EA’s online shooter Battlefield 2042 has not had the reception it hoped for, as Steam users review bomb the game for its failures.
Although gamers in general are prone to overreacting some communities have a particular reputation of their own. League Of Legends fans are known for being less than welcoming to new players and Battlefield fans, particularly Battlefield fans on PC, are known for being uncompromising in terms of their demands of developer DICE.
Battlefield 2042 currently has a very reasonable 73% score on Metacritic and, with some caveats, we certainly enjoyed it in our review, but on Steam it has one of the lowest review scores of all time.
It’s not as low as Konami’s eFootball 2022 (Steam reviews have been breaking records all year) but fans are upset at the perceived lack of features and the poor performance.
A list of features that have been in previous Battlefield games but aren’t in 2042 have been doing the rounds for a few days now, although these are the same fans that complained when DICE spent their time on a story campaign with Battlefield 5. So to suddenly complain that there isn’t one in Battlefield 2042 (as there wasn’t with many of the earlier games) seems a little disingenuous.
The list is also very naïve about the whole process of game development, as just because a feature was in a previous version it still needs to be updated and redeveloped – which takes time and effort – for a new one.
That said, there are certainly some serious performance issues, especially on PC, with sever problems, in-game stuttering and rubber-banding, and crash bugs that can make the game essentially unplayable.
Many fans are also unconvinced about the whole 128-player concept, with complaints that the current maps are too big and just not much fun.
The lack of important features like a leaderboard and persistent lobbies are also valid complaints and perhaps speak to the difficulties of developing a game during the pandemic. Although that’s no excuse if the issues were known about beforehand and EA decided to release the game anyway.
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It’s all very reminiscent of Battlefield 4 (which once again reinforces the idea that publishers never learn from past mistakes) and EA and DICE have already been making all the usual promises about fixing everything with updates – one of which has already been released.
Battlefield 2042 currently has a ‘Mostly Negative’ rating on Steam, with only 30% of the roughly 36,000 reviews, at time of writing, being positive.
That’s peanuts compared to eFootball 2022, which managed only 8% positive, but it does make Battlefield 2042 the ninth lowest rated game ever on Steam.
It was number eight yesterday though, so things are already getting better, but this is all going to be a big worry for EA as they try to win fans back over the next few years.
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