Battlefield V - What Happened?

[Music] [Music] welcome back to another growing grabbing lee depressing episode of what happened the show where we chronicled various video game development disasters from a wide range of publishers almost never focusing our efforts on what people call the usual suspects you know you know we don't reach for that low-hanging fruit here but don't worry a your EA is all that EA's jokes aside thanks to Josh Silvestri for nominating the subject of today's episode which if you give a quick cursory glance towards the video title will reveal that it is battlefield 5 our let's see the second I don't care it's another embarrassing release coming from the 2012 and 2013 consumerist Swersky in America Award winner while not even getting close to the revolving door of various development or PR farts that plagued fallout 76 or anthem battlefield 5 was no slouch its problems break down into a cornucopia of categories and sub-categories misguided and tone-deaf marketing campaigns too little too late course correction a buggy broken launch period missing features lack of transparency miss deadlines cancelled modes broken promises lack of consistent content lack of proper dev time and testing and pressure from the competition all the hallmarks of the standard EA what happened template so without further ado let's put on our babe's pull our chairs closer to the trough then let's dig in now despite being called battlefield 5 it is in fact incredibly like the 15th I think game in the series which of course includes various spin-offs and the like the battlefield that preceded it a battlefield one that that's not because was a remake or chronologically the story it's because it was based on World War one was very much a tough act to follow yay as his tradition had some very lofty expectations and was placing on this big 2016 release these lofty expectations were that they wanted the game to sell 14 million units worldwide which is just such a ridiculous number I mean how can you put this unrealistic prediction on it okay then so yes no matter which way you slice that dice the Swedish developer behind the series who also gifted the world of Mirror's Edge and then cursed the world with Mirror's Edge catalyst had a mighty big task ahead of them and they only had two years to do it and with roughly half their workforce to do it with dices output ever since being bought by EA in 2006 had a habit of fluctuating any given year they'll have just one release the next two of them and then the year after that zero of them there was never a consistent pattern unlike say oh I don't know Call of Duty its biggest single competitor following their monstrous success with battlefield 1 in 2016 they're really Star Wars Battlefront 2 the next year and that went well and when I say well I mean Battlefront 2 is still a constant request for this very show all this to say is that EA probably wanted to maybe mask the smell of that dying tauntaun and hope to do so with another battlefield and maybe raise their profit margins in the process now you can see where all of this is going we just released a very divisive game yeah let's go with that that costs a fair bit of money that's accurate and and we're going to need to keep working on said game to make sure things don't get worse meanwhile let's have the same guys push out another game fingers crossed to make people forget the [ __ ] that we did twelve months ago yay the numbers don't lie and they spell disaster for you sacrifice regardless the marketing machine started to grind it's giant gears and spin it's giant wheels and let the world know that a new battlefield was on the horizon and would be dubbed battlefield 5 though it takes place during world war ii which going by the last number in convention it should be called battlefield 2 was already a battlefield to soak then battlefield 2 28 knots we [ __ ] it all up just call it five weeds whatever since there wasn't a whole lot of time to create something brand new here you know a unique setting or a gameplay hook they tried to do some surface level things differently instead even though this technically was a sequel to Battlefield 4 which had a large cohesive single-player story dice was still opting for the smaller bite-sized campaigns of bf1 women exist in the world that's new let's put them in there a little skill trees for each class and and let's have them let's have them make like little forts to fend off invaders and yeah Bob's your uncle the thing with a lot of battlefield fans though which you could say of any large fanbase is that they want everything in one bag but they don't want the bag to be heavy they want something familiar but not too familiar something different but not not too different and wild ideas like women were not taken well you don't like having a woman in your squad the battlefield series prided itself on historical accuracy something up to that point it had absolutely never wavered from so many fans let their feelings be known to EA and dice both companies for their part defended these decisions and cited several examples of women actually participating in the fighting during the war but also added that they would always prioritize fun over historical accuracy but despite what they said very quickly the marketing campaign started to change tact ever so slightly and tried their best to lean into the tone most have come to expect from the series the last thing EA needed here was another barrage of vicious review bombings of their next big expensive war game leading up to its November 20th 2018 release and a man Seuk well some but certainly not all of the tumult coming from the fanbase in fact an industry analysis firm hey I know this is random but does anyone remember Michael Pachter Michael Pak claims that pre-orders for battlefield 5 were down 85 percent when compared to that year's Call of Duty which I can't imagine made EA very happy it seemed like a lot of people were waiting for the game to you know actually launch and then judge it based on the final product but battlefields had a habit of releasing in less than optimal States battlefield 5 kept with that tradition among audio mixing issues consistent crashes problems with the in-game currency loot boxes being pushed at every conceivable second and many modes and features m.i.a the skies were swelling with planes and the bombs started to fall if a buggy launch had been the only issue things would have ironed out rather quickly but the jump from World War 1 to World War 2 made the game feel very similar to the last one and that was only two years old furthermore there were some baffling but tiny changes to the moment-to-moment gameplay that really didn't need to change the time to kill or ttk for each weapon was altered making long-standing guns worked differently than they had in the last couple of entries if you don't play battlefield let me put it like this let's say one day Capcom just changes every single facet of every single normal special or super move in Street Fighter just BAM no warning the damage range priority just everything's being rewritten learn it all over again [ __ ] you what's worse here though is that later in battlefield fives lifecycle they changed it again after everyone had gotten used to those changes they didn't even want in the first place of course aside from all this my new show the main fault of the game was promising new modes and features and simply not delivering on them yay and dice announced that battlefield 5 was going to get its own act surprised battle royale mode dubbed firestorm now the thing about battle Royales is that well they're usually free or the game they're attached too isn't being chased by angry villagers with pitchforks while the mode certainly wasn't terrible it very quickly started to hemorrhage its player base and you need a player base for the entire concept of battle royale matches to even work it was always played with small but consistent issues that players won and fixed bit dice had no time for and the mode has received no real update since that's because they were busy trying to deliver other modes that also saw their own delays and fuck-ups combined-arms was a co-op mode that dice had demoed for the press before the base games launched but the final release version of the mode had been scaled back in several ways disappointing fans and critics there was also a mission generator which would theoretically have provided additional narrative content but I say theoretically because as of this writing it still hasn't manifested and that's because it won't dice and EA announced not even long ago that they would stop supporting battlefield 5 after its final June update which will vaguely consist of new content weapons and tweaks and if my eyes don't deceive me June puts that squarely in the middle of the year meaning that the game lasted for about eighteen months it's a telltale signs of a crew knowing when to abandon sinking ship as to further reasons why all this happened well dice is made of roughly 600 employees and while that seems like a lot there were so incredibly busy not just with battlefield but the continuous content updates and support of Star Wars Battlefront this Squeakquel which is no small task remember they had to redesign much of that game's economy and levelling system due to you know all the troubles as well as additional levels balance changes and characters that never included Darth Talon or Mara Jade this was an unexpected amount of work dice probably weren't expecting and stretched them thinner than usual leaving battlefield 5 to lag behind in obviously in many areas not to mention the game's biggest competitor Call of Duty delivered on many fronts where battlefield 5 failed it had a brand new engine a big single-player campaign ground war mode which was clearly aping battlefields larger scale skirmishes and if he got bored with firestorm and you most likely did well just enlist in Call of Duty's 100% free to play war zone he and I seemingly never had a chance with all that said there are still thousands of people playing Battlefield 5 every day just up considerably less than there was for their tour of world war 1 the last official numbers given by EA pegged the game at around 7 million copies sold and said it was a disappointing figure which is still so bonkers to me at the end of the day you can again chalk this up to EA mandating that a certain game has to be out by a certain time and they'll fix all the problems later on it happens in almost every story I've covered involving the electronic artists and they never really seem to learn oh this was a rush under baked product that lots of people didn't like [ __ ] well op let's just rush another under bait product into stores to make them forget about it you can't keep doing this you can't keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it okay to be better hopefully the next time a new battlefield is announced and by this point I wouldn't be surprised if it was called a battlefield 356 days over seven that dice gets the proper amount of time to polish bug tests and offer a good amount of content to appease players at launch because goddammit I don't want to have to make another ea focused episode tired if you know of any other video games or turbulent twisting tales of development he'll let me know in the comments below or light ray Adams you can storm the beaches of a flophouse VIP patreon to officially nominate the subject of your choosing for future episode see you next time and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 365,508

Rating: 4.822062 out of 5

Keywords: Battlefield V, Battlefield, EA, Electronic Arts, Dice, Video Game Disasters, Video Game Documentaries, What Happened?, wha happun, Matt McMuscles, Flophouse, FPS, Call of Duty

Id: DYSoMjOEfIQ

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/YoungDumbass]

One correction: Battlefield V came out alongside Call of Duty Black Ops 4, not Modern Warfare. Black Ops didn’t have a new engine or a story mode. Other than the Battle Royale I don’t really know what it did that was “new”

[u/ContraryPython]

Matt forgot that someone at EA responded to some criticism of the game prior to launch by saying “If you don’t like it, don’t buy it”. No, I’m not kidding, he actually said that. He also left the company some time after he said that.

[u/[deleted]]

I don't know what it is about Battlefield that brings out the most bone-headed comments from EA/DICE but there's a history of this shit well before BFV.

The two examples I can think of are the exec who said playing single-player games are like jacking off rather than fucking (ie playing multiplayer). And someone at DICE said during the lead-up to Battlefield 4 that they wouldn't have humor in single-player stories because mainstream gamers don't like humor and want "hard-boiled" stories, so in BF4 everyone acts like a huge asshole to each other and dies. HARD-BOILED BRO.

[u/PrimeName]

7 million copies sold = a failure in EA's mind

I can't even begin to understand the businessman-ness of this statement.

[u/Spartan448]

EA's biggest mistake with Battlefield V was starting a massive shitstorm about the role of women on the battlefields of the Second World War, and then having a campaign that not only doesn't even include the one front of the war in which women famously fought on equal footing to men, the one mission where you play as a woman, you play as a character that didn't even exist, where you lead a mission that historically wasn't led by a woman.

Like the Eastern Front is chock full of stories of women fighting on the frontlines and giving hell to the Nazis like no man could. Everyone loved All Ghilied Up in COD4, why not make the WWII version of that with one of the top Soviet snipers? Or perhaps the top scoring female fighter ace of history, whose first two kills were scored on German flying aces, one of whom was captured and thought his captors were playing a joke on him after he asked to meet the pilot who shot him down? Or the woman who wrote Stalin personally asking for her own tank to go fight on the frontlines, got it, became a legendary tank ace, and died jumping out of her tank to fix it while under heavy fire, and managing to fix it before getting caught by a stray bullet? Or the all-female anti-aircraft division that halted the German advance during Barbarossa for a full week because the Germans could not push them out of their position and the Soviet 85mm AA gun makes for as terrifyingly effective anti-tank gun as the German 88mm AA gun?

But I guess we're not allowed to play as Russians anymore. Playing as the literal fucking waffen SS is fine though apparently,

[u/Shrekt115]

The salt over at r/games yikes

[u/GoneRampant1]

This feels half finished. Like, Matt didn't mention Patrick Soderlund and several DICE staff using their daughters as an excuse for the increased prominence of women or the "Don't like it don't buy it" stuff. And from what I've heard, Battlefield 5's post launch is a whole other story alongside the delayed or cancelled features, like the community manager leaving, DICE barely resembling its old self and the team actively hating the community.

Just feels like he reached the game launch and went "Whelp I'm done," and just blamed Battlefront 2 for everything.

[u/The_Draigg]

I just wish we got more Battlefield games like Bad Company or 2142. Those ones had more soul than Battlefield V.

[u/ragasquid]

DICE has an LA and a Sweden studio. The former made Battlefront 2 and the latter made BFV. Also the ttk changes that pissed everyone off didn't happen at launch. They were changes made several months after release.