Feedback: Why I'm done with the title, and why you should be too.
- The Skeleton Crew. All big multiplayers get glitches, but it's been made clear lately that the current skeleton crew are struggling. Slow updates, masses of glitches with each one, modes being cancelled, and then fixes which fail. EA wanting profits over a bigger team is extremely evident here, even with the fancy roadmap video. Once that content is slowly drip fed out (glitching all the way to release), they'll be done after season 5 or 6. Not to even mention the layoffs.
- The store is the priority. It's extremely clear that EA loves profits so much, that it's willing to make skins and AI generated front end stickers the main goal. We get the same basic uniform to unlock in challenges, but if we want something slightly different, we HAVE to pay significantly more. While a battlepass model isn't ideal, you get some value for money. However the other, more interesting skins, are all locked behind a paywall, sometimes double the price of a full pass. The game isn't valued. Money is, above everything else.
- The failures of REDSEC. While there are fun elements to REDSEC, it's still an extremely undercooked mode. It was released in a rushed state, and it suffered from such big problems, tournaments were cancelled. Solo and ranked modes were a big afterthought, and currently there's still masses of balance issues, inconsistent combat mechanics, and game breaking bugs that haven't been dealt with for some time. Not to mention, it's completely distracting from what people love about battlefield, which is the main multiplayer. It currently feels like it's not worth the extra development time, as it's just as broken as the rest of the game.
- The game design. Unbalanced teams continue to make for steamrolled matches that waste your XP boosters. Netcode, TTK, constant big changes to how guns work, and other such failures. The maps were uninspired and small, aside from Golmud for the size. Nostalgia over innovation also played a big part, bringing back maps from better games in an attempt to lure people to the title. However one big, average map, and one meat grinder bazaar map, (with future plans to bring back other old maps), is a big sign that the vision isn't to innovate, it's to make new maps that are poorly designed, and hope that people like the old ones returning. Old maps shouldn't be returning. Saying that Golmud was the most "innovative thing our studio has done", isn't true. Golmud was done previously.
- Temporary modes. This model of "testing" what players like is all well and good, but to put so much development and promotional time into these, only for some of them to vanish and never be seen again, is pointless in the long run. A lot of them are very undercooked, very repetitive, and very boring. Instead of fixing the core pillars of what makes battlefield great, we're getting a tiktok scroll of modes, that waste time and energy.
- The battlepass. Average value for money skin and gun wise, but padded out and filled with waste of time items. Gun keyrings that only we usually see. Player card backgrounds, some of which are AI generated, massing hundreds and thousands of them, many of which will barely be ever used. Card logos, vehicle stickers and other such rubbish that we can't even place manually, resize or change ourselves. Some are so small on vehicles and weapons, that we can barely make them out. This doesn't value time or progress. Don't even get me started on how stupid it was to introduce spray paints like in Fortnite. Not only do people never use those in that game, I'm yet to see anyone use them in this game either. Why on earth was this prioritised over QA, big fixing and genuine battlefield content?
EA is no longer a company that cares about gaming. It cares about profits, and quick marketing slop for temporary thrills that promise the world and under deliver to a colossal extent. This is even more evident by who the new buyers are.
Battlefield 6 may very well deliver the stuff that is promised in the roadmap, but the point is, it's ultimately stuff that should've been in the game from the start, not an afterthought. You build on the previous titles in your series, you don't remove bits and slowly return them and state that it's "innovation". 2042 was borderline illegal in how bad it was. This was a step up by a centimetre.
