Battlefield 2042 post-mortem blames poorly-received launch on remote working (and Halo)

Cutting corners: This week, EA and DICE gave the most explicit acknowledgment yet of their failures associated with the launch of Battlefield 2042 last year. However, even this admission laid much of the blame on external factors, including the pandemic and a competing game’s launch.

Xfire reports that EA COO Laura Miele led a post-mortem discussion on Battlefield 2042 during an internal Town Hall tele-meeting. In the 20-minute talk, she went over the challenges EA and DICE went through, leading to the game being one of the most unpopular in Steam’s history.

Hundreds of thousands of BF2042 buyers have signed a petition asking for a full refund from EA.

Since day one, players complained about numerous bugs and a long list of missing features compared to previous Battlefield games like server browsers, VOIP, persistent lobbies, and a lot more.

Miele said one issue with BF2042’s development is that DICE had to significantly rework Frostbite, calling what the game shipped on essentially a whole new engine. Xfire notes that this rebuild took a year and a half, which may have taken development time away from other features.

Switching to working from home halfway into development because of the global pandemic also introduced unexpected challenges. However, Miele also claimed that after they’d started to make some progress on fixing bugs following last summer’s beta, Microsoft launched Halo Infinite in a much more polished state, which made the latest Battlefield look bad.

From now on, EA plans to keep working to improve the game. In that respect, the company delayed the season-one expansion until some time this summer.