Battlefield 2042's launch hasn't exactly gone swimmingly. Players have their own theories as to why this recent instalment dropped the ball so much, with complaints made about a lack of content, and performance issues. This has caused players to drop off, returning to previous entries in the series.
Now, almost three months after launch, EA has reportedly held a "town hall" meeting on how it all went so wrong. Several reasons were given as to why the game was released with so many issues, ranging from problems with the engine, troubles with working from home, and being blindsided by Halo Infinite's launch.
This comes from a report courtesy of insider, Tom Henderson. According to Henderson, the meeting took place yesterday, and sheds some light on what higher-ups believe the problems are.
One of the reasons cited by EA's chief studios officer, Laura Miele, is the fact that so many were working from home. "Add up all of this new innovation, all of this ambition for the new project, and then you add a global pandemic halfway into the project, where the game teams had to work from home, we ended up with more new variables in development than we have ever experienced before", Milele said.
Because of this, Milele revealed that the game's level of recorded bugs reached "historic levels for a DICE game", which looked all the worse when compared to the polished Halo Infinite.
The Frostbite engine also takes its fair share of the blame, as it has done with other messy development cycles. This time around, it was because Frostbite apparently needed an upgrade to get it ready for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S generation of gaming. This is said to have taken 18 months - over a year that could have been spent solely on polishing Battlefront. This also meant the team was working on what was essentially a new engine, learning as they went along.
The report says that, to combat this, the team will be restructured to encourage a more "streamlined development process". It's not known what this means for the workers, but EA stressed that living up to its players' expectations, rather than its own, will now be the priority.