Battlefield 2042 developer DICE has just announced a Season One battle pass called Zero Hour in a bid to revitalise its ailing multiplayer shooter.
I want to take a quick look at the community response to this news, but before I do that, if you’ll permit me a moment to editorialise.
The game, which arrived in a bit of a state when it launched last year has been slowly addressing its laundry list of problems since. In a business model where the game had launched to instant success, a battle pass would make sense. It would be a way to ensure the game had a long tail, kept players interested, and remained profitable for some time to come. But Battlefield 2042 hasn’t done any of things you need to do to earn the right to ask your players to move to the Zero Hour battle pass.
Particularly a paid battle pass. To me, DICE’s decision to put its hand out for more money is, to deploy an Australian colloquialism, testing the friendship. Given Battlefield 2042‘s still-uneven state, it hardly seems fair for DICE to ask for more when it has yet to get its house in order.
Though a great many of the game’s problems have been addressed in the eight months since launch, a great many still remain too. Is it time for the game to move to the next phase of its life cycle? Let’s see what the community thinks.
The community responds
But let’s take a look at the community response, starting with Reddit.
Interestingly, most of the fan critiques so far have been around the dearth of content available in the update, not that DICE intends to charge for it.
They’re not taking it super well. Broadly, the subreddit feels Battlefield 2042‘s new Zero Hour content is an anaemic offer that seeks to paper over the game’s ongoing issues. They’re also deeply unimpressed with the “gimmicky” new crossbow weapon.
Twitter felt similarly with many players expressing disbelief at the lack of content.
Me realizing I spent 100 dollars on Battlefield 2042 only to wait nearly 8 months for the first season of barebones content drops and a battle pass pic.twitter.com/WiQMMbjpGx
— White Rabbit (@RabbitShirogane) June 7, 2022
Some expressed a sense that their faith in DICE to respond to the game’s issues had not been rewarded. Others were excited to see any movement at the station at all and hoped it would lead to more significant updates in the future. Others complained that previous Battlefield games were able to produce numerous maps on a similar scale in around the same amount of time and that one map and a single operator simply wasn’t cutting it.
An announcement post for Zero Hour posted to the Battlefield 2042 community page saw similarly split comments, with some celebrating the news, some blasting the studio, and others simply deciding to post through it.
As always, we’re keen for your thoughts. Should DICE be charging for the battle pass, or even implementing it at all? Are you happy with the new content or do you feel there should be more? Do you hate the crossbow? Are you, like quite a few folks on Twitter, convinced this is a move to get ahead of Modern Warfare 2? Let us know in the comments below.
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