Why did BF2042 turn out the way it did?

I am not business master mind or any sort of strategic mind but I for one loathe that money 💰🤑 has so much power in decision making that it blinds people in executive offices.

Blame managment 

The old days of doing things have changed, we can't get around this, stuff evolves. I really hope for the best but prepare for the worst. If they can learn from their mistakes, we may get what we want if they can't who knows.

All this speculation hurts my brain.

EA think the best way to deliver games is to monetize everything.

Recent massive successes like Helldivers, Battlebit, Tarkov, Lethal Company, The Finals, and others have proved that players can see straight through that now, and would prefer to spend their money on a game that is fun to play, isn't necessarily a live service game, is well balanced, is produced by devs that listen to their community, and basically a game that focuses on the gameplay.

Pretty much everything 2042 isn't.  2042 tried to be too many things at once.  Too much variety and not enough detail.  Trying to squeeze various game modes and ways to play into the same maps was always going to result in terrible map design.  Concentrating too much on poorly implemented game formats that are not traditionally Battlefield, like Hazard Zone, reflected badly on other elements of the game as devs seemed to struggle to deliver even the basics.  Classes, destruction, vehicle/infantry balance, server browser, map design, netcode - all either missing or poorly implemented.  Most of the promises of the trailers have never materialised or been phased out or become insignificant compared to the issues.

I have no confidence that EA has learned from the mistakes of 2042 and will just continue their usual model of game production with the next Battlefield game, and ignore the feedback and requests from the loyal playerbase.  Recent developer departures and studio closures have only made that feeling much worse.  Every game since BF4 has gradually gotten worse, and while big improvements were made to BF1, BFV and 2042 after their release, it was too late to make the game a success, leaving the devs supporting the game scrabbling to make ill-thought changes trying to appease those that spent their money on it.

Because the devs left, and we were stuck with people of little to no imagination. That's why BF turned out the way it did.

It launched with less that half the features we should have had, and around a third of the maps we should have by now.

NO Pre-Order for the next game from me (I didn't pre-order this one though either) because I will wait and see what others are saying about it first and watch some game play too after 2042's mess.

Oh, and I have started to play Robocop Rogue City for a while because 2042 has whizzed me off that much with all the constant nerfing and messing they have done.

[edited by moderator to conform to forum rules]

@AdamonicLol, that bloke is just grifting using the latest alt-right buzzwords. oooh it's ESG, and DEI and Sweet Baby Inc. That guy is acting like he knows what went on internally at EA when he never worked for them, and he's acting like he knows what modern megacorp game dev is like when he left Blizzard in 2006. ESG barely existed as a concept by the time he left Blizzard, and wouldn't become mainstream for a decade!

Where's his evidence of any "DEI" or "ESG" group somehow deciding to give EA hundreds of millions of dollars AND that said money somehow lead to a bad game being made? EA had $5 billion dollars in cash on hand in 2019. Sure, companies love cheap money but where's the proof? He says "ESG funds are failing so they have to do this".. but Vanguard's ESG ETF has a 13% annual return for the past 6 years. iShares ESG ETF is at 9%, Fidelity's US Index fund is 15% 5 year annual return, Calvert's is 10% annual. Sure, not all of them are doing better than cash rates but that's the nature of stock trading. He says "that source of Revenue", the so called "ESG Funds" that gaming supposedly is taking billions of dollars in, is "drying up", but there's no evidence of that either. It's just grifter buzzwords with nothing behind it.

2042 sucked because DICE had finally petered out as a game developer running on the fumes of the best last people from the good ole days of DICE (BF2, Bad Company 1/2, BF3) and had failed to adequately build up/refresh it's institutional knowledge combined with typical capitalist greed where releasing a broken game is better for the CEO's bonus than not releasing it, working on it another 2 years and becoming successful then.

Because of that, DICE screwed up Battlefield 4, Hardline sucked, BFV was butchered by a horrendous design (eg maps, factions, lack of care about historical accuracy) and Patrick Soderlund's silly response to criticism, BF1 was hampered by people having given up on the franchise after three disasters in a row (and the lack of accuracy in the WW1 gunfighting), and 2042 was the worst of the worst because it did all that AND the EA Execs decided to meddle with it, forcing in the cringe operators & releasing it early.

Not because of some mythical gamergate boogieman.

Product design has been left to people who ONLY look at the bottom line.