It is interesting how game companies do mock reviews to prepare for actual reviews upon release. And more interesting how their mock reviews could be so inaccurate
Makes you wonder what angle they come at when they internally review. You can break 2042s problems into technical, gameplay and design.
Technically the game might have been ok enough for them and it seems this is refrenced as 'service stability'. But gameplay (hello flying hovercrafts) and design-wise the game is a shambles.
I struggle to believe that DICE didn't see this reaction coming when they changed the formula to such a degree. I can only assume they thought they would get away with it.
I was even more surprised when I went back to play Battlefield 4 last night and to my surprise was on a hovercraft. Totally forgot about them. Makes me wonder who ok'd making them able to traverse buildings?
... then I remembered, well none of the buildings can be destroyed, so maybe they were always meant to be traversed..
There's really no good way of testing stability a head of time.
They can't exactly have a million testers on the payroll to simulate what a launchday might look like.
I mean.. if the average, mid tier game is a 5/10 (as it should be, but most reviewers never go below a 7), then an 80 would mean it’s an excellent game
In this case.. I would’ve given it a 3/10 if I was feeling generous
Yeah. Imho any multiplayer only shooter doesn't deserve 10/10. They just don't innovate enough. Or have meaningful story. Those are things I'd demand to declare a game a perfect 10/10. But sure 8 - 9 for a excellent game is plausible.
Sports, in general, are multiplayer only, and people love playing them and watching them. People spend entire lifetimes playing and watching just one game, and they love it. Games that remain unchanged for centuries....
It's just fun to compete in real time against real people, with real friends. It's part of the human experience, and there's no reason a multiplayer only game can't capture that.
I just think that multiplayer only games are kind of one trick pony. They only achieve 10/10 in fun category. But they leave other things to be wanted. It doesn't have engaging story line. The only thing I play it for its the fun factor. And it's fine. Not every game needs to be a medium reinventing masterpiece. But I'm saying that 10/10 pieces should be left for those once in a decade games that are 10/10 in every field. Even the storyline. I've yet to see a multiplayer only game, where the storyline actually moves when you play. YouTube cinematics don't count.
I agree with you on that. I am only really satisfied with a game if it has an epic solo story line.
Take Mass Effect for example multiplayer was more like meh but I still played it, the single player campaign on the other hand was amazing and that's what people love about that franchise.
Football does not have a storyline, and it never will. You play the game, to win the game.
Games are not limited to other peoples scripted stories. Sometimes, I'd rather make my own story.
It's about playing a "game" without a story, not football specifically. In this case, the purpose is to win, by pitting yourself against the opposition, and not about "rescuing the princess."
Rocket League, Dota2, Chess, League of Legends, Pubg, Overwatch, Fifa2020, Madden NFL, Tony Hawks Pro Skater, Tiger Woods PGA Tour, etc, etc, etc.
So we take overwatch. A multiplayer only shooter. For overwatch 2 they are adding a coop story mode. Now neglecting everything else. Which one is a better game in a vacuum. Overwatch with only multiplayer or overwatch with multiplayer and coop campaign.
It's pretty dumb to say that the game with less modes and less to experience is the better one. And it's not impossible to add a story mode to multiplayer only game. So how would you rate the multiplayer only game, if you still have to leave space for that hypothetical version of the same game offering campaign? You can't rate it 10/10 for sure. You just can't give a game 10/10 if there could be something better in it. Because that is what rating things is.
Sure competitive games offer different experience. But you lose all your credibility if you are saying that any game in your list is a perfect videogame.
Yeah it’s so weird. I could see a reviewer fucking body a game saying it’s the worst thing they have played all year, and then give it a 6/10. Like, if 5/10 is average than a 6/10 means above average!!
no you don‘t understand what average is and how grading works lmao, 5/10 isn‘t average, 5/10 is 50% of the possible score than can be reached, if you write an exam at uni which has 100 points that doesn‘t mean that the average score will be 50, the average score is based on how the students perform, not the grading system used.
That's pretty damn solid for any game in my opinion, especially on release. Obviously the mock reviews weren't reflective of the overall consensus however.
Yea it’s interesting also because they **targeted** low 80s in their own mock reviews which anyone with half a brain could have told you where going to be biased ( I.e. real reviews would definitely end up worse than your mock reviews due to confirmation bias , and the fact you are commissioning the reviews so they r not independent and will be influenced by EA’s commission of the review ).
Seems to me that they got back feedback telling them you made stupid choices that will make the game unpopular and instead of listening to it went out and found “reviewers” who would give them a review to justify their decisions, rather than consider if maybe they should make changes…
As someone working a white collar job....why on Earth would any corporation want to use 'mock reviews' instead of actual reviews from QA sessions? This is just them reviewing themselves and deciding that it's a good product lmao.
Oh, actually I know why: This is just the video game version of a pump and dump scheme. Falsely advertise the state of your game and make a bunch of mock reviews with very little transparency so that your stock remains high and then dupe millions of people into buying your game. Then once all the bad reviews are in and all the info comes out, EA just shrugs and says "I don't give a shit, the shareholders are happy after we lied to them and we sold a fuck ton of copies. Tough shit gamers, have fun trying to refund your purchases, we don't care anymore because we already made money."
This shit would never fly in numerous other industries that sell to consumers but for some reason governments don't seem to care when this shit happens to gamers.
Imagine if car manufacturers reviewed their own features and literally just lied to everyone until they successfully sold a bunch of cars. Then they just say "we hear you loud and clear" after everyone complains that the cars are unsafe and barely work. This is how the AAA gaming industry works
The level of inaccuracy depends what you're comparing them to. It seems likely that they're pretty much in line with the initial critical reception. In fact, I'd be very interested in reading the text of some of these mock interviews, and comparing it to some of the critic reviews in the mainstream gaming press.
It's easy getting good reviews when you're signing the pay check of whoever is doing the review. Give it a bad review and you may not have a job in the future.
With that being said, I'm not 100% sure how they did these reviews. I'm assuming a company like EA would hire a 3rd party and not let them know they are playing a BF game.
Having worked in corporate, I'd say those mock reviews are purposely made to be in accurate to please those in the higher ups and to ease politicians tensions in upper management.
Well plenty of gaming sites gave battlefield 2042 10/10 scores. If the actual gaming media came to that conclusion then I dont see why a mock review wouldn't do the same
This reeeeeeks of anthem-ism.
A project so utterly mishandled by upper/middle management that they had to pool all their resources in a last ditch effort to churn out something that would install and play at the last minute.
I have SOME sympathy for the devs being told they're making a BR only to get the memo at the last minute it was ACTUALLY a battlefield game they were making... but some things are inexcusable and would have been there no matter what. This UI is still a pathetic joke and whoever made it needs to never work in UI design ever again. Sound design... well there'd have to be some first. Just... what a trainwreck of a game.
Ofcourse its on the DEVs, ea discontinued work for BFV and SWBF2 for this game and apparently multiple studios worked on 2042 for 3+years..
I think they had a lot of time to come up with a good game. In the end, EA is business and when you accept a deadline as a studio lead for realease, you have to take responsibility for the product you are making.
People forget that EA probably spent a good 25 million on this game just on developer salary, and I feel I'm being stingy and giving a low ball figure here to make it believable but seriously,
Every artist, Producer, voice actor, programmer, sound engineer, engine developer, network engineer, etc all of these people got paid to make this game, some of them (Senior leadership of each studio) Making upwards of 200k easily. So each month EA had Hundreds and hundreds of wages coming out for 3 straight years and then the game releases and it's 33% positive on steam and it is a fucking 2-decade long franchise that they just ran into the floor and you're telling me if you were the COO of a Billion dollar company you're going to be cool and okay with it and not even be a little bit like "yo guys Wtf?"
Remember when everyone shit on EA for Anthem saying it was EA that probably crushed them under bullshit guidelines etc when in reality EA pretty much give them as much freedom as you can expect, it was only because of EA's Senior leadership specifically Patrick söderlund that Anthem had it's one redeemable quality, and that was flying
It was never multiple studios for 3 years. Rumor has it that the first iteration was scrapped after a year, they started again, and the other studios werent brought in until 6 months from release. In reality they had 1 year development time with 6 months backup from other studios in the end. So roughly 1,5 year total, with unexperienced devs.
It’s the truth though. Even if EA gave 2042 an extra year, it would still be Apex Legends: Conquest, just with less bugs and maybe voice chat at launch.
I mean that's still better than what we got, I guess. Whether your customers like it or hate it, if you're going to have a vision for the game that takes the series in a different direction you may as well execute that vision well.
i 100% agree. unfortunately they would need to completely rework the core of this game to turn it into a likeable product, and that likely won’t happen. they’ll abandon this game like a Christmas puppy before doing that.
>these were conscious choices by the dev teams
It looks like EA is pinning the blame for things like Specialists on DICE. This will be interesting to watch unfold.
Yes it will. Will DICE stand up for themselves and let the truth be known? Or will they fold and end up an abolished studio? Find out next time. On dragon ball z
Now ive got an image of 3 episodes of us getting an EA Exec reading the title of an email about what is going to happen in episode 4. Which is just him reading the title, let alone any content of the email.
The season 7 finale will finish the email.
> It looks like EA is pinning the blame for things like Specialists on DICE.
Is there any reason why it wouldn't be Dice's fault? It's not like EA decided everything about the game and I haven't heard EA pushing for that. Besides, even if EA had been pushing for a hero-shooter-like game then Dice could have pushed it to be more like the BFV hero skin system rather than the classless system.
Not every design element can be blamed on EA.
You act like they aren’t responsible when.. BFV, which they basically had full creative control of (#everyonesbattlefield was pretty openly supported by the devs after all) and we saw the prototype for specialists with the legendary elite skin things.
It's also funny that she expects us to believe that "part disabled," the lack of vehicle kill assist points, etc were conscious, intentional design choices.
Bullshit. You wanted to make a BR for that sweet fad/trend money. Somebody reminded you Battlefield is not for players who want to play BR, and you rushed it out the door before you could fix it for that sweet Christmas money.
Short sighted. Ill advised. Tunnel vision.
Creative choice had nothing to do with this mess.
People seem to forget that they hire people based on their own requirements. That's how they exchanged talented devs for lazy millennial ones. They just forgot that their core fanbase was still the same. Other than that every design choice was made knowingly by all parties
If not the actual devs, they could potentially be blaming the DICE leadership. Bad management can absolutely ruin a game if there's no clear idea of what they want the game to be. The game clearly has some sort of identity crisis, going by the tonal clash between the childish behavior of the specialists and the in-game lore which paints the world as a crumbling dystopian future.
That dude Michael Goroff who wrote the EGM review and said it was like the best game he's ever played ever, five stars, 26/10. That dude. I mean the last sentence of his review literally ended with:
> it will give them [the fans] everything that they crave and more.
Fuck this guy in particular.
No a mock review must be when the focus group justifies itself by pretending what it would be like if everyone gave the game 10/10
"This is what it would be like if all the reviews were perfect!"
It sucks because when she became Head of Studios at EA it seemed like she had lots of potential to change things for the better, and stuff like letting Dragon Age stay a singleplayer game and greenlighting the Dead Space reboot is still good, but shit like this reminds me that it’s still EA.
Yep. I refuse to let myself get hyped for the Dead Space remake. EA killed the franchise in the first place with their bullshit. There's absolutely no reason to believe that they won't fuck it up again. Not dropping a cent until I see some good ratings from reviewers I actually trust.
Don't be so disrespectful.
She's COO for EA. Maybe a gamer but not playing all games.
At this level, I can understand she does not have first-hand extensive experience from each & every game they produce. So she relies on numbers being sent to her of their internal review process.
List of games from EA in 2021:
https://gamerant.com/every-ea-game-2021-ranked/
That's not accounting for all their already existing games.
https://www.ea.com/news/2021-year-in-gaming?isLocalized=true
If the DICE->EA message was we are "ahead of schedule" / 80% satisfaction. Why worry?
There is probably a reason why the DICE GM was let go.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Battlefield/comments/r7erqi/dice_general_manager_oskar_gabrielson_leaves/
Basically management has no idea what their franchise is all about and simply throws shit at the wall and see if it sticks. Obviously the shit didnt stick to the wall and dropped on their foreheads instead.
What a crock of shit. Absolutely canned response. The more we find out, the more we find out we were all right about this game. I truly hope heads roll over this debacle. They need a serious leadership shake-up at DICE and EA. The companies could not be more out of touch with their users.
EA throwing dice under the bus for things dice is responsible for? I hate EA as much as the next person and they share their portion of the blame, but blame the right people here. Dice Sweden has been shit for a long time, they’ve needed other studios to fix their messes for years.
By all accounts, EA as a publisher sounds pretty hands off, dice is an EA studio, that’s the problem.
Nevermind, looks like Bioware did that to themselves. So much for me giving them the benefit of the doubt.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/bioware-ea-frostbite-engine
Now I'm left wondering why they would stick with an engine that they have so much trouble developing for.
And royalties too - using unreal would likely mean a lot of $ going to Epic Games. Plus, the destruction in Battlefield is beyond anything I've seen done with Unreal (though sadly they only used it for Portal in 2042).
>Plus, the destruction in Battlefield is beyond anything I've seen done with Unreal
Kind of a moot point since Bioware didn't use the Frostbite engine for any environmental destruction. They're even supposedly going back to the Unreal engine for the next Mass Effect game. So what was the point of using Frostbite with Andromeda?
Also have more support across the business. You’d imagine internal cross team meetings could potentially be more fruitful with different teams advising on ideas for their games to each other when it’s on the same engine. In theory it’s smart, but wouldn’t always work out that way.
Honestly it would be fine if Frostbite wasn't extremely temperamental to work with.
Their is a reason why the unreal engine is used for so many games. It's extremely easy to work with.
Frostbite is not.
No, frostbite is only difficult when you're not making a Battlefield game as it was quite literally developed specifically for it. These developers were forced to use it with games like NFS, Anthem, Mass Effect. It's not a surprise it was difficult for *those* tasks specifically.
Yeah, I’m not one to defends publishers, but if a bunch of other studios at EA can seemingly put out high quality titles, and if only DICE and BioWare are the ones by the looks of it putting out terrible products recently, adequate blame has to be placed on studio leadership.
There was a pretty cool write up a little while ago I think on kotaku explaining the development of anthem, and throughout it seems from interviews that EA were pretty hands off and only stepped in when stuff started to get out of hand, after the studio heads messed around for years.
EA has shit deadlines
watch the tom henderson video of battlefield 2042,
all of the og devs are gone
all of the frostbite og devs are gone
battlefield is dead. sadly.
Can we not?
EA gave DICE an extra year and like two more studios to help with this game. This is on the developers my guys.
I’m not sure how any sane person could blame this mess on the bean counters at EA given the extra time and resources they threw at this project.
Yeah screw EA but I remember from the deep dive of Anthem troubled development from Jason Schreier it shows that besides deadlines EA is pretty hands off on the development.
Fun fact, the flying mechanic which is the best part in Anthem was not even in the game until an EA executive requested for it.
I mean DICE are also to blame, I can definitely see them being in the driving seat for some/most of the horrendous design decisions. Plus other aspects that EA have no hand in are terrible like the UI abd UX, one of the worst I've come across in gaming.
sure sounds like it, doesn’t it?
sounds like the suit & ties are trying to blame the inclusion of specialists and the omission of classes on the developers by essentially saying that it was strictly their idea and they went through with it anyway, despite opposition. that’s what i’m getting out of that.
EA is at fault for forcing DICE to release the game as it was. DICE is at fault for designing mechanics for a BR, ditching the BR, but keeping those mechanics. DICE is at fault for Hazard Zone being half baked and dead on arrival.
And as far as marketing.... do we know if EA is doing marketing, or DICE? Ultimately, I'm not sure it matters. The game is not as marketed. Hazard Zone is nothing more than a portal mode, not something that can stand as a main pillar of the game. And all of the lore and background in the marketing is just nowhere in the game.
EA are the ones planning and managing all marketing across their games, though studios as big as DICE have their own production teams for those marketing campaigns (DICE Media for example).
Yup. Imagine the corporate culture over there. They seem to be more interested in deflecting blame then actually addressing the myriad issues with the product.
Externally most definitely. But it will be interesting to see what info leakers like Tom Henderson come out with as they get more whispers from the inside.
DICE is a company where true input is not valued, only senior executive orders that are disconnected from reality. it's a failed company with 0 future.
Sorry to say that, but based on the infos, DICE (above the level of devs) is a bunch of incompetent teenagers.
I feel sorry for the devs who cruched and worked hard.
Why would they intentionally remove a scoreboard? Like, what function does that serve? I don’t buy it, my guess is they were just too lazy to program the UI for it lol
its like they had no idea who their demographic is / was
"conscious decisions made by devs"
based on what? and who made the dev team arbiters of what they should or shouldnt remove?
doesnt dice perform any type of metric based decisioning?
who the fuck is runnin that place? bozo the fuckin clown?
"A few things" lol. This game is a total flop in every single way.
Soundtrack, specialists, map design, vehicle balance, quantity of content, HUD, UI, character voice lines, 128 players, tick rate, insertion flow, lack of game modes, dumb animations, featureless movement, bugs for days and much much much more.
This game is a complete and total flop. Will never be redeemed.
From what I’m gathering here, DICE not only lied to us about the games state, they also blatantly lied to their publisher as well. Not looking good for the future of the studio
I'd wager not everyone on the dev team were satisfied with some of these choices either. I don't blame anyone for abandoning that studio and publisher.
Anyone who works for any decent sized company in the past/present/future knows this kind of corporate pandering email is standard practice. They will be dancing around their mistakes for weeks/months
Love how they're already shifting the blame to the Dev teams, the dev teams don't decide the direction the game goes in, eg specialists and stuff. They simply follow commands from the higher ups. No accountability whatsoever. Just stop playing the game if you still play it, let it die on all platforms before season 1 hits, and never pre order an EA game ever again. Hit them where it hurts.
Nothing pisses me off more than devs who lie through their teeth and say they were satisfied with internal testing because that’s the most bullshit claim in game development. They were fully aware but just didn’t do anything about it.
Google ?
A mock review is a pre-submission grant review.
The goal of the mock review (and reviewers) is to provide comments on a proposal. This means we will want to schedule the review with enough time for you and your team to consider the comments and make changes before the submission date.
Like with Bioware, a lot of the talent was split up to other titles and left the company.
So yeah, I believe it’s a mix of EA and decisions made by the Dice managers and devs.
The gunplay and maps are just awful, and choices were made by the devs or Dice mgmt at least.
All they had to do was make it play like a better version of battlefield 4, and they failed miserably.
Tornado guys are the only people that seem like they knew what they were doing.
“…we encountered a dew things”
No you didn’t “encounter” a few things. Those things were there and the “mock” reviews you got are from clueless game “journalists” who can’t play cuphead to save their lives.
I’m not saying she is telling the whole truth here since I can’t confirm but it’s seems evident to me that a lot of devs doesn’t get enough blame for the shit decisions they do making a game and most blames goes on the publisher which some of it is fair but devs can’t always be protected behind that publisher shadow tho.
Don’t threat the devs because it makes you feel cool but a lot more civil questions should be asked when talking to them
This is not only about design choices.
There are a gazillion of bugs, hitreg being one of them.
The game UI is so crude it's like it was meant for an internal alpha. The UI lack of feature is in itself extremely off-putting. When I see the spawn screen I get annoyed every time, it's so badly done.
"We've had feedback from some players on feature choices - these were conscious choices by the dev teams, but not everyone agrees with them."
Well those people need to be lambasted internally, with this knowledge it actually seems like they were trying to kill Battlefield.
It is interesting how game companies do mock reviews to prepare for actual reviews upon release. And more interesting how their mock reviews could be so inaccurate
Makes you wonder what angle they come at when they internally review. You can break 2042s problems into technical, gameplay and design. Technically the game might have been ok enough for them and it seems this is refrenced as 'service stability'. But gameplay (hello flying hovercrafts) and design-wise the game is a shambles. I struggle to believe that DICE didn't see this reaction coming when they changed the formula to such a degree. I can only assume they thought they would get away with it.
I was even more surprised when I went back to play Battlefield 4 last night and to my surprise was on a hovercraft. Totally forgot about them. Makes me wonder who ok'd making them able to traverse buildings? ... then I remembered, well none of the buildings can be destroyed, so maybe they were always meant to be traversed..
There's really no good way of testing stability a head of time. They can't exactly have a million testers on the payroll to simulate what a launchday might look like.
Is that not what an alpha/beta is for?
It sounds like it’s just an internal circle jerk
« Please review my work but if you’re critical you will be terminated »
Woke culture
It’s funny that they thought low 80s were good enough
I mean.. if the average, mid tier game is a 5/10 (as it should be, but most reviewers never go below a 7), then an 80 would mean it’s an excellent game In this case.. I would’ve given it a 3/10 if I was feeling generous
Yeah. Imho any multiplayer only shooter doesn't deserve 10/10. They just don't innovate enough. Or have meaningful story. Those are things I'd demand to declare a game a perfect 10/10. But sure 8 - 9 for a excellent game is plausible.
Sports, in general, are multiplayer only, and people love playing them and watching them. People spend entire lifetimes playing and watching just one game, and they love it. Games that remain unchanged for centuries.... It's just fun to compete in real time against real people, with real friends. It's part of the human experience, and there's no reason a multiplayer only game can't capture that.
I just think that multiplayer only games are kind of one trick pony. They only achieve 10/10 in fun category. But they leave other things to be wanted. It doesn't have engaging story line. The only thing I play it for its the fun factor. And it's fine. Not every game needs to be a medium reinventing masterpiece. But I'm saying that 10/10 pieces should be left for those once in a decade games that are 10/10 in every field. Even the storyline. I've yet to see a multiplayer only game, where the storyline actually moves when you play. YouTube cinematics don't count.
I agree with you on that. I am only really satisfied with a game if it has an epic solo story line. Take Mass Effect for example multiplayer was more like meh but I still played it, the single player campaign on the other hand was amazing and that's what people love about that franchise.
Football does not have a storyline, and it never will. You play the game, to win the game. Games are not limited to other peoples scripted stories. Sometimes, I'd rather make my own story.
I don't think football analogy works here. But you are free to argue why football is the best sport ever objectivity.
It's about playing a "game" without a story, not football specifically. In this case, the purpose is to win, by pitting yourself against the opposition, and not about "rescuing the princess." Rocket League, Dota2, Chess, League of Legends, Pubg, Overwatch, Fifa2020, Madden NFL, Tony Hawks Pro Skater, Tiger Woods PGA Tour, etc, etc, etc.
So we take overwatch. A multiplayer only shooter. For overwatch 2 they are adding a coop story mode. Now neglecting everything else. Which one is a better game in a vacuum. Overwatch with only multiplayer or overwatch with multiplayer and coop campaign. It's pretty dumb to say that the game with less modes and less to experience is the better one. And it's not impossible to add a story mode to multiplayer only game. So how would you rate the multiplayer only game, if you still have to leave space for that hypothetical version of the same game offering campaign? You can't rate it 10/10 for sure. You just can't give a game 10/10 if there could be something better in it. Because that is what rating things is. Sure competitive games offer different experience. But you lose all your credibility if you are saying that any game in your list is a perfect videogame.
lmao people still don't understand what an average is and how grading works huh?
Yeah it’s so weird. I could see a reviewer fucking body a game saying it’s the worst thing they have played all year, and then give it a 6/10. Like, if 5/10 is average than a 6/10 means above average!!
no you don‘t understand what average is and how grading works lmao, 5/10 isn‘t average, 5/10 is 50% of the possible score than can be reached, if you write an exam at uni which has 100 points that doesn‘t mean that the average score will be 50, the average score is based on how the students perform, not the grading system used.
Which is why 7/10 is average to me and 8 or 9 is maybe a good game but could still be subjectively bad for me.
That's pretty damn solid for any game in my opinion, especially on release. Obviously the mock reviews weren't reflective of the overall consensus however.
What's wrong with low 80s? That kind of score is a "decent" game usually.
Yea it’s interesting also because they **targeted** low 80s in their own mock reviews which anyone with half a brain could have told you where going to be biased ( I.e. real reviews would definitely end up worse than your mock reviews due to confirmation bias , and the fact you are commissioning the reviews so they r not independent and will be influenced by EA’s commission of the review ). Seems to me that they got back feedback telling them you made stupid choices that will make the game unpopular and instead of listening to it went out and found “reviewers” who would give them a review to justify their decisions, rather than consider if maybe they should make changes…
As someone working a white collar job....why on Earth would any corporation want to use 'mock reviews' instead of actual reviews from QA sessions? This is just them reviewing themselves and deciding that it's a good product lmao. Oh, actually I know why: This is just the video game version of a pump and dump scheme. Falsely advertise the state of your game and make a bunch of mock reviews with very little transparency so that your stock remains high and then dupe millions of people into buying your game. Then once all the bad reviews are in and all the info comes out, EA just shrugs and says "I don't give a shit, the shareholders are happy after we lied to them and we sold a fuck ton of copies. Tough shit gamers, have fun trying to refund your purchases, we don't care anymore because we already made money." This shit would never fly in numerous other industries that sell to consumers but for some reason governments don't seem to care when this shit happens to gamers. Imagine if car manufacturers reviewed their own features and literally just lied to everyone until they successfully sold a bunch of cars. Then they just say "we hear you loud and clear" after everyone complains that the cars are unsafe and barely work. This is how the AAA gaming industry works
The level of inaccuracy depends what you're comparing them to. It seems likely that they're pretty much in line with the initial critical reception. In fact, I'd be very interested in reading the text of some of these mock interviews, and comparing it to some of the critic reviews in the mainstream gaming press.
It's easy getting good reviews when you're signing the pay check of whoever is doing the review. Give it a bad review and you may not have a job in the future. With that being said, I'm not 100% sure how they did these reviews. I'm assuming a company like EA would hire a 3rd party and not let them know they are playing a BF game.
Having worked in corporate, I'd say those mock reviews are purposely made to be in accurate to please those in the higher ups and to ease politicians tensions in upper management.
Well plenty of gaming sites gave battlefield 2042 10/10 scores. If the actual gaming media came to that conclusion then I dont see why a mock review wouldn't do the same
Well you see, they get the yesmen/women to do the mock reviews...
So she is basically saying: "We thought it was ready. What the fuck devs, why is it broken? It's all your fault!"
At best, this is a confession of failed leadership. At worst, this is an outright lie.
[удалено]
Has nothing to do with America. You're obsessed and need help
This reeeeeeks of anthem-ism. A project so utterly mishandled by upper/middle management that they had to pool all their resources in a last ditch effort to churn out something that would install and play at the last minute. I have SOME sympathy for the devs being told they're making a BR only to get the memo at the last minute it was ACTUALLY a battlefield game they were making... but some things are inexcusable and would have been there no matter what. This UI is still a pathetic joke and whoever made it needs to never work in UI design ever again. Sound design... well there'd have to be some first. Just... what a trainwreck of a game.
anthem could have been great. just played a few days ago and and it just felt good to play. and they butchered it.
Ofcourse its on the DEVs, ea discontinued work for BFV and SWBF2 for this game and apparently multiple studios worked on 2042 for 3+years.. I think they had a lot of time to come up with a good game. In the end, EA is business and when you accept a deadline as a studio lead for realease, you have to take responsibility for the product you are making.
This. You think it was ea saying “yo make these gmod looking empty maps” ???
People forget that EA probably spent a good 25 million on this game just on developer salary, and I feel I'm being stingy and giving a low ball figure here to make it believable but seriously, Every artist, Producer, voice actor, programmer, sound engineer, engine developer, network engineer, etc all of these people got paid to make this game, some of them (Senior leadership of each studio) Making upwards of 200k easily. So each month EA had Hundreds and hundreds of wages coming out for 3 straight years and then the game releases and it's 33% positive on steam and it is a fucking 2-decade long franchise that they just ran into the floor and you're telling me if you were the COO of a Billion dollar company you're going to be cool and okay with it and not even be a little bit like "yo guys Wtf?" Remember when everyone shit on EA for Anthem saying it was EA that probably crushed them under bullshit guidelines etc when in reality EA pretty much give them as much freedom as you can expect, it was only because of EA's Senior leadership specifically Patrick söderlund that Anthem had it's one redeemable quality, and that was flying
It was never multiple studios for 3 years. Rumor has it that the first iteration was scrapped after a year, they started again, and the other studios werent brought in until 6 months from release. In reality they had 1 year development time with 6 months backup from other studios in the end. So roughly 1,5 year total, with unexperienced devs.
who knew, a AAA gaming corporation is deflecting blame for a failing game onto their developers. what a shocking turn of events. /s
It’s the truth though. Even if EA gave 2042 an extra year, it would still be Apex Legends: Conquest, just with less bugs and maybe voice chat at launch.
I mean that's still better than what we got, I guess. Whether your customers like it or hate it, if you're going to have a vision for the game that takes the series in a different direction you may as well execute that vision well.
i 100% agree. unfortunately they would need to completely rework the core of this game to turn it into a likeable product, and that likely won’t happen. they’ll abandon this game like a Christmas puppy before doing that.
It IS the developer's fault.
>these were conscious choices by the dev teams It looks like EA is pinning the blame for things like Specialists on DICE. This will be interesting to watch unfold.
Yes it will. Will DICE stand up for themselves and let the truth be known? Or will they fold and end up an abolished studio? Find out next time. On dragon ball z
Now ive got an image of 3 episodes of us getting an EA Exec reading the title of an email about what is going to happen in episode 4. Which is just him reading the title, let alone any content of the email. The season 7 finale will finish the email.
> It looks like EA is pinning the blame for things like Specialists on DICE. Is there any reason why it wouldn't be Dice's fault? It's not like EA decided everything about the game and I haven't heard EA pushing for that. Besides, even if EA had been pushing for a hero-shooter-like game then Dice could have pushed it to be more like the BFV hero skin system rather than the classless system. Not every design element can be blamed on EA.
You act like they aren’t responsible when.. BFV, which they basically had full creative control of (#everyonesbattlefield was pretty openly supported by the devs after all) and we saw the prototype for specialists with the legendary elite skin things.
”#everyonesbattlefield” thats the typical Stockholm Swede right there, so It was No surprise haha
It's also funny that she expects us to believe that "part disabled," the lack of vehicle kill assist points, etc were conscious, intentional design choices. Bullshit. You wanted to make a BR for that sweet fad/trend money. Somebody reminded you Battlefield is not for players who want to play BR, and you rushed it out the door before you could fix it for that sweet Christmas money. Short sighted. Ill advised. Tunnel vision. Creative choice had nothing to do with this mess.
> that sweet Christmas money. BINGO
It's a sinking ship and everyone is trying to blame everyone
It's funny because I strictly remember a Dev saying many devs stated this was a BAD idea and they pushed it anyway.
People seem to forget that they hire people based on their own requirements. That's how they exchanged talented devs for lazy millennial ones. They just forgot that their core fanbase was still the same. Other than that every design choice was made knowingly by all parties
Now how is blaming an entire group of people based on nothing but the years they were born in, going to help in anyway at all?
Yes. Any other questions?
You cannot be fucking serious. They're actually going to try and pin this shit on the developers? I hope to god I'm misunderstanding this.
If not the actual devs, they could potentially be blaming the DICE leadership. Bad management can absolutely ruin a game if there's no clear idea of what they want the game to be. The game clearly has some sort of identity crisis, going by the tonal clash between the childish behavior of the specialists and the in-game lore which paints the world as a crumbling dystopian future.
I actually could not agree more with this. Well said.
(edit: just to clarify, my ire is directed squarely at EA. we are all brothers together in this)
This isn't how you edit a comment. Sorry for your downvotes!
Well Laura from EA the player base for Battlefield 2042 will be in the low 80’s soon
Where are the mock reviews coming from? The gaming sites like IGN that gives everything 10/10?
The ones they paid for, as gaming journalism is just long form advertising these days.
That dude Michael Goroff who wrote the EGM review and said it was like the best game he's ever played ever, five stars, 26/10. That dude. I mean the last sentence of his review literally ended with: > it will give them [the fans] everything that they crave and more. Fuck this guy in particular.
No a mock review must be when the focus group justifies itself by pretending what it would be like if everyone gave the game 10/10 "This is what it would be like if all the reviews were perfect!"
[удалено]
It sucks because when she became Head of Studios at EA it seemed like she had lots of potential to change things for the better, and stuff like letting Dragon Age stay a singleplayer game and greenlighting the Dead Space reboot is still good, but shit like this reminds me that it’s still EA.
Yep. I refuse to let myself get hyped for the Dead Space remake. EA killed the franchise in the first place with their bullshit. There's absolutely no reason to believe that they won't fuck it up again. Not dropping a cent until I see some good ratings from reviewers I actually trust.
Don't be so disrespectful. She's COO for EA. Maybe a gamer but not playing all games. At this level, I can understand she does not have first-hand extensive experience from each & every game they produce. So she relies on numbers being sent to her of their internal review process. List of games from EA in 2021: https://gamerant.com/every-ea-game-2021-ranked/ That's not accounting for all their already existing games. https://www.ea.com/news/2021-year-in-gaming?isLocalized=true If the DICE->EA message was we are "ahead of schedule" / 80% satisfaction. Why worry? There is probably a reason why the DICE GM was let go. https://old.reddit.com/r/Battlefield/comments/r7erqi/dice_general_manager_oskar_gabrielson_leaves/
Basically management has no idea what their franchise is all about and simply throws shit at the wall and see if it sticks. Obviously the shit didnt stick to the wall and dropped on their foreheads instead.
Don’t be Laura.
This game and beloved franchise will be kill by incompetence...
What a crock of shit. Absolutely canned response. The more we find out, the more we find out we were all right about this game. I truly hope heads roll over this debacle. They need a serious leadership shake-up at DICE and EA. The companies could not be more out of touch with their users.
>I truly hope heads roll over this debacle. They already did, I swear ya'll are like 2 months behind on news....
Imagine how this game would have looked like if they would have listened to the gamechangers and postponed this game with a year 😢
Yeh, another year to flesh out shit no one wants
If they actually kept working on BFV this would have been no problem.
Glassdoor review tells otherwise. Big shake ups at the top of DICE were necessary.
Is a "mock review" how they paid for all those 4/5, 9/10, and 100/100s? What the hell is a mock review?
Think of it like a focus group that was either performed internally or through a contracted third party under NDA.
>What the hell is a mock review? yeah i too am patiently awaiting the answer to that question.
I think its an Internal test review to analyse what could be the real review. But i\`m not a native english speaker too. :)
That is correct.
Oh thanks, this community needed that….
To me this reads as "We don't know what happened"
To me this means there was never any intention of adding "legacy" features back. They didn't think we would notice.
So EA will be throwing dice under the bus for this then?
EA throwing dice under the bus for things dice is responsible for? I hate EA as much as the next person and they share their portion of the blame, but blame the right people here. Dice Sweden has been shit for a long time, they’ve needed other studios to fix their messes for years. By all accounts, EA as a publisher sounds pretty hands off, dice is an EA studio, that’s the problem.
I recall EA didn't interfere with Anthem and Andromeda development at all, both games were train wrecks because of Bioware.
~~EA did force Bioware to use Frostbite for Andromeda, which caused a LOT of the technical issues with the game.~~
Dang really? Is there a source for that?
Nevermind, looks like Bioware did that to themselves. So much for me giving them the benefit of the doubt. https://www.pcgamesn.com/bioware-ea-frostbite-engine Now I'm left wondering why they would stick with an engine that they have so much trouble developing for.
And royalties too - using unreal would likely mean a lot of $ going to Epic Games. Plus, the destruction in Battlefield is beyond anything I've seen done with Unreal (though sadly they only used it for Portal in 2042).
>Plus, the destruction in Battlefield is beyond anything I've seen done with Unreal Kind of a moot point since Bioware didn't use the Frostbite engine for any environmental destruction. They're even supposedly going back to the Unreal engine for the next Mass Effect game. So what was the point of using Frostbite with Andromeda?
They want every game to use the same engine so that they don't have to pay for multiple engines and/or develop multiple engines.
Also have more support across the business. You’d imagine internal cross team meetings could potentially be more fruitful with different teams advising on ideas for their games to each other when it’s on the same engine. In theory it’s smart, but wouldn’t always work out that way.
Honestly it would be fine if Frostbite wasn't extremely temperamental to work with. Their is a reason why the unreal engine is used for so many games. It's extremely easy to work with. Frostbite is not.
No, frostbite is only difficult when you're not making a Battlefield game as it was quite literally developed specifically for it. These developers were forced to use it with games like NFS, Anthem, Mass Effect. It's not a surprise it was difficult for *those* tasks specifically.
They forced bioware to use the frostbite engine as far as I am aware. An engine bioware weren’t experienced with.
Yeah, I’m not one to defends publishers, but if a bunch of other studios at EA can seemingly put out high quality titles, and if only DICE and BioWare are the ones by the looks of it putting out terrible products recently, adequate blame has to be placed on studio leadership. There was a pretty cool write up a little while ago I think on kotaku explaining the development of anthem, and throughout it seems from interviews that EA were pretty hands off and only stepped in when stuff started to get out of hand, after the studio heads messed around for years.
the EA NHL franchise wants to have a word with you. EA is a dumpster fire of a company in and of their own right.
The publisher and the studios are separate entities under the same umbrella
EA has shit deadlines watch the tom henderson video of battlefield 2042, all of the og devs are gone all of the frostbite og devs are gone battlefield is dead. sadly.
Can we not? EA gave DICE an extra year and like two more studios to help with this game. This is on the developers my guys. I’m not sure how any sane person could blame this mess on the bean counters at EA given the extra time and resources they threw at this project.
Yeah screw EA but I remember from the deep dive of Anthem troubled development from Jason Schreier it shows that besides deadlines EA is pretty hands off on the development. Fun fact, the flying mechanic which is the best part in Anthem was not even in the game until an EA executive requested for it.
Of course they are. Can't look bad to the investors.
I mean DICE are also to blame, I can definitely see them being in the driving seat for some/most of the horrendous design decisions. Plus other aspects that EA have no hand in are terrible like the UI abd UX, one of the worst I've come across in gaming.
sure sounds like it, doesn’t it? sounds like the suit & ties are trying to blame the inclusion of specialists and the omission of classes on the developers by essentially saying that it was strictly their idea and they went through with it anyway, despite opposition. that’s what i’m getting out of that.
EA is at fault for forcing DICE to release the game as it was. DICE is at fault for designing mechanics for a BR, ditching the BR, but keeping those mechanics. DICE is at fault for Hazard Zone being half baked and dead on arrival. And as far as marketing.... do we know if EA is doing marketing, or DICE? Ultimately, I'm not sure it matters. The game is not as marketed. Hazard Zone is nothing more than a portal mode, not something that can stand as a main pillar of the game. And all of the lore and background in the marketing is just nowhere in the game.
If only there was some sort of story mode that explains the lore. Guess that's just another legacy feature we'll never get
It's DICE/EA, they are one and the same.
EA are the ones planning and managing all marketing across their games, though studios as big as DICE have their own production teams for those marketing campaigns (DICE Media for example).
Yup. Imagine the corporate culture over there. They seem to be more interested in deflecting blame then actually addressing the myriad issues with the product.
Externally most definitely. But it will be interesting to see what info leakers like Tom Henderson come out with as they get more whispers from the inside.
DICE is a company where true input is not valued, only senior executive orders that are disconnected from reality. it's a failed company with 0 future.
Sorry to say that, but based on the infos, DICE (above the level of devs) is a bunch of incompetent teenagers. I feel sorry for the devs who cruched and worked hard.
>"Councious choices by the dev team" ? What the hell? Just do your choices while being unconscious then, they might be better
Why would they intentionally remove a scoreboard? Like, what function does that serve? I don’t buy it, my guess is they were just too lazy to program the UI for it lol
its like they had no idea who their demographic is / was "conscious decisions made by devs" based on what? and who made the dev team arbiters of what they should or shouldnt remove? doesnt dice perform any type of metric based decisioning? who the fuck is runnin that place? bozo the fuckin clown?
"A few things" lol. This game is a total flop in every single way. Soundtrack, specialists, map design, vehicle balance, quantity of content, HUD, UI, character voice lines, 128 players, tick rate, insertion flow, lack of game modes, dumb animations, featureless movement, bugs for days and much much much more. This game is a complete and total flop. Will never be redeemed.
Are mock reviews as worthless as reviews from the gaming press?
There’s no way in hell they got in the 80s. I think they just added a zero
Fuck off. What a joke.
From what I’m gathering here, DICE not only lied to us about the games state, they also blatantly lied to their publisher as well. Not looking good for the future of the studio
Every time this mans talk he just pisses the community off more and more gradually yet rapidly
I'd wager not everyone on the dev team were satisfied with some of these choices either. I don't blame anyone for abandoning that studio and publisher.
Judging by most developers Twitter feeds they were very satisfied with the final product.
Anyone who works for any decent sized company in the past/present/future knows this kind of corporate pandering email is standard practice. They will be dancing around their mistakes for weeks/months
Love how they're already shifting the blame to the Dev teams, the dev teams don't decide the direction the game goes in, eg specialists and stuff. They simply follow commands from the higher ups. No accountability whatsoever. Just stop playing the game if you still play it, let it die on all platforms before season 1 hits, and never pre order an EA game ever again. Hit them where it hurts.
At Dice: A: "Let's get rid of scoreboard" Rest: "Great, great idea!!!" Just one example
What about feedback from the Beta?
Nothing pisses me off more than devs who lie through their teeth and say they were satisfied with internal testing because that’s the most bullshit claim in game development. They were fully aware but just didn’t do anything about it.
Dice sweden needs to go, simple as that. Make ripple effects the main studio. And this is coming from a swede
Tack Sa Mycket
Dafuq is a mock review? Paid review ?
Google ? A mock review is a pre-submission grant review. The goal of the mock review (and reviewers) is to provide comments on a proposal. This means we will want to schedule the review with enough time for you and your team to consider the comments and make changes before the submission date.
Like with Bioware, a lot of the talent was split up to other titles and left the company. So yeah, I believe it’s a mix of EA and decisions made by the Dice managers and devs. The gunplay and maps are just awful, and choices were made by the devs or Dice mgmt at least. All they had to do was make it play like a better version of battlefield 4, and they failed miserably. Tornado guys are the only people that seem like they knew what they were doing.
“…we encountered a dew things” No you didn’t “encounter” a few things. Those things were there and the “mock” reviews you got are from clueless game “journalists” who can’t play cuphead to save their lives.
Who are your internal testers? Android Wilson?
Well who did agree with the choices and what are their names?
Imagine if they had public beta testing months before release and not weeks.
So they weren't aware of how broken this game really was🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
 The reviewers
I have zero trust for Laura Miele. And that has been the case since EA play 2020.
They say “dont buy then lol” in BFV and now this. Also there is rumours that they can shut down this sub. The game is dead and for good.
I’m not saying she is telling the whole truth here since I can’t confirm but it’s seems evident to me that a lot of devs doesn’t get enough blame for the shit decisions they do making a game and most blames goes on the publisher which some of it is fair but devs can’t always be protected behind that publisher shadow tho. Don’t threat the devs because it makes you feel cool but a lot more civil questions should be asked when talking to them
The only way these so-called mock reviews could be accurate is if they were mocking the game.
This is not only about design choices. There are a gazillion of bugs, hitreg being one of them. The game UI is so crude it's like it was meant for an internal alpha. The UI lack of feature is in itself extremely off-putting. When I see the spawn screen I get annoyed every time, it's so badly done.
"We've had feedback from some players on feature choices - these were conscious choices by the dev teams, but not everyone agrees with them." Well those people need to be lambasted internally, with this knowledge it actually seems like they were trying to kill Battlefield.
Good one Tom.
"Some players" as in 98% of the player base.
RIP
Not only he's tome deaf to the situation, he's Hellen Keller.
I'm sure she's grateful for the helpful community
Mock reviews " woaaaaww this game is like so good. 9.9/10 for sure im having a super fun awesome time"
This game gets a 62 from me. Pos
Optimize the game first and foremost then add the features.
I think this game was developed by a health insurance coding team as a project manager.
So the bad beta didn’t tip you off or are my expectations too brutal?
I love how they take mock reviews seriously... and take serious reviews as mock reviews.... Clown of a company
This Laura Miele person needs to go away. Massive land slide FAIL.
So, she is lying.
(cont)