It’s been a rough few months for Battlefield 2042, and things don’t sound like they’re going to magically turn around anytime soon. EA announced today that the live service shooter won’t be getting any new content until summer, over six months after launch, with season one delayed and basic features like team voice chat still being worked on.
EA revealed last month that Battlefield 2042 would only be getting the slimmest of upgrades in February in the form of a proper scoreboard, something fans were disappointed not to see at launch and have been clamoring for ever since. But now it appears players will have to continue waiting months for actual content updates in the form of new maps and specialists.
“We’ve had to make some big decisions to ensure that our next set of updates can be focused on delivering these improvements, with the most substantial one being to move the release date of our first Season to early Summer,” EA wrote in a blog post today. According to previous datamines, the first season wasn’t supposed to start until March, which was already a long wait. Plus some players have already paid for it as part of the Battlefield 2042 season pass. EA says it will make it up to them with some special Legendary skins.
In addition to adding a robust scoreboard, the Battlefield 2042 team will in the meantime focus on implementing voice chat and player profiles, as well as rolling out a new system for collecting feedback from the community. In future blog posts, the team will present planned changes for specific areas of the game like map design, watch how players digest and react to the news, and then roll out a revised plan that factors in community feedback.
While not always in such explicit terms, this is how most live service games operate at this point, and as with the larger state of how Battlefield 2042 launched, it’s weird that this is being pitched as something EA is pivoting to rather than its starting point.
Plenty of people have grown attached to Battlefield 2042‘s messy, sprawling brand of futuristic warfare, but the game continues stepping on rakes with uncharacteristic regularity. Last month, EA added a zombie survival mode to the game’s Portal playlist, but then removed it the very next day because players were using it to farm XP. It was a bummer because the mode was actually a lot of fun.
Battlefield 2042 recently dropped out of Xbox’s top 50 most-played games, and its concurrent player count on Steam has fallen to almost half of its predecessor, 2018’s Battlefield V. That game also had a fraught launch, and notoriously took years to win fans back over. In December, EA announced that Respawn Entertainment co-founder and CEO, Vince Zampella, would be taking over the Battlefield series following a management shakeup at DICE and plans to expand the Battlefield “universe.” Of course, Battlefield 2042‘s first season will have to go live first.
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