The end of Battlefield & Dice era

Youtuber + DICE insider commentary (allegedly).

Bellular News | EA Pull The Plug On Battlefield V... Early?! How EA DICE Failed For 2 Years & NO BF2020
Where’s Russia? Where’s the liberation of Europe? EA have pulled the plug on Battlefield 5: a game with a history rife with horrendous decision making.

YongYea | Battlefield V Dies In Failure, EA/DICE Pull The Plug On Botched Live Service

Laymen Gaming | DICE Betrays Community By Ending Support for BFV Before Finishing The Game


End Of An Era | DICE insider commentary (allegedly)
Glassdoor:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BattlefieldV/comments/chphnf/disappointed_with_dice_this_should_explain_it/
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-DICE-Sweden-RVW28127305.htm
"End of an era"

Current Employee - Game Designer Doesn't Recommend Negative Outlook I have been working at DICE (Sweden) full-time Pros Parties, After Work with free drinks and free breakfasts. Most, if not all, coworkers are friendly and nice to be around. Salary and compensation are good for a European studio, but still underwhelming compared to American ones. Crunch is very low for most employees. Cons Creative leadership appears totally clueless. More often than not, their vision raises eyebrows, questions, and concerns. They push their ideas through anyways. Be prepared to work on systems you do not believe in, but leadership is convinced will be a smash hit. Studio leadership appears equally clueless or simply incapable of reining in creative leadership. The result is creative leadership is free to run amok with no oversight. Talking to studio leadership about issues will have them agree with you, only for nothing to happen. EA leadership either signs off everything without much scrutiny or are being kept in the dark on the problems the studio is facing right now. Leadership can make huge blunders but are forgiven and even promoted for the next project. Lower ranking employees can be stuck for years asking for a new role. Leadership conveniently holds meetings for themselves during playtests. Not surprisingly, they appear to be very disconnected with the state of the game. Developers also participate less and less because they know their concerns will not be addressed anymore. Bonuses and annual reviews can appear to be based on throwing darts. The quality or quantity of your work is not obviously reflected in your bonus which can range anywhere from 50 to 150%. Politics seems to play a bigger role than competence. For years, some designers accidentally had salaries significantly lower than other designers with comparable backgrounds, experience and titles. The editor for Frostbite is difficult to work with and feels like it is 15 years old. Basic file operations can take minutes, simple actions like copy and paste do not work reliably. Many people have left over the past couple months. It will be difficult to find potential replacements and get them up to speed. Talent loss may never recover. The studio has become much less open recently. You used to be able to submit anonymous questions for studio meetings. This is no longer possible. Contractors stay contractors forever.

Advice to Management DICE: Play your games extensively before launch. Then play them even more after launch. EA: Scrutinize new games and ask employees directly what went wrong with old games. Don't rely on studio leadership's perspective alone.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BattlefieldV/comments/evskz6/as_much_as_we_love_to_hate_ea_the_direct_reason/
If you read the Glassdoor reviews
(You need an account in some cases to read them) from ex-DICE employees about DICE Stockholm:

Cronyism and nepotism are huge problems. The previous generation of leadership is reaching retirement age and began passing the torch over a year ago. How they selected the current generation is not clear but it isn't working at all. What features make it into the game or get development time isn't dependent on how they'll improve the game but on who has your back. This is especially troublesome because current leadership, or rather the couple of people at the top, is obsessed with executing their vision at the expense of everything else. Being a visionary isn't necessarily a bad thing but they have failed to inspire confidence in that vision. Instead, they did the exact opposite by forbidding negative criticism and discussion as their way of addressing low morale and skepticism. This, among leadership's other consistently backwards ideas and policies, just reduced morale more and more. The worst part was that it wasn't hard to see why their vision wouldn't work. Leadership was just stubborn and refused to back down or admit that they're wrong even after negative reception from nearly all parts of the process. Instead, leadership chased their vision even harder. Leadership’s drive to fulfill their vision despite objections from multiple departments and people was disheartening and they were also very sensitive to anyone who didn’t “get with the program.” People who agreed with leadership were pulled out of the production process and instead helped promote leadership’s vision in public-facing materials. They did this to steer player perception in their favor and then used “champion the players’ view” to enforce a sense of legitimacy. Implementation of features was then handed to team members that already had other tasks on their plate. Gallows humor has been used to cope with how painful playtests of leadership’s ideas were. Leadership loved to manipulate data when there were creative disagreements. They cherry picked a limited subset of feedback from social media channels that aligned with their vision and insisted that it was actually from the overwhelming majority. It’s easy for them to do this since players parroted leadership’s propaganda. It hurt to be sidelined in favor of half-baked suggestions from strangers that mostly piggybacked off leadership’s already absurd ideas. It hurt even more watching the points of failure people indicated actually lead to the exact disaster they warned leadership about. To top it off, leadership drew terrible conclusions on where mistakes were made and will undoubtedly repeat them again. Design had become an almost entirely top-down experience. The ideas leadership came up with were designated MVP to shut down criticism and to prevent resources from going to other systems. This made it difficult for everyone else to implement their designs and even then, leadership demanded revisions and would not discuss their reasoning beyond simply not liking a specific part, nor would they approve the design until those revisions were made. Their cronies did not have to undergo nearly as much scrutiny. Needless to say, these political games are not the kinds of games the company and its employees should be playing. Despite the protests from the people below them, leadership slammed their decisions through with near fanatical conviction. Unsurprisingly, these antics and the overall general lack of confidence have led to dozens of people leaving. Those vacancies will inevitably be filled by people loyal to leadership, regardless of competence. If current leadership is allowed to continue, then the company has no future. Leadership isn't fooling anyone by insisting everything is alright and that we are consistently destroying our competitors. That kind of delusion simply made people's self-preservation instinct stronger and increased their urgency to leave an obviously sinking ship. Everyone was painfully aware of leadership’s lack of project management skills. Because of leadership’s visionary nature, massive scope/feature creep and overcomplication of normally very simple systems were a regular occurrence. Leadership already bit off more than it could chew and chose to add even more work to the pile knowing we did not have time. The whole ordeal was reminiscent of “Pentagon Wars” especially with the people in charge getting promotions even after everything blew up in their face. Making another blockbuster hit like past titles isn’t completely out of reach, but leadership is going in the exact opposite direction. Wait a few years for the current leadership and their cronies to be promoted to positions of irrelevance then consider coming here. If the company survives that far into the future, maybe producing wildly successful games will become possible again.

Also this:

EA leadership either signs off everything without much scrutiny or are being kept in the dark on the problems the studio is facing right now.

As much as we love to hate EA, it seems like management has dug their head up their asses and ruining everything.

Mass exodus of talent:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BattlefieldV/comments/fsf2bw/i_recommend_everyone_check_out_the_glassdoor_page/


This comment on the thread David Sirland made on Twitter about his last day suggests that there are disagreements within DICE
https://www.reddit.com/r/BattlefieldV/comments/fcwjfh/this_comment_on_the_thread_david_sirland_made_on/


TL;DR current state of western capitalism (Richard__Cranium)
https://www.reddit.com/r/BattlefieldV/comments/evskz6/as_much_as_we_love_to_hate_ea_the_direct_reason/

Higher ups surrounding themselves with yes men who only cherry pick feedback that aligns with their fucked up stupid as shit, out of touch ideas? Sounds like where I work. Hey idiots, morals at an all time low. There's a reason there's more and more people leaving/open positions with nobody wanting to come in and replace them.

What exactly are the problems with that game and why is it so disliked

I know about the ludicurous cosmetics- basically if I wasnt told its WW2, I wouldnt know- but what else

I havent really played it (besides the SP during free weekends) and I did spend some time (around 50 hrs avg) in each BF from 3 to 1, so Im curious

still waiting for them to pull the plug on Criterion. They ruined NFS.
Underground 3 boycott pls

A shame they fucked it up so much. The actual gameplay was very good, they made nice changes from the last battlefield mechanically. But they made such stupid fucking decisions about the setting. Not just the women in the game either, they specifically wanted to focus the conflict on forgotten battles people hadn't seen before. aka boring shit nobody was interested in. Instead of normandy or stalingrad or dunkirk they did fucking norway and rotterdam.

I feel bad for the developers and artists. It was clear they made huge advancements in the actual gameplay and graphics but got tied down from corporate.

What exactly are the problems with that game and why is it so disliked

Where to start really. It got off to a pretty bad launch because of the terrible reveal trailer and the planned cosmetics / creative direction, and some executive causing an uproar by saying people just "shouldn't buy the game if they don't like it" in reaction to feedback about the ridiculous cosmetics.

Graphics are amazing. Gameplay was pretty good. Gunplay was excellent and the majority of players liked the fast TTK. Vehicles were okay; planes have been overpowered ever since release and tanks can either camp and rack up a great amount of kills or go in and get destroyed very quickly, but nothing they couldn't have fixed if they had tried. However, the game never really had the sandbox "only in Battlefield" feeling to it.

Add to this that they decided to focus on "untold stories" which isn't that bad in itself, but the maps and the game in general had no atmosphere (one of the main things BF1 was praised for). The launch of the Pacific theatre fixed this with the new maps being cool and having a much better immersive and historic feel to them. However they ruined all the hype about this expansion shortly after by making huge TTK changes that no one in the community asked for, which severely worsened gameplay, and it took months for them to revert. It was actually the second time they tried to mess with the TTK after the first time already caused huge community outrage. It's unbelievable they tried to do it a second time. They were completely out of touch with their players it seems or they just didn't care.

In addition to this all the game was plagued by very bad decisions and development. Patches adding more bugs than they fixed. A very slow content drip instead of the "amazing" live service that was promised. A huge amount of content (revealed by people digging in the game files) being cancelled or never being released. Popular game modes kept being taken out of rotation for no apparent reason (classics like Rush only ever stayed live for 1-2 weeks before being taken offline again). No road maps and bad communication with the community. The Battle Royale mode was actually really fun and unique (because of vehicles) but they messed it up by not making it free to play and they ditched it shortly after release because of low player numbers.


I was still hoping for a Battlefront II turn-around with DICE finally picking up on the live service and adding new theatres like the Eastern Front, D-Day, Africa and Italy etc. with more famous and immersive battles being depicted. It would've been amazing to go back to cinematic WW2 with BF5's excellent graphics engine. But they completely botched it, and now they ditched this smoking mess of a game. And we'll probably have to wait another 10 years before we ever re-visit WW2 again.

BF5 in short: wasted potential.

Where to start really. It got off to a pretty bad launch because of the terrible reveal trailer and the planned cosmetics / creative direction, and some executive causing an uproar by saying people just "shouldn't buy the game if they don't like it" in reaction to feedback about the ridiculous cosmetics.

Graphics are amazing. Gameplay was pretty good. Gunplay was excellent and the majority of players liked the fast TTK. Vehicles were okay; planes have been overpowered ever since release and tanks can either camp and rack up a great amount of kills or go in and get destroyed very quickly, but nothing they couldn't have fixed if they had tried. However, the game never really had the sandbox "only in Battlefield" feeling to it.

Add to this that they decided to focus on "untold stories" which isn't that bad in itself, but the maps and the game in general had no atmosphere (one of the main things BF1 was praised for). The launch of the Pacific theatre fixed this with the new maps being cool and having a much better immersive and historic feel to them. However they ruined all the hype about this expansion shortly after by making huge TTK changes that no one in the community asked for, which severely worsened gameplay, and it took months for them to revert. It was actually the second time they tried to mess with the TTK after the first time already caused huge community outrage. It's unbelievable they tried to do it a second time. They were completely out of touch with their players it seems or they just didn't care.

In addition to this all the game was plagued by very bad decisions and development. Patches adding more bugs than they fixed. A very slow content drip instead of the "amazing" live service that was promised. A huge amount of content (revealed by people digging in the game files) being cancelled or never being released. Popular game modes kept being taken out of rotation for no apparent reason (classics like Rush only ever stayed live for 1-2 weeks before being taken offline again). No road maps and bad communication with the community. The Battle Royale mode was actually really fun and unique (because of vehicles) but they messed it up by not making it free to play and they ditched it shortly after release because of low player numbers.


I was still hoping for a Battlefront II turn-around with DICE finally picking up on the live service and adding new theatres like the Eastern Front, D-Day, Africa and Italy etc. with more famous and immersive battles being depicted. It would've been amazing to go back to cinematic WW2 with BF5's excellent graphics engine. But they completely botched it, and now they ditched this smoking mess of a game. And we'll probably have to wait another 10 years before we ever re-visit WW2 again.

BF5 in short: wasted potential.

Well, that explains a lot

Thanks

What exactly are the problems with that game and why is it so disliked

I only played old BF games.
They tried to turn/market the game for a younger casual audience. The big problem was not so much the game itself but terrible marketing and response to consumer criticisms.

Why EA/Dice marketing failed. This sums it up nicely;
Left-leaning POV:

Right-leaning POV:

This explains the western culture war that also exist within BF community:


Dice/EA exec also did this, being completely out of touch:
DICE Celebrates Failed BFV Launch By Demonising Gamers...Again.


In comparison, BF1 WW1 had great marketing as do War Thunder and World of Tanks;
example:




Allegedly the Dice team behind the Rotterdam BF5 Trailer (few dislikes) had another pitch for the reveal trailer. They wanted to go with a Saving Private Ryan theme and hire Tom Hardy, the spitfire pilot from Dunkirk.
Dunkirk - Final Dog Fight & Oil Scene (2017 HD):


The higher-ups said no which then became the much disliked BF5 reveal trailer.

EA BF5 casualization goes wrong:
https://www.coh2.org/topic/102968/ea-bf5-casualization-goes-wrong

Really enjoyed BFV, spent many hours playing it and was hoping for eastern front as well as so many other battles but... a big middle finger to the higher ups.

still waiting for them to pull the plug on Criterion. They ruined NFS.
Underground 3 boycott pls

and still no new burnout since more than 12 years by criterion, what a shame.. arcade racing died very long ago, very sad..

Instead of normandy or stalingrad or dunkirk they did fucking norway and rotterdam.

maybe because those scenarios have been in games for a million times.. but well, a new version with current graphics and physics would have still been cool.. but on the other hand battlefield singleplayers have always been extremely horrible to me

Dice as sweeden studio is too much tolerant.. black women fighting for germany ? Political correctness is true cancer in our time. In bf6 there will be third gender and soldier sexuality choice.
Its sad that they care about black dudes and absolutly dont care about foreigners in british or us forces. This the reason why witcher 3 is the best game.

I don't understand why people were angry at the reveal trailer, especially battlefield fans.

Battlefield has had stuff like golden weapons and crazy attachments in BF1 too, just this trailer didn't lie to its audience with a fake "historically accurate" trailer. Actually the reveal trailer is about as close to a game of BF you can get (yes most players picking crazy skins they think look "cool") unlike the BF1 trailers that made it seem like some bolt action trench simulator.

Dice as sweeden studio is too much tolerant.. black women fighting for germany ? Political correctness is true cancer in our time. In bf6 there will be third gender and soldier sexuality choice.
Its sad that they care about black dudes and absolutly dont care about foreigners in british or us forces. This the reason why witcher 3 is the best game.

Sure I can understand the argument, certain soldiers not matching their regiment or clothing.

But where was the pitch forks when Axis spawn with US weaponary, Allies spawning with prototype axis guns, or golden gun skins and imaginary attachments that threw historical accuracy out the window? previous BF titles did just that but there weren't twitter movements attacking the devs for russians spawning with an M16. Apparently with BF5 black people are the kicker (despite most of the british army being indian or black).

I sympathise with DICE on this regard honestly, but that's not to say I defend their legitimate criticisms like DLC or map policy.

Dice as sweeden studio is too much tolerant.. black women fighting for germany ? Political correctness is true cancer in our time. In bf6 there will be third gender and soldier sexuality choice.
Its sad that they care about black dudes and absolutly dont care about foreigners in british or us forces. This the reason why witcher 3 is the best game.

Yes, if you choose a certain time period, you take its limitations. There were no transgender people in them, women were only in the USSR but not as linear infantry. Of the line infantry, only snipers can be distinguished. Etc. if developers want hype hype, go to a modern setting. When choosing a time period, try to observe history.

What exactly are the problems with that game and why is it so disliked

I know about the ludicurous cosmetics- basically if I wasnt told its WW2, I wouldnt know- but what else

I havent really played it (besides the SP during free weekends) and I did spend some time (around 50 hrs avg) in each BF from 3 to 1, so Im curious

Current BF player who is apart of the Twitch Community and the dead competitive community (Top 1% in KD, KPM, SPM, etc). Issues with the game is mostly severe bugs that have been in the game since launch, a lack of rsps mixed with a severe cheating issue, and game mechanics/gameplay solely designed to limit good players. There is also a huge lack of content.

I have a friend whos a bf streamer that is probably one of the best bf/fps players I've seen recently, hes been stream sniped by a aimbotting cheater for an entire year without that cheater being banned. The anti-cheat is non existent.

I can go in detail with how Dice managed to fuck up literally every major update since launch but I might be typing all day trying to explain the sheer incompetence at Dice Sweden.

Dice as sweeden studio is too much tolerant.. black women fighting for germany ? Political correctness is true cancer in our time. In bf6 there will be third gender and soldier sexuality choice.

Expand your thinking. PC/woke culture (the final outcome) has little to do with POC or sexism.

PC culture = "useful idiots" without much clue who or what they're fighting for (susceptible to enemy propaganda).
Activision Blizzard executive leadership bends the knee to authoritarianism.
Communism/authoritarianism in disguise (global con game).
Western culture war = ideology subversion / Unrestricted Warfare / Stealth War / Wall Street corruption/Reece Committee

Real vs Fake racism:
1) Africans in China: We face coronavirus discrimination (17 April 2020):
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-52309414
2) China State media (CGTN) - "Hug a Chinese" Italy (this did not age well):


This western culture war is not left vs right, political extremism do not play "fair".
Win by any means necessary.

Current BF player who is apart of the Twitch Community and the dead competitive community (Top 1% in KD, KPM, SPM, etc). Issues with the game is mostly severe bugs that have been in the game since launch, a lack of rsps mixed with a severe cheating issue, and game mechanics/gameplay solely designed to limit good players. There is also a huge lack of content.

I have a friend whos a bf streamer that is probably one of the best bf/fps players I've seen recently, hes been stream sniped by a aimbotting cheater for an entire year without that cheater being banned. The anti-cheat is non existent.

I can go in detail with how Dice managed to fuck up literally every major update since launch but I might be typing all day trying to explain the sheer incompetence at Dice Sweden.

By game mechanics designed to limit good players do you mean TTK changes? Just curious because I felt previous BF TTKs weren't bad

Maybe they wanted a scapegoat for why players are leaving

By game mechanics designed to limit good players do you mean TTK changes? Just curious because I felt previous BF TTKs weren't bad

Maybe they wanted a scapegoat for why players are leaving

Yes, there are a couple examples put the two biggest are attrition and the ttk changes. Other things like the dumbing down of vehicles compared to other BFs, the additions of super crutch weapons designed to just beat every other gun in a 1v1 (type2a and model 37) and animations that hamper aggressive play styles were much smaller and less easy to notice if someone had not played for a long period of time.

Attrition is designed to hurt players who won a gunfight in their next gunfight. This overwhelmingly hurt good players who did not play medic. Therefore literally every good solo player would main medic class and squads were required to run atleast 1 and against other good players 2. I’ve lost a ton of gunfights in 5 because I’m stuck at 30 hp because some players in past fights would Slowly lower my hp. (And trust me you can’t rely on random teammates in bf to do anything such as give you health)

The TTK changes were definitely designed to hurt good players. Funnily enough it actually made 1v1 much more favored to the better player than the original ttk. But it made 1vX incredibly difficult because of the time required to kill each person was so high that there was no way in hell you’d be able to kill a squad like before. This promoted huge zergs as the meta so everyone just ran around in a blob since trying to fight separate from the Zerg would just get you killed. Considering that a vast majority of players who play off the Zerg are typically your better players, essentially the main play style on most maps for good players got hard nerfed. Another aspect on gunplay that lowered the skill gap was spread to recoil. Basically the recoil on most guns was completely random. It would kick left right up down and diagonal. So basically you had to hope your gun would work with you and if it decides to kick super hard left for no reason then that’s unlucky you’ll never be able to control it. On some guns it’s so bad it’s basically fucking bloom.

As to why they changed the ttk I’m not certain but I’m pretty sure it was a gamble trying to get more casual players to return or buy the game as both occurred around Christmas time. I’ll also note that the post launch maps in bf5 were pretty fucking awful overall. Al Sundan, panzerstorm and the wake island remake are some of the most horrendous maps ever made in bf history.

Snip

This sounds absolutely awful, no wonder players left in droves. The health changes with attrition sound terrible, I mean even in "hardcore" shooters like rising storm or post scriptum you can self heal to combat readiness to fight a fair fight.

It's baffling to me a studio with as much experience as dice would make such elementary mistakes. At a time when bf1 won praise and sales for being the "grounded" and slightly more hardcore version of CoD.

It seems to me they didn't know what direction they wanted to take the game. But a battle royal side mode was a red flag to me. It seems I judged correctly.

snip.

The issue with battlefield being such a dud is that there really isn’t anything to replace it. Nothing in the market is really a arcade sandbox shooter and the games that are suppose to compete with it are more milsim than arcade shooter. I’ve gone back to bf1 and 4 recently, each of those games have their own separate issues but its been refreshing compared to the time I put into bf5.

It’s been a rough time for fps in general, bf is dead, modern warfare servers currently don’t work, and valorant is overhyped and mediocre.

I think the multiplayer new Medal of Honor 2020 will be the Battlefield substitute. And if you look at the old Medal of Honor 2010, there was a multiplayer in it very similar to Bad Company 2 multiplayer.

for example:
https://youtu.be/zNxoKBaOoiE