MeinMMO author Marko Jevtic has Battlefield 2042 long defended. The game has many serious and major bugs, but at its core, he saw a fundamentally solid shooter that just needs a bit of polish. However, he is now firmly convinced that there is nothing left to save here. And not just because the game has problems.
I have never seen such a huge disaster in gaming as Battlefield 2042. Anthem, Lawbreakers, Battleborn, Crucible, Hyperscape – these shooter flops were terrible, their failure predictable. But Battlefield 2042 takes the crown.
At release, I really liked the game. I defended Battlefield 2042, recommended it cautiously, and most importantly, I simply enjoyed playing it. I thought the foundation was good; it just needed polishing, like Battlefield 4 back in the day.
But after almost 6 months, I no longer believe that the game can ever realize its potential. On the contrary: After 6 months of poor decisions, PR disasters, and insufficient or even missing updates, I doubt that anything can still be saved here.
All efforts by the developers, no matter how good and well-intentioned, will come to nothing. Because not only does the game have fundamental problems that cannot simply be smoothed over; the trust of the players has completely disappeared, taking the players off the servers with it. It is particularly important to note that the trust has been lost in such an unbelievable way that Battlefield 2042 can hardly be evaluated as a game anymore.
Battlefield 2042 does not play as horrifically as it is made out to be
When the trailer for Battlefield 2042 came out, I was immediately excited: It showed things that make Battlefield and the community particularly special; things like C4 vehicles, Rendezooks, weather disasters of gigantic proportions. It was as if DICE wanted to show: We know the fans very well and will deliver exactly what they want.
When the game was finally playable, not much of these promises was to be seen. The problems of Battlefield 2042 are well known: The maps are far too large and terribly boring, the specialists do not feel like Battlefield, and the whimsical lines of the characters clash in a ridiculous way with the serious tone that the “nail-on-the-chalkboard” soundtrack wants to convey.
And yet I liked the game. In the first weeks after release, I put in many hours and had a lot of fun. I felt like one of the few people who actually enjoyed playing the game.
Even if I stand more or less alone with the opinion, I like the specialists. They may not have felt “like Battlefield”, but they played well. The name was actually misleading: None of the specialists had a solidified role that enforced a specific playstyle.
Instead, the specialists are designed to be used very flexibly. For example, the healer Falck can be played passively and heal her teammates from a distance or be extremely aggressive with her self-healing.
In my games, I also felt that other players took their roles more seriously thanks to the specialists. It seemed to me that the Falcks and Angels from Battlefield 2042 revived me more often than the medics in the old Battlefield titles.
The plus system with the replaceable weapon attachments at any time is still brilliant, as it further emphasized the focus on flexibility. Battlefield purists may not have liked these changes, but I had a blast with this level of possible improvisation.
And when I played with my colleagues from the editorial team, Tarek, Maik, and Benedict, we had incredibly fun rounds where all these game systems harmonized almost perfectly. Yes, the game has always had huge, fundamental problems. No, the maps have never been good as a whole. But I still had a lot of fun because even a bad Battlefield can still be a good shooter.
This is why I also placed Battlefield 2042 on the list of the 15 best online shooters in 2022. Some MeinMMO colleagues were against it – the mood around the game was simply too bad just a few weeks after the release, the problems too obvious. But I thought that some ideas in the game really work well and that the developers did really good work in parts.
However, what has happened since then made me reconsider this spot on the leaderboard. The shooter does not appear in the ranking anymore. And this is only partly due to the game itself.
The months after release were so embarrassing that one cannot recover from it
For months, the player numbers of Battlefield 2042 have been sinking to a tragic level. Every bad decision was followed by a disastrous communication, and the stories surrounding the game became increasingly bizarre. Here is a small, incomplete selection:
- EA said that Battlefield 2042 failed due to elite PC players and the early release of Halo Infinite
- Cheat providers have given up on the game because it runs so poorly.
- In South Africa, one person could hold the entire player base of the region “hostage”.
- Hundreds of thousands of players demanded their money back with a petition.
And although players have sometimes shelled out €100 for 4 seasons in a year, this service game is still in “Season 0” after almost 6 months. The GaaS model works so poorly in Battlefield 2042 that the in-game shop hasn’t even sold a single item.
The first months of Battlefield 2042 were an incredibly embarrassing chain of events, decisions, and stories. Regardless of how good the game may be in and of itself or how much more polish it could have – this presentation was so disastrously and embarrassingly bad on all levels that one cannot recover from it.
EA could put the most competent developers and the smartest PR people at the helm, and with the crowning of Vince Zampella as the new Battlefield boss, they have already tried that. But how can even laudable improvements like a finally usable scoreboard, actually good playable and interesting maps, or a retreat on the increased player count in matches distract from the fact that pretty much every mistake that can be made was committed over the months?
No change, no update, no change of heart will be able to straighten out Battlefield 2042 again. Because by now it is not even the gameplay that has broken the game. It is the embarrassing performances surrounding the game, which have been surpassed with unbelievable regularity repeatedly over months, that have sunk the game.
When Battlefield 2042, for example, slipped from one incomprehensible PR disaster to another for weeks, the official Twitter account promoted a unlockable “Tactical Beanie” for the most annoying specialist in the game.
The few players still playing Battlefield 2042 are now just mocking in the in-game chat. About the massive bugs, the ridiculous skins, the missing content, the annoying lines of the specialists, and the thoughtless statements from pitiful developers.
Rarely has a game been so clearly marked by the fact that a stock portfolio is where the heart should be. Unfortunately, the game has not even managed to sell skins. Battlefield 2042 is hardly a game anymore; it is a slapstick comedy.
No decision in the world will ensure that one can view the shooter primarily as a shooter again instead of as a chain of embarrassing messes. This cart cannot be pulled out of the mud anymore, no matter what is done. Only a complete restart can help.
