Everybody must know about how badly EA’s Battlefield 2042 has performed since it was released nearly a year ago. The critics hated it, the fans despised it – even the Battlefield loyalists had trouble loving this one – and it quickly became known as one of the worst entries in the whole series. According to Vince Zampella, the current franchise boss of the series, the game failed because it was “too ambitious” and “strayed too far away from previous games.”
Vince Zampella is also the co-founder of Respawn Entertainment and Infinity Ward and is now the overseer of the entire Battlefield franchise. In a recent interview with Barrons, Zampella basically said it straight, that the launch of the game and its subsequent life had too much pressure put on it, and seemingly struggled to achieve the ambitious heights that the studio attempted to reach.
“I think they just strayed a little too far from what Battlefield is,” said Zampella, “They tried to do a couple of things that were maybe ambitious: grow the player count, etc. I don’t think they spent enough time iterating on what makes that fun.” It really is that simple, to be honest. We’re all for studios being ambitious if the objective is to make something new and exciting, but for EA’s Battlefield 2042, it seemed as if it was trying to be different just for the sake of it. Why change a tried and tested formula, one that has created arguably the most authentic first-person shooter series of all time, just to move it in another direction? Zampella went on to add “It’s not inherently a bad idea. The way they were set up and the way they executed it just didn’t allow them to find the best thing possible.”
There have been a lot of changes made to the game since last year to try and shake things up – it was only in May that DICE decided to remove the game’s 128-player Breakthrough playlist. Their reasoning for this? DICE explained that it wanted to keep the mode as a more tactical experience that would be better suited for the classic 64 players instead.
And not only that but in reply to Battlefield 2042’s “polarising” specialists, the developer also confirmed plans to introduce a class system in the game’s future Season 3 update. The idea being that is brings the game back to a level that players are more familiar with – good luck with that one then
Even with all the failed expectations, Battlefield 2042 still has quite a vast number of players still active (the game isn’t even a year old yet to be fair) and if you are one of those players then you should be enjoying the recent Season 2 update that appeared in late August called Master of Arms. Season 2 features a whole host of fresh weapons and vehicles, whereas future inclusions will consist of a series of reworks for the game’s launch maps.
