Battlefield 2042 [PS, XB, PC]

I don't play Battlefield games or generally any FPS besides Halo and Doom, but it's interesting for me to hear the negative comments about this game as my older son and his friends seem to be loving it. It might be a technical disaster, but it doesn't seem like a gameplay disaster in my son's casual gamer circle. It makes me wonder about how much it matters that a game is technically amazing.
 
Got the game yesterday night, runs like a champ on my ancient 2080Ti/3900X/32gb system. The usual DICE game with glitches but its still fun playing in squads with friends.
 
Anthem 2.0. I agree, @techuse, this could be a death blow. They put Vince Zampella in charge last week, so they haven't given up, but it's a desperation movie. I thought they'd already put him in charge of evangelizing Respawn's development model to other studios within EA, but maybe that happened too late. The Respawn model is prototype everything to death before full production begins, from what I understand. If BF2042 doesn't have a solid player base, which I'd be surprised if it does, then I'm not sure they'll ever fix it. Frostbite seems like a disaster right now. Maybe Vince can pull a rabbit out of a hat and get the next title right, but they need to win over a lot of people to really bring the franchise back to what it was.

I'm so glad I stopped pre-ordering games a long time ago. This should be a good lesson learned. The next BF game should get zero pre-orders.
 
Scott_Arm said:
Anthem 2.0. I agree, @techuse, this could be a death blow. They put Vince Zampella in charge last week, so they haven't given up, but it's a desperation movie. I thought they'd already put him in charge of evangelizing Respawn's development model to other studios within EA, but maybe that happened too late. The Respawn model is prototype everything to death before full production begins, from what I understand. If BF2042 doesn't have a solid player base, which I'd be surprised if it does, then I'm not sure they'll ever fix it. Frostbite seems like a disaster right now. Maybe Vince can pull a rabbit out of a hat and get the next title right, but they need to win over a lot of people to really bring the franchise back to what it was.

I'm so glad I stopped pre-ordering games a long time ago. This should be a good lesson learned. The next BF game should get zero pre-orders.
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Makes me nauseous just thinking about it. Hero shooter ugghh.
 
techuse said:
Makes me nauseous just thinking about it. Hero shooter ugghh.
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With BF, EA seems to want to chase trends, but does it halfassed and way to late like with the battle royale mode in BFV that hardly anyone played.

EA already has a great shooter in Apex Legends so why do they want another and in another franchise where the core player base never asked for one.
 
McHuj said:
With BF, EA seems to want to chase trends, but does it halfassed and way to late like with the battle royale mode in BFV that hardly anyone played.

EA already has a great shooter in Apex Legends so why do they want another and in another franchise where the core player base never asked for one.
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I would definitely not be against another Battefield BR. It just can't be half assed and has to feel like battlefield. The firestorm map was horrible. But ultimately there's a core player base for Battlefield that will buy the game if it's good and has conquest and rush.
 
Ouch ouch ouch.


Holy cow it's so much worse than I thought. I didn't get to see much of it because almost all of the streamers that I watch that would in the past have played 100's of hours of BF stopped playing this after a few days.

Here's what I get from this game.

How to make a modern Battlefield game in order of priority of the development team.
  1. Graphics, graphics sell games.
  2. Graphics, work harder on the graphics because graphics is all we need.
  3. Hand over the game to a New Age production team with no concept of what a war game is.
  4. As such replace all of the iconic Battlefield music and music influences with New Age "music"
  5. As such make sure the UI is unusable.
  6. Make sure noone gets their feelings hurt so don't show a scoreboard.
  7. Make sure everyone is the same (remove roles) so noone feels like they are different from anyone else.
  8. Make sure noone gets their feelings hurt if they can't get a vehicle, let people call in vehicles in the middle of combat.
  9. Get rid of devolution and then put key objectives on top of a skyscraper with limited ways to get to.
    1. combined with #8, once you have control just call in multiple tanks and hovertanks to guard it.
    2. again, combined with #8 if one of your vehicles on the top of the skyscraper gets destroyed, just call in another one.
  10. To make sure noone gets their feelings hurt if a group of good players keep queuing up as a squad, make it so the game randomly kicks people from your squad of friends so the game can put random players in your squad.
  11. Maybe think about maybe working on the network code ... maybe.
  12. Maybe work on the bugs ... maybe.
  13. Maybe think about spending some time working on the gameplay loop ... maybe.
What a mess when you lose sight of what makes a BF game and why people want to play a BF game. Started with BF1 where they lost some of their playerbase. Then BFV where they lose a LOT of their playerbase. And now with BF2042, instead of fixing what people didn't like about BFV, they instead remove the things in BFV that people actually still liked about BF games.

Never thought I would see it, but another prestigious developer under EA's management may now be defunct or might soon be defunct. Ouch.

Regards,
SB
 
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Silent_Buddha said:
Ouch ouch ouch.


Holy cow it's so much worse than I thought. I didn't get to see much of it because almost all of the streamers that I watch that would in the past have played 100's of hours of BF stopped playing this after a few days.

Here's what I get from this game.

How to make a modern Battlefield game in order of priority of the development team.
  1. Graphics, graphics sell games.
  2. Graphics, work harder on the graphics because graphics is all we need.
  3. Hand over the game to a New Age production team with no concept of what a war game is.
  4. As such replace all of the iconic Battlefield music and music influences with New Age "music"
  5. As such make sure the UI is unusable.
  6. Make sure noone gets their feelings hurt so don't show a scoreboard.
  7. Make sure everyone is the same (remove roles) so noone feels like they are different from anyone else.
  8. Make sure noone gets their feelings hurt if they can't get a vehicle, let people call in vehicles in the middle of combat.
  9. Get rid of devolution and then put key objectives on top of a skyscraper with limited ways to get to.
    1. combined with #8, once you have control just call in multiple tanks and hovertanks to guard it.
    2. again, combined with #8 if one of your vehicles on the top of the skyscraper gets destroyed, just call in another one.
  10. To make sure noone gets their feelings hurt if a group of good players keep queuing up as a squad, make it so the game randomly kicks people from your squad of friends so the game can put random players in your squad.
  11. Maybe think about maybe working on the network code ... maybe.
  12. Maybe work on the bugs ... maybe.
  13. Maybe think about spending some time working on the gameplay loop ... maybe.
What a mess when you lose site of what makes a BF game and why people want to play a BF game. Started with BF1 where they lost some of their playerbase. Then BFV where they lose a LOT of their playerbase. And now with BF2042, instead of fixing what people didn't like about BFV, they instead remove the things in BFV that people actually still liked about BF games.

Never thought I would see it, but another prestigious developer under EA's management may now be defunct or might soon be defunct. Ouch.

Regards,
SB
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The graphics aren't even impressive either.
 
As a long time fan of the series, having played all major releases it’s quite incredible how they destroyed the franchise’s reputation with 2 horrible releases in a row. They abandoned BFV one year after release so they could focus 100% in the new game to release something that it is not even close to a good BF experience. I do believe they can turn it around but if the user base continues to quit the game is not going to be profitable for them to continue releasing patches.

Big issue is that most (if not all) of the OG Dice team has left for other projects and the new responsables do not understand what makes a BF game great. Since BF1 it’s downhill.

By the way, BF has supported 64 players since BF2, they (og DICE)never went above that number for a reason and it’s that 128 players is not fun. Remember MAG? More doesn’t mean better. Massive maps where the infantry is exposed and becomes a tank fest.
 
techuse said:

Wishful thinking but I’d love a post mortem on what happened with 2042.
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That video is lacking. IDK the reason the BF3 avatar never rotates enough to shift its feet but the lack of doing so is problematic.


BF2042 isn't perfect and maybe the animation aren't as modern as one would hope. But they are improved and more refined than BF3. In BF2042 avatar gently slides unrealistically when rotating but in BF3 the animation is very rough and abrupt with unnatural positions when shifting to a point that the avatar has to finally move its feet when rotating. While firing, BF2042 actually has a trigger pull animation, which BF3 lacks. The 2042 avatar's non trigger hand slightly moves around when firing while in BF3 the hand is like glued to the gun. In BF2042, the avatar actually produces a new ammo clip when changing weapons even though it magically appears out of no where. The BF2042 avatar will keep the initial clip if you didn't empty the clip while letting empty clips fall to the ground. Where in BF3 the avatar commonly just removes the old clip only to reinsert that same clip as if new.
 
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dobwal said:
That video is lacking. IDK the reason the BF3 avatar never rotates enough to shift its feet but the lack of doing so is problematic.


BF2042 isn't perfect and maybe the animation aren't as modern as one would hope. But they are improved and more refined than BF3. In BF2042 avatar gently slides unrealistically when rotating but in BF3 the animation is very rough and abrupt with unnatural positions when shifting to a point that the avatar has to finally move its feet when rotating. While firing, BF2042 actually has a trigger pull animation, which BF3 lacks. The 2042 avatar's non trigger hand slightly moves around when firing while in BF3 the hand is like glued to the gun. In BF2042, the avatar actually produces a new ammo clip when changing weapons even though it magically appears out of no where. The BF2042 avatar will keep the initial clip if you didn't empty the clip while letting empty clips fall to the ground. Where in BF3 the avatar commonly just removes the old clip only to reinsert that same clip as if new.
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The animations of your 1st person character are improved. 3rd person animations of other soldiers are clearly worse. The inability to have torso movement/rotation independent of legs is a huge drawback and makes natural animation impossible. Keep in mind these games are 10 years apart. 2 console generations.
 
EA discusses why BF2042 failed.

I really have a hard time reconciling 18 months spent updating to the latest frostbite technology and yet nearly every aspect of the game looks/plays/runs worse than previous entries. Even ignoring the 128p modes and playing the most visually simple portal map on an empty server, the performance delta is huge.
 
techuse said:
EA discusses why BF2042 failed.

I really have a hard time reconciling 18 months spent updating to the latest frostbite technology and yet nearly every aspect of the game looks/plays/runs worse than previous entries. Even ignoring the 128p modes and playing the most visually simple portal map on an empty server, the performance delta is huge.
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An engine is not gameplay code or the customization they need for a particular code. If they were jumping many revisions it could mean a lot of the game systems could not be ported from BFV and essentially they had to rebuild a lot of the basic plumbing and more complicated systems. Then try doing it with your company working entire remotely for the first time. I’d be curious to hear what happened that the engine version in battlefield fell so far behind. Did BFV operate on an already outdated version which left enormous technical debt for the follow up?
 
Scott_Arm said:
An engine is not gameplay code or the customization they need for a particular code. If they were jumping many revisions it could mean a lot of the game systems could not be ported from BFV and essentially they had to rebuild a lot of the basic plumbing and more complicated systems. Then try doing it with your company working entire remotely for the first time. I’d be curious to hear what happened that the engine version in battlefield fell so far behind. Did BFV operate on an already outdated version which left enormous technical debt for the follow up?
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According to Tom Henderson who apparently has contact with anonymous employees at Dice, yes.
 
LoL.

Turning to Battlefield 2042 design and feature choices, the lack of a scoreboard and VOIP, as well as the Specialists system, were mentioned for a brief moment, and we already know that improvements and additions in these areas will be coming in future months.
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They brush that aside as if it was a minor thing, yet that is as large or larger of a criticism from longtime Battlefield players as to why the game was not good. Yes it had technical problems, but technical problems can be forgiven as BF has a history of technical problems at launch. But fundamental changes to how players not only interact with the game (like the scoreboard) as well as how they play the game (like the not well thought out Specialist system) were the main reason why so many players just flat out stopped playing the game.

Hell, even the music was a reason cited by some people I know as to why they stopped playing the game. Like WTF was that new agey music that they decided was appropriate for a BF game? Seriously. Oooof.

Regards,
SB
 
Scott_Arm said:
Did BFV operate on an already outdated version which left enormous technical debt for the follow up?
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Since Patrik Söderlund left EA, DICE is no longer the top technology team at EA and there might be a lot of infighting regarding the development of Frostbite. Combine that with top talent jumping to Embark (and other studios) DICE (and Battlefield) might not have a bright future.
 
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