and armored hovercraft anywhere at almost any time!
128 players was a marketing point. I’m sure some DICE lead pitched it at some EA executive as the next step for the franchise.
Never mind in the previous years DICE had already done prototypes with more players and they said the game was less fun, that’s why they were staying at 64 players.
(oh KevinC already mentioned it, lol).
Apart from the game design/fun issues it brings, 128 players also means worse netcode experience, with more BS moments where your client receives an update late and you are killed by a enemy behind a corner, and higher computer requirements.
They bumped up the player numbers and map size, yet when I was playing I saw like 2 tanks per side. :|
Update 3.3 is out.
Scoreboard and the “Thanks for paying extra for this POS” cosmetic bundle to Deluxe and Ultimate Edition owners.
Returning player numbers are gonna be Yuuuuuugeeee.
What on earth have they been doing? It’s been months and they come up with “part one” of the scoreboard and a couple small bugfixes?
There is an army of one working on the game. ;)
The amount of effort they have been putting into fixing even the small stuff has been pathetic.
I have to always assume that anything involving Frostbite will take 4 times longer than other engines.
Which honestly should have put the scoreboard sometime pre-holidays, still! :) I mean, it’s a scoreboard.
I’m guessing the bulk of the team (assuming they’re still working on it) is working on a larger overhaul, but the amount of fixes for all this time is really pathetic. I mean, surely they could fix loadout bugs and other really annoying things that have been there since day one. Just wild.