To better support Battlefield 2042, DICE will be inspired by the Respawn method (Titanfall)

Despite a launch that “did not meet the expectations of its publisher and fans”, Battlefield 2042 is not abandoned, said again yesterday Andrew Wilson when posting of the last quarterly report of Electronic Arts. The thing that changed from the previous quarter was EA’s CEO finally communicating a long term plan to provide the means to achieve this.

That’s why EA is planning very soon a “scratch” restructuring of DICEunder the supervision of the founder and former head of Respawn Entertainment (Titanfall, Apex Legends) Vince Zampellawho took the reins of the Battlefield franchise at the same time as the departure of the head of the studio Oskar Gabrielsonat the time of the release of Battlefield 2042.

We take a long-term view here. [Battlefield] is one of the great franchises in our industry, built by one of the greatest teams around, and we expect it to continue to grow and truly become an important part of our portfolio for many, many years to come. to come. We have incredible leadership on this team now, they’re rethinking the development process from the ground up and really following the Vince Zampella/Respawn Entertainment model of “delivering fun as directly as possible”. They’ve done thousands of updates for the community, quality of life work, and are starting to get to the good essence of the game.

Indeed, since the launch of Battlefield 2042 in November 2021, DICE rolled out quite a few optimization updates, balancingor even features requested by the community to try to rectify the situation, while unfortunate game choices and level designs were tracked and analyzed. But for complete a construction site of a whole new nature, it would seem than a deep questioning working methods of DICE – and supporting studios like Ripple Effect Criterion Games – is essential.

I think we still have work to do on site, and the team is committed to doing this work for the good of the community and beyond. Once we get to a place where we’re comfortable with the gameplay experience and with the base game, you can expect us to invest in the game at a stage well beyond the current situation.

It is difficult to know if completely change working methods of a gargantuan studio like DICE will make it possible to change things in the medium and long term, but take inspiration from how Respawn Entertainment works is not, in principle, not a bad idea.

Indeed, the studio created by the former founders of Infinity Ward (Call of Duty) has seen few missteps since its inception in 2010, and is currently enjoying of a rather positive radiation with gamers, especially following the success of Apex Legends and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. The main Respawn franchise, titanfall, is no slouch, but was only a success of esteem long enough after the release of Titanfall 2… whose release had been overshadowed by that of Battlefield 1, the same week. Holy irony of fate.

Unfortunately, although Battlefield V met a similar fate when it was released, we now wonder if the renovation of Battlefield 2042 won’t come too late from a community perspective. Currently, the number of competitive players on Steam is struggling to exceed 2000 playersand we still have no news from the first season of content planned which had been postponed for this summer.