Battlefield Briefing: The Journey to Season One [ Edited ]

[Straatford87]

You’ve waited patiently to hear from us on what we’re doing to address the issues with Battlefield 2042 that you have told us about, and the direction you can expect to see us take in the months ahead. Today we are stating our team's commitment to bring the game up to the highest standards that we all hold for the franchise.

We have heard you. So, we are heavily invested and committed to the future of Battlefield 2042 – working on taking action on multiple fronts to address feedback and implement extensive fixes to the game, key features that are important to you, and getting team play where it needs to be.

We’ve had to make some big decisions to ensure that our next set of updates can be focused on delivering these improvements, with the most substantial one being to move the release date of our first Season to early Summer. This decision gives us the time to focus on improving the Battlefield 2042 experience while finalizing the development of our seasonal content to ensure that it all reaches our standard for quality.

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UPCOMING UPDATES

Here’s a snapshot of the features we are bringing into the game as soon as possible:

• SCOREBOARD - In our next update, we’ll be adding a refreshed in-round Scoreboard alongside further changes we’ve worked on since the holidays. This will be an ongoing evolution from what was shown in the work in progress we shared recently. We have heard your feedback around including two tables and separating your own team versus the enemy, and are working on incorporating that for the release. K/D scoring and End of Round reporting will also be coming in a future update.
  
  
• ALL PLATFORM VOICE COMMUNICATION - The arrival of voice communication (VOIP) is just the start of the improvements we’re bringing to enhance team play and communications.
  
  
• PLAYER PROFILE - Giving you a better overview of your career on the battlefield and how far you have to go for your next unlock.

For team play, you can expect us to incorporate a clearer, tighter squad loop, a refined ping system, and an improved reward loop for when you and your squad play the objective. Gunplay will continue to receive feedback-based improvements too.

Portal remains an integral part of the game and we will continue to expand its tools, modes, and tweak player experience gains. Finally, we have a team analysing Specialists and working on them. We’re not quite ready to talk about actions we’ll be taking, but as soon as we are, you will hear from us.

A NEW FEEDBACK LOOP

We’re committed to pushing up the quality of the game, both through our updates, and how rapidly we will respond to critical issues in the live environment. We are also going to clarify the direction we’re taking, and what’s motivating our decisions to bring improvements to the game. So expect to get more insight as we expand our existing feedback loops to involve you, our players, more directly. 

Our team has identified several areas we’re targeting for improvements. This is how we will be incorporating your feedback going forward:

1. We will present specific, major focus areas to you along with our current thinking, detailing where we’re planning to make changes.
   
   
2. We’ll then take the time to observe and listen to the conversations that you go on to have about both the area of concern and our proposals for adjustment.
   
   
3. Later, you’ll hear from us on the topic again but this time your feedback will have been factored into our consideration and guided the decisions made for improvements.

These conversations will be centralised, and accessible here on the Battlefield website, and summarised across our channels.

Later this month, this process will kick off with one of our key focus areas, map design. We want to outline to you our vision for how we’re going to approach and factor into our new maps enhancements to the gameplay experience, by addressing feedback on openness and lack of cover in key areas.

Big topics like map design will be loud and broadly shared, but for more nuanced areas of the game (such as Portal logic) we may have those conversations on smaller scales. The important part here is that all these conversations will happen publicly, and with everyone invited to take part.

Some of these feedback loops will cover bigger areas than others, and some loops will take longer to complete and realise in the game than others. That’s not an indication of how we might prioritise issues with the game, but a reflection on the nature of game development. Changes to our maps and core gameplay will take time.

Our commitment is to explain our reasoning behind future decisions and to make sure you understand where we stand on your feedback. We want you to see more of the big picture of where we’re going and incorporate more of what we’re already hearing to ensure that our work is meaningful to you.  

We’ll start this process ahead of the launch of our next update. You’ll read about it here on our website when we start these conversations, and if you’re already following Battlefield across social media, you won’t miss it when we do.

LOOKING AHEAD TO SEASON ONE

When Season One arrives in early Summer, it will mark the start of a year where we’ll deliver four Seasons, four new Specialists, and new locations, along with more completely new content. We know that this release is later than anticipated for many of you who purchased or upgraded to the Year 1 Pass as part of the Gold and Ultimate Editions. To acknowledge and thank you for your patience and continued support, those players will receive an exclusive bundle containing a Specialist skin, weapon and vehicle skins, a melee weapon and Player Card, all to be delivered in the next update.

We’ll continue to keep you informed of future updates via the @BattlefieldComm Twitter account. You can also follow along with our tracking of Known Issues and game changes that we’re able to make in real time on our Battlefield forums.

We are committed to, and focused on, ensuring Battlefield 2042 lives up to our ambitions and your expectations — it’s a task we’re dedicated to accomplishing.

Ryan McArthur (Senior Producer), on behalf of the Battlefield team

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The details listed in this Blog may change as we listen to community feedback and continue developing and evolving our Live Service & Content. We will strive to keep our community as informed as possible. 

NO WEAPON, MILITARY VEHICLE OR GEAR MANUFACTURER IS AFFILIATED WITH OR HAS SPONSORED OR ENDORSED THIS GAME.

[Gerhard_Koepke]

The communication is very much appreciated, so thanks for that. 

While a scoreboard, VOIP and a user profile are fine and probably fast enough to implement, they are not changing how the game feels to me as an infantry-focused player. I am actually looking forward to the more substantial changes that will improve the core of the game - map design, vehicle balance, squad loop and specialist rework. Unfortunately, this will also take a lot of time. :/ But it's fine, better than not doing anything at all.

I'm also looking forward to the EoR report changes, as I already gave my feedback on the whole EoR flow in fine detail. Currently, it's something I would love to just skip entirely.

Speaking of "skipping entirely": what about Hazard Zone? Why was it not mentioned at all in this statement?

Finally, let's hope, you guys can keep your promise of better communication this time. It has been promised again and again (e.g. before BF2042, where we were supposed to get dev diaries and letter from the front etc. and not much has changed sadly), so try to keep it up and not just stop, because it's hard. Of course it's hard. Game dev is generally hard. I know from experience myself. 

And even here on Answers HQ, when I try to give constructive feedback far away from the noise of twitter and reddit, I don't really get the feeling it is heard and acknowledged, apart from getting some XP. 

Anyway, I do enjoy the game in some areas and I am looking forward to get an even better version soon.

[AEIDOLONE]

@Straatford87 I, for the first time, don't agree with the community being not happy about the delay, even though I can totally understand the frustration I feel happy about this announcement.

At this point we cannot have both - all the bugs fixed, features added AND Season 1. It just takes time.

So, I'll rather take the delay THAT IS IF THEY ACTUALLY STICK to all those promises, fix all the big bugs and add some features.

It's a good call, first fix the game, but PROPERLY, than add new content in S1.

GG just please don't disappoint again. Thank you.

[cglavin]

This statement has caused me to uninstall your game.  

Your marketing for 2042 was a complete lie.  Your "live service" model was also a complete lie.  In the face of the dumpster fire of a game that you unethically marketed and sold to fans and consumers, you now offer "skins" to them to make up for the lies you sold the game on...  after releasing a "battlefield" game with no classes and fewer guns, maps, content and features than ANY battlefield game since before BF2.  You clearly didn't bother testing the garbage maps you made for 2042 or how they played with 128 players, and I have no faith that you'll test any of your "fixes" or whatever garbage "specialists" and "skins" you may end up releasing down the line.  You should be embarrassed and ashamed with the status of the game both now and at launch.

Quite honestly, the "Journey to Season One" statement just reminds me of EA's Anthem release and "live service" roadmap, its subsequent failure, the "delay" of the roadmap and a "commitment" to "fix" things...  and then the inevitable scrapping of any roadmap at all as well as any effort to fix the game...  and the game is now dead.  And that's where I see battlefield...  on the same path as Anthem, with Dice and EA inevitably going to abandon the game just like how Dice abandoned the promised roadmap for BF5 to work on this trash heap and EA abandoned Anthem.  Anyone who thinks this isn't the future of battlefield is just gullible given all the evidence from Dice and EA's previous actions.

Your actions and lies have squandered what little trust I had in EA or Dice to fix battlefield. I do not believe you will fix the game to a state that I'd even want to play it again because the lack of care and testing you put into the launch isn't going to have changed in 3 months...  it'll just be the same lack of care and testing going forward.  I'll just go back to the old BF games from back when Dice actually cared about making a good product for its fans.  Clearly, those days are long, long gone.

[ConanDLibrarian]

@Straatford87 We greatly appreciate the update and I am glad to hear that it appears you want our feedback. 

Sadly, it might be too late. Servers online currently are full of ai, and most of my IRL friends have moved on because of crashes, frustration at joining on each other, or just because 2042 isn't fun. You all burned so much goodwill here and in other online spaces by rarely responding to bug reports or constructive criticism from us. There are THOUSANDS of unanswered bug reports here on AnswersHQ. Why should we believe you're suddenly going to start listening to us and being more responsive? 

Everything you have done up to this point leads me to believe that 2042 is dead in the water and you're doing the bare minimum needed to not be sued by those of us who pre-ordered content. 

I have lots of other things that I could be doing right now, but I care about this franchise so I post about the issues here. To be continually ignored is maddening, saddening, and frankly it's insulting.

 I am a veteran of Battlefield. Playing Battlefield is how I connect and hang out with longtime friends.

I want this game to succeed. Do you?

Do you have the support you need from your bosses to adequately deal with us as community? Are you truly empowered to take our concerns to those who can change things for the better? 

Do your bosses listen to you when you describe what we want to see in the game? 

I think you guys need to be looking inward instead of outward. The problem is inside of the studio. We've offered solutions. We get almost zero feedback from you. I can't tell you why that is-- the answer is inside EA/DICE.

[Nonstiq]

Are you going to make the Hazard Zone achievements/trophies achievable at some stage? I haven't been able to find a single game 2 months after release, let alone enough games to reach the 25 extractions/50 drives/squad not dying goals.  Even if you fix up its issues - which you did not address in your statement - I'm not convinced there will be enough players to get games to start.

[AdjareGudju]

I played BF Bad Company for 2 8 years, the only thing I wanted from 2042 was to play Bad Company 2 cards with new graphics, and having more servers and server castomization attracted me very much. I bought the game just for that. In the first month while on the main screen was the bookmark "Bad company 2 rush" I played and enjoyed, although there were many technical problems and even a wild imbalance of teams. Now, entering the portal without this tab in general, in the list of servers there are only servers with a large ping that for me who does not live in Europe is a big drawback, the rest of such cards are filled with bots. Having created their own server with bots, other players do not go there, and if you create a server without bots, then I cannot wait for live players.
What I want:
I want to have official EA servers for Bad company 2 assault in portal. I also want in the portal server editor, I can edit rules for rush mode. I also want to see the rest of the cards from BC2 - Oasis. Atacama desert. Harvest Day. Laguna Presa. Nelson Bay. White Pass. Port Valdez. ​
You can add DLC BC2 Vietnam as a separate game, I look forward to it very much.
There are also a lot of very good maps in BF3, especially I am waiting for the metro map
First of all, you need to correct the error
entering the game, and it is easily solved in fact here I showed how it is solved https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXEC9_9_gmE. Give a clue to solve the problem, on the same screen with an error.
You chose a very risky path with the main game 2042, in the end you still do not know what you will be able to do in the end. But you can just save the game adding, what we loved so much in the Battlefield series, everything that's been tested for years, just give us back old Battlefield parts in the new chart.
I like weapons from 2042, I like the hook from a specialist, too. But everything else is not.
If you throw the game in raw form, then your next parts of the game are not interesting to me. Because I'm gonna think I was cheated on money. Nevertheless, I am sure that if you finish the game, everyone who writes angry comments will return to the game and calm down. At least return what we really liked before

[IIIIWhiteWolfIII]

Find a solution to this freezing problem now.

[SCUBASTEVE120]

Honestly Dice I'm so disappointed in this decision. In my opinion the game plays fine but the lack of content is the problem. If you check my battlefield stats I have 3000+ hours across all your games (not sure about 2042, not included) I have stood by this game since launch patiently waiting. But 2 game modes and 6 maps (PS4 player) will not cut it till summer. Also do I have to own season pass to get new maps specialist and weapons?!?! If so I will uninstall and never ever look back. 70 dollars was enough for this lacking game to have free maps

[Pinkmayonnaise1]

Thank you for the update!

I really like the idea of portal and I think a Rush mode I made (64-64) with all of the maps in circulation would be awesome with full XP allowance (especially to add more rotation into the game in the meantime)! Can I request it to be featured? PSN: The_Good_WIdget Lobby code:aatc3d

Also, do you think if XP continues to be limited, we could look at a community in-game voting system each week or every two weeks where the top voted modes made by the community could be elevated to features for the full XP privilege? I think this could cause players to strive for more intended game modes for an opportunity to be featured!

Thank you and keep up the hard work the team is trying to make the game what it should be!