The ex DICE veterans are a huge loss to this series.
They have absolutely knocked that "other game" just released and free to play out of the park. The levels of detail & polish put this game to shame. Bring them back at all costs.
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@I_DYN4MO_II'm not buying the narrative that Battlefield was good because those devs were working on the game, and because they left it became bad.
Everyone knows 2042 was rushed and EA scaled back the development resources after the bad launch. Details and polish only happen when there's enough resources and time for that. Look at Cyberpunk 2077 before and now, 2042 literally had more detailed water. Even then, every new or reworked map has shown 2042's devs can do good maps. Compare literally any AoW map to Altai Range, Silk Road (even pre-rework Hourglass felt like it might be better), Operation Whiteout, Giants of Karelia or who knows what else.
There was a 2042 UI/UX designer dunking on Elden Ring's UI, who left 2042. After some updates, 2042 now has a settings menu that handily beats Onion Ring's, off is not the same as low Fromsoft! And it's a step above the settings menu of many other games that in their enum options will use an arbitrary number of very low, low, medium, high, very high, ultra, and randomly pick if the specific setting ends on high, very high or ultra, AND make them loop so you have to guess what the highest is. 2042 has a very simple and clear solution to this.
Was that guy an atrocious UI designer and the game's UI only got good because he left? I kinda doubt it. Again, the game being rushed seems the more likely explanation. UI gets done last. And those settings squares definitely step into polish territory.
Furthermore, I'd like to mention Alara Prime, another game made by the magical ex-Battlefield devs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSOllRWeFnk The game doesn't look to have anything particularly innovative like The Finals, rather it looks like yet another CS clone. We'll see how it goes once it releases but I think this further makes it clear veteran BF devs aren't some magic sauce you add to a game and then it suddenly becomes the best thing ever, and not having them on (like how CS2 doesn't have BF devs) means the game becomes bad.
@Lady_One the difference is on average 2042 has had and will most likely forever have the weakest map-pool in franchise history.
sure older titles had not so great maps but on average they had much much better map pools than 2042 could ever hope to have.
Just naming a few from the last two main titles- Amiens
- Rotterdam
- Devastation
- Marita
- St.Quentin
- Achi Baba
- Argonne Forest
- Nivelle
- Prise De Tahure
- Provence
- Ballroom Blitz
What does 2042 as pure 2042 maps actually have? I doubt any fan will foam at their mouths for a remake of Kaleidoscope or Orbital anytime soon....
- @sk1lld Maybe we might see it back in season 7. What if that Middle-East map that is on the table in that teaser with Ryan McArthur points towards Doha Qatar and we get a reworked infantry only map built around the stadium?
- @X-Sunslayer-X Redacted, Reclaimed, Exposure, the new Breakaway, Spearhead and maybe Manifest are all great maps, I would say post-rework Hourglass is good though most people, including me and the person above me, will remember it as "the map that they removed the stadium from". Well, a remake can include that stadium, so, I'm foaming at the mouth for a stadium version.
- @Lady_One is 2042 by any chance your first or second BF game?
- @Lady_One Not sure that holds up. BF1 had a three year development time, the same as 2042. And...well just compare the launch states. It sort of speaks for itself.
From what I can gather, post BF1 is when the exodus of Dev's began and since that time we've had BFV and 2042. I think a case could be made that we've seen a fairly solid decline in quality.
The sales since BF1 would also back that up too.@BFB-PraetorianIn many ways BF1 is the best BF-game ever made (BF4 was more fun though) and it the was last game, before the live-service-model "destroyed" the BF-franchise.
I think the devs actually matter less, the big problem is management. There are no 'gamer-soul' left in the decision-making and everything is about money at this point.
We must see what the next game does for the franchise. I think that if they disappoint once more, the franchise could end up dying.@BFB-Praetorian2042 had devs working on a new version of the engine at (or around?) the same time which from what I've heard second hand from some dev podcasts might be the main reason and supposedly the engine work took 1.5 years?
I do wish info like that wasn't behind paid podcasts...I'm not gonna pay to learn why 2042 was bad, lol.
Mass Effect Andromeda and Dragon Age Inquisition also blamed Frostbite, so I think that gives the engine issues even more credence. Unless you think it's become a meaningless excuse...
Besides that, 2042 itself also has larger scope than BF1 with Portal, 128 players, maps too big for 128 players, 5 platforms vs 3. I think the rumors about the game making a shift from BR late into development hold ground given the launch AoW map design and Exposure afterwards. 2042 launched with 14 maps, sure 6 were remakes however that's still work playtesting or making brand new assets for decently old maps, it's not just taking the last game's maps from 2 years ago made in the same engine, but removing the annoying blue filter.
The game has kept on improving, and that's with the clearly reduced resources after the mass refunds or old devs leaving. I think it's a safe bet to say that if the game took another 4-6 months to release with development at full speed, it would've equaled to 1 year or more of what we got post-launch (mostly bugfixes, huh?) and there would be a lot less refunds, and in turn a lot more development after launch, and in turn things like more maps.
BF1 released a year after Hardline, were they rotating studios like COD or was Hardline really just that much of a BF4 DLC? I really don't know.- @Lady_One Frostbite has been a problem for Dice for a long time. In BF1 we got the 'we do not have the tech-meme', from the developers. Doing all kind of apparantly simple things were a mess even in BF1. Things like showing achievements/unlocks while playing, double XP-events etc etc all had issues, because of Frostbite being a problem.
Frostbite looks nice and mostly runs fine (BF1 looks nice even today), but it is apparantly hard to use for development and loosing the old developers is a problem for Dice, in this regard.
But still, 2042 is not a matter of bad 'coding', but rather stupid design decisions and bad game-mechanics.
Hardline was not made by Dice, it was another studio.
- @BFB-Praetorian And at the end of 'BFV' is when it bled dry: the exodus was complete (old-hands, that is). '2042' suffered from new intakes, and we saw first hand what happened.
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