Battlefield 2042 had a disappointing launch this last November, and EA has finally acknowledged it blaming both Halo Infinite’s multiplayer release and COVID-19.
Xfire.com reports that EA held a quarterly “Town Hall” meeting call where the company gives insight into updates on the business. Much of that call spent time discussing the rocky launch of Battlefield 2042 and what exactly went wrong. Laura Miele, EA’s Chief Studios Officer, went on to say that the game “failed to meet the expectations of our players, and also clearly missed our own expectations.”
Part of the issue came from development issues with the gaming engine Frostbite. “The Frostbite version they were on was so old they had to go back and update,” Miele said. “So it was basically putting the game on a new engine.”
Miele also cited the company’s adopting a work from home environment in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the issue, “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.”
Despite its issues, Miele did say the game received good feedback after its Beta with players saying “this feels like Battlefield, Battlefield is back, this is my Battlefield.” Despite that, the game released coincided with the surprise release of Halo Infinite’s multiplayer campaign. While Battlefield did get some positive reviews, it was just not as polished as Halo Infinite. Battlefield 2042 included a number of bugs, and currently has a user score on Metacritic of 2.1.
A petition was even started with players demanding their money back after playing the disappointing game. EA continues to say they’ll push to improve Battlefield 2042.
