Let me clarify:
Why should you care?
1. More choices in the present, being able to play offline against bots is an option, so is playing in LAN, so would be being able to host your own server either on rented hardware or on your own, or playing on the official servers. It's more ways to play the game making it accessible to more people. If your only choice is playing on the official servers causes several problems you wouldn't have if you had more choices to play whenever there's something wrong with the server or your connection.
2. Preserving the game for the future. Always online games are built to be killed, every single one of them will be become completely unplayable forever one day once the servers are shut down. If you are not forced to rely on them because there's offline mode and ability for anyone to make their own server this ensures the game will live on forever, good examples of these games would be DOOM, Quake and Unreal Tournament for example, this used to be the norm when people cared.
Yes this is all about control and here's why:
Since the business model started shifting away from monetizing copies sold to monetizing game time it's in EAs interest to kill this game once they don't feel like it's a worth while investment, and while it is the game experience will suffer because they will mess with the gameplay in various ways to incentivize purchase of additional content, they have many patents registered like the ones that artificially change the difficulty of the game (yes even in multiplayer) to make you spend more time in the game and therefor more money. This provides a bad or at least worse player experience than games that don't do this therefor it's in their interest to limit your choices because if anyone could just spin up a server without these drawbacks everyone would play on there have more fun while spending less money which is bad for EA. Perfect example is the older Battlefield games, many players prefer playing on the community servers where admins kick the cheaters and other type of undesirable players which provide a better experience than official servers. It's important to note though that servers can not be hosted on your own hardware or any cloud provider in these titles either, they can only be rented through EA's systems which ensure they can still add undesirable things into the game but it's still better than nothing having the choice at all like in Battlefield 2042. Though being able to self host servers and playing against AI offline would be obviously better. Just like real mod tools would be significantly better than Portal but then again if modders can make a better game than EA for free it's in their interest to not let that happen.
To the ones saying "EA is not a charity, they wanna make money this makes them more money" Yes you're 100% right, i've just explained above, I though do no work for EA nor own shares of them therefor their profits are not anything of interest to me, I'm just someone who wants to have fun playing games and it's in my best interest to call out decisions like this from the developers that negatively affect player experience. Why should they listen to me? They probably shouldn't as long as people keep paying them no matter the quality of the product but i will not unless at least some of the things i suggested aren't implemented in some capacity, Battlefront 2 bots come to mind again, that's a decent compromise. I can not purchase a product that can at any second be completely taken away from me though and that's that.
@tyl0413I really don't mean to sound callous, and I admire your passion, but, for me offline play is not something I'm worried about and I've not ever played a BF game after the release of the newest version.
I've also never driven a car at 120mph and would not worry if I had a car that could not go that fast. Others might think it important, but I am sure no-one would try to convince me that my car manufacturer should produce a car that should do 120mph, when it is not something I care about. Even less would they expect me to support a campaign to persuade the manufacturer to build that car just because they wanted to go that fast.
@ChrisAWJBethel wrote:
@lzilchetlOther people enjoy playing games offline. Why should they have to suffer because the majority of players play online?
Its hardly suffering is it mate? Its a computer game.
What do you really want to happen here? Is trying to make a load of random people on this forum care about something that does not matter to them the best way of achieving that? I'm not fussed if you fight for it or even if you manage to achieve it. But trying to convince me and others on this thread is not going to make any difference is it? Have you thought about writing formally to EA or organising a petition, or putting together a YouTube to spread the word?
Personally, I think you are fighting a futile battle, happy for you to prove me wrong. Good luck with that.
@tyl0413Fair comment. I'll back out of the thread and leave the topic alone. I think the point,some including me, have been trying to make is that the AI soldiers that feature in 2042 are not bots as you know them. They are probably the biggest bit of innovation Dice have produced in a long time. They have to be as they will play alongside you, follow orders, jump in vehicles and have a skill level similar to real players. KDR will be allocated the same with the AI soldiers as with real players, The concept of the game will fall over if they to not measure up to real players. The bots we have seen until now have been cannon fodder. It is a significant change. The vast majority of computers/consoles have nowhere near the processing power to run even a partially populated local server with bots with that sophistication. This relies heavily on cloud processing, its not something that can just be turned on for offline mode, online access is an essential part of the architecture of the game. My point has always been that the game would need to go back to the drawing board if you are going to get your offline not very AI "bots" and that is certainly not going to happen before launch, if ever. I am completely impartial and have no reason to try and scupper your chances of achieving this, but I , and others become frustrated because some have unrealistic expectations and then seem to become indignant when we try to point that out.
But, go for it.
I'm out (I promise)
