Vince Zampella has gone on the record that Battlefield 2042 is not considered a failure at EA.
In an interview with IGN, Zampella’s exact words is that it is not a “failure of a game”, even if it did not do as well as it hoped. Zampella said that DICE “really spent a lot of time learning how to adapt it and getting things back.”
So, EA did not give us the transparency to properly assess if Zampella’s statement is accurate or not. We do know that EA said that Battlefield 2042 did not meet sales expectations in the company’s February 2022 earnings call. They made that announcement a few months after it launched in November 2021.
We also know that EA stopped work on new Battlefield games in favor of getting the game up to shape to what they intended, and what fans wanted to see. For that reason, EA pledged not to start the release schedule of their seasons until they had successfully implemented these fixes.
For this reason, it took June 2022 before they started on Season 1. As we had reported, EA stated that they had successfully redeemed the game by November of last year. While EA is free to form their opinion on this, as we know, many of the Battlefield player community dropped Battlefield 2042 and have yet to look back. Subsequently, many gamers have now adopted Team Jade’s Delta Force, with some gamers referring to it as a better Battlefield.
Zampella did make it clear that they “want it to be good out of the gate.” Subsequently, he explained why they aren’t trying Battlefield 2042‘s 128 player maps again:
“Yeah, the 128 player, did it make it more fun? Like…doing the number for the sake of the number doesn’t make any sense. We’re testing everything around what’s the most fun.
So like you said, the maps, once they get to a certain scale, become different. It’s a different play space, and I think you have to design around that. So we are designing something that is more akin to previous Battlefields.
I’d rather have nice, dense, really nice, well-designed play spaces. Some of them are really good. I can’t wait for you to see some of them.”
Zampella also shared his opinion on the game’s Specialists system:
“So I wasn’t there for 2042. I don’t know what the rationale was, but for me, it’s like the team tried something new. You have to applaud that effort. Not everybody liked it, but you got to try things. It didn’t work. It didn’t fit.
Specialist will not be coming back. So classes are kind of at the core of Battlefield, and we’re going back to that.”
These fall in line with Zampella’s claims that the next Battlefield will go back to the basics.
For all we know, Battlefield 2042 may have made huge money for EA. It could have been safely profitable and still not reach expectations. But EA also sees the reputational damage that release did to them, and that’s where they’re coming from with the big franchise reboot. We certainly hope they did at least enough things right to make the next Battlefield something that we do want to play, on the date that the game was actually released.
