A former DICE staffer has gone on to Twitter to claim that Battlefield 2042 “never stood a chance.”
Joakim Bodin is currently a senior backend engineer at Epic Games. As late as May 2022, however, he was at EA’s DICE studios, where he had worked as a software engineer for 12 years.
Joakim shared a screenshot of Battlefield 2042’s 68 Metascore on PC, and had this to say about it:
“This game had many iterations, and the deadline never changed much, so never stood much chance being great at launch.
I’m proud though to have pushed hard to have this game have full cross play, progression and (mostly) commerce. It’s online systems will serve future titles well.”
I would like to note here that Joakim was actually participating in a meme, where game developers were talking about their lowest reviewed games and what they liked about it.
As reported by Tom Henderson on Inside Gaming, the development troubles of Battlefield 2042 are well documented, albeit not officially by EA, but instead from insider sources and journalists like Tom putting the story together.
The problems started even before the project pitches for Battlefield 2042 began. As Tom revealed in a post mortem, by the time DICE were planning for the game, most of the original DICE staff, who created the Frostbite engine, had left the studio. EA and DICE clashed over EA’s desire to replicate Call of Duty’s success by matching them year after year, and DICE’s desire to outdo Call of Duty, which would have taken time for them to iterate.
Battlefield 2042 went through several pitches before the dev’s ambitions would be stifled. DICE would continue to lose their original staff during and after its development, though to be clear, it continued to be a fully staffed studio.
The main problems Battlefield 2042 faced were updating to the new Frostbite engine and the pandemic. Of course, we understand that all game productions struggled to get going through the pandemic. DICE’s devs had to share computers and consoles remotely to do their work, and this was not unique to them, though most fans may not know this.
DICE’s unique problem was Frostbite. The original staff that had worked on building Frostbite had largely left the studio. So, as ironic as it seemed, because DICE was no longer staffed with Frostbite’s creators, they struggled to update Battlefield 2042 to the new game engine. In fact, it added a year to their development.
DICE was able to settle on the idea of Battlefield 2042’s specialists, a genuinely popular feature, relatively early. So it wasn’t that everything about the project flopped completely. It would have likely never shipped if that was the case.
Ultimately, DICE did not get the time they needed to shape the game up as they intended, and they could. And we know that this was all true, because DICE actually did pull it off, after they got the time to do it.
EA CEO Andrew Wilson’s claim that Battlefield 2042 had gotten too ambitious comes across as self-serving, with this context of EA vs DICE in mind. We can see now that DICE could deliver on their ambition. If EA had arranged for Battlefield to have a two/three studio and three year cycle planned out, just like Call of Duty, maybe Battlefield could be a better competitor.
It doesn’t seem like that’s what we are getting now, but with Respawn head Vince Zampella and former Call of Duty head Byron Beede now in charge, maybe there is reason to hope that Battlefield can be redeemed by taking it in a new direction.
If you’d like to give Joakim Bodin and his team the kudos they deserve now, you could play Battlefield 2042. Battlefield 2042 Elite Edition had recently released on multiple platforms, bundling all the content that had been published thus far.
