A year has passed since the shooter”s chaotic launch. We spoke to the developers about how to bounce back after a false start
It”s been pretty much a year since Battlefield 2042 opened its doors – and caused an outcry of outrage and disappointment among fans. Serious technical problems, painfully missing features (no scoreboard), unpopular specialists instead of classes. It was a really bad start.
A lot of time has passed since then, many patches have been applied, Season 3 was recently released. Gradually the wind is changing on Steam, the user reviews of the last 30 days speak a completely different language than at release. Battlefield 2042 is making a slow, hard-won comeback.
We spoke to the developers of the shooter. In the interview they tell us how they experienced the chaotic time after the launch, what keeps the team together in crises – and how to win back alienated fans.
Who did we talk to? We did several interviews, talking to four people about Battlefield 2042:
- Ryan McArthur (Senior Producer, DICE)
- Nika Bender (Producer, DICE)
- Alexia Christofi (Associate Producer, DICE)
- Byron Beede (General Manager, Battlefield)
How was the launch for the developers?
“Of course everyone was disappointed,” is how Alexia puts it. They wanted to deliver something to the fans that would excite them, that they would really enjoy playing. And the launch of the predecessor Battlefield 5 didn”t exactly go smoothly. The fact that Battlefield 2042 came off even worse with the community was painful for the developers. But instead of letting themselves be paralysed, they decided to get straight to work.
“Very soon, almost immediately after launch, we sat down and looked closely at the feedback. Thought about how we could deal with it and how we could get changes going as quickly as possible. We tweaked the balancing and the aesthetics, adjusted things to the specialist and so on. We did a lot to try and make the game what we wanted to achieve “
Alexia Christofi
We also wanted to know if the massive negative feedback surprised the developers – couldn”t the launch disaster have been foreseen? No, at least not completely, as the developers Nika and Alexia explain. That”s mainly because of how great games are made.
The development of a new Battlefield is not a linear process, but the individual parts of the game are only put together shortly before the end. This means that developers often don”t even know what the complete finished product will look like, but work focused on their part. In addition, with a multiplayer title, many bugs only appear when tens of thousands of players flood the servers.
We also wanted to know if the massive negative feedback surprised the developers – couldn”t the launch disaster have been foreseen? No, at least not completely, as the developers Nika and Alexia explain. That”s mainly because of how great games are made.
The development of a new Battlefield is not a linear process, but the individual parts of the game are only put together shortly before the end. This means that developers often don”t even know what the complete finished product will look like, but work focused on their part. In addition, with a multiplayer title, many bugs only appear when tens of thousands of players flood the servers.
The Covid pandemic and the sudden complete change in the work situation as a result was also a huge hurdle. For the first time, everyone was sitting at home while working on Battlefield, spontaneous exchanges were no longer as easy as they used to be in the office. The regulations in Sweden had come into force virtually overnight, so no orderly transition was possible.
How do you bounce back after a nightmare launch?
In the interview, no one talks much about the reasons why Battlefield 2042 was so badly received. They have long been discussed, for example here in our trailer check. Much more exciting: How do you weather such a storm as a developer without the team falling apart? How do you motivate yourself to trudge to work in the morning on a game that many have already declared dead? You can”t do it alone, but only if you stick together and believe in a good ending, say Nika and Alexia:
You have to have people around you to lift you up again. We draw so much energy from working with others. The team was pretty motivated right after the launch, we thought to ourselves, we can do this. We”ll keep at it and we”ll turn it around.
The developers quickly realised: Season 1 can”t be released like this, first a lot of things have to be fixed in the basic game. But of course a live service game urgently needs new content, otherwise many people will be bored and move on to the next shooter, which might even be free. Making a decision here was anything but easy. But urgently necessary, as Ryan explains to us:
We sat down and went through our options. And our decision was, we have to move the first season so that we can have the best possible game experience. That was a tough decision and it was really hard to ask the company to do that. I didn”t know how they would react. But our fairly new leadership immediately saw that this was the right way to go. They supported us completely.
So the Season 1 launch was delayed, in favour of patches and updates, it was only after six months that it was ready. And it became a perceived turning point, after which things steadily picked up. General Manager Byron tells us:
Season 1 was an important moment for us (…). As I said, it was a difficult decision to push the planned release of Season 1 to June. We knew that this was a long time for players to wait for new content, but we needed the time to improve the core game beforehand.
When Season 1 came out after a lot of work and we saw the positive reactions to the content, that felt like confirmation that the decision was right. Since then, the Battlefield team has been steadily taking the game to new heights. We”re seeing more players join us with every Season, including Season 3 again. It”s a testament to what a great job the team has done.
How do you win back alienated fans anyway?
We also asked how it is possible to get fans back after a failed launch. The developers told us about three important pillars.
- Return promotions: Battlefield 2042 is offering Free Weeks in December, during which players can try out the shooter for free to see for themselves how it is progressing. For PC players, the offer runs from 1 to 5 December 2022 via Steam.
- Showing instead of talking: You have to demonstrate to players that you listen to their critical feedback and implement it. The best way to do this is to tackle problems head on and make a noticeable improvement to the game experience as quickly as possible.
- Clear communication: Of course, conversations are still important to make fans feel valued. He says it is important to be as clear as possible about what is being worked on and where improvements are coming soon. For example in this video:
For Ryan, this rebuilding of lost trust is a long process that is never quite finished:
You don”t just win them back once and have it done. I think we have to win them back with every patch, every release, every day. We always have to listen to them.
What”s next for Battlefield 2042?
By now we are in the middle of Season 3, which among other things brings back the much desired classes. Shouldn”t they have listened to the fans right away? Are the wishes of the players always a good guide? Ryan comments like this:
Players are very good at expressing what they want. But not necessarily why they actually want it. Translating that is then the job of designers. An example is the scoreboard. We initially decided against including a classic scoreboard because we didn”t want to fuel the perceived pressure to perform, but wanted a social shooter. Of course, every multiplayer shooter is competitive somewhere, but you can also overdo it. In the end, we found a good compromise between our principles and the wishes of the fans, I think.
The work on Battlefield 2042 is far from over, at least two more seasons are explicitly confirmed. But the devs” tasks have changed since launch: Alexia and Nika tell us that they now have much more room for new feature ideas. Since the biggest problems have been solved, the teams can work on new visions. We wanted to know how they decide which proposals to implement and which to discard in such a huge game. Not so easy, the two developers explain:
We often sit down together and discuss it. There is no generally valid procedure. The central question is always, how much does this benefit the players? How much effort can we put into improving their experience? How much money does it cost to develop the feature? How much development time does it take? We have this huge list of things we”d like to implement and it”s a real group exercise to decide what we”re going to do next.
Okay, so there”s plenty more to come for Battlefield 2042. There”s already been a preview of the upcoming seasons, complete with map reworks and new specialist. But when will the point be reached where the developers are really satisfied? Nika, Alexia and Ryan all give the same answer: never!
“Oh, I”m never completely happy,” Ryan says, laughing. “There”s always more to improve. But I am proud of what the team has achieved. To fight your way back up like that after a launch like that, really hardly any other team would have done so well. “
A look behind the curtain: curry pizza, unicorns and a strong team
Finally, we asked the developers for personal stories they might like to share with us. After all, we”ve heard so many times that the team is so great, how exactly do you have to imagine that?
Alexia and Nika give us a particularly charming glimpse behind the scenes: they tell us that the DICE team in Sweden gathers in a room (or virtually arrives) for every season or update launch and munches on pizza together. In Sweden, however, pizza is often interpreted … creatively. With lots of curry powder on it, for example. Or kebap pizza. Pineapple sounds completely harmless compared to that!
Nika also shares her favourite memory from work with us: she loves unicorns more than anything else (in the interview she also sits at a laptop decorated with unicorn stickers). Of course, they don”t necessarily fit into the Battlefield setting, but as a surprise, the team included a matching icon for her in Season 3:
