Why Did Battlefield V Failed So Miserably?

[Vintageitem]

Unreplayable campaign

[Brenker]

I don't think Battlefield V is objectively good. I'd say it's objectively worse in terms of gameplay design than Battlefield 1942, 2, BC 2, and Battlefield 2142.

They improved the graphics, improved the audio, improved everything gameplay wise and you're telling me it isn't objectively(factually) better than those games? What have you been smoking man! Look, I don't like BFV at all, I think its terrible but thats subjective, I'm personally disliking it, it has nothing to do with what it really is.

[Murray]

As someone who likes the Battlefield franchise as a whole (I've played BF2, Bad Company 1&2, BF3, BF4, BF1) I got put off by BFV for several reasons. Ironically, the purple-haired female with an amputated arm wasn't necessarily one of them.

- EA/Dice's attitude towards their costumers, basically belittling them for not liking what they're doing to the franchise.

- The game being incomplete, several parts of the game are to come out at a later date. Just delay the game and release it at a later date if that's the case.

- General glitches that are always there when a game comes out. While they're usually fixed eventually, it added to my decision of skipping out on BFV.

The "Don't like it? Don't buy it." quote was just the dumbest dare they could have made. Of course we're not gonna buy it if we don't like it. It's not like we're all a bunch of collectors, wanting to have every single installment of a game franchise. We can skip out it if we don't like it, and so we did.

[Lars]

I've been a loyal customer of Battlefield games since about ten years. When I heard DICE were making a new WWII battlefield game, they already had my money. All they needed to do was the same thing they always had done and do it once again.

Then the bomb dropped with that, famous for all the wrong reasons, trailer. Customize your character in every possible way in a WWII game? Do they even know who their customers are?

"We want our players to express themselves."

BS. You want to sell cosmetic tat for real money. And then dress it all up in the "veil of inclusiveness". Well sorry, but we don't fall for that.

"Ignorant."

"Don't like it, don't buy it."

OK.

"Genderfield." etc. on the internal launch event.

They continue to mock the whole community for what some guy wrote on the internet. Straw manning everyone who has another opinion on how WWII games should be.

[Matcam89]

The game itself is good - Played the other day with some friends and it was an absolute blast. The problem lies in the following

The Executives - Out of touch - Insulting your fan base
The Developers - Out of touch - insulting your fan base

Lack of a season pass - Yep i will take flack for this and i don't care at least with a season pass i knew i would get extra content. This game will suffer the same fate as Battlefront II and get nothing good

Lack of content - Single Player campaign not finished, Multiplayer content seems lacking - WWII is too large to be lacking - Missing, US, Russia,Italy, French/Polish Resistance etc...

But despite all this the game is a blast to play

[fenrif]

Objectively speaking the game is good, it has all the features, the servers are full of players that are playing so I can't see how it is failing miserably but I guess thats how people look at games, completely subjectively and disregarding facts

I don't think Battlefield V is objectively good. I'd say it's objectively worse in terms of gameplay design than Battlefield 1942, 2, BC 2, and Battlefield 2142.

[Garrett]

Disclaimer: This is not a political post. This is about game design. Proper worldbuilding-oriented game design to be exact. You can make a game historically accurate and still retain historically inaccurate customization.

The singleplayer campaign of BFV shows several signs of ideological compromise, but the way the multiplayer was revealed shows game design incompetence. See, I don't think the original multiplayer trailer was meant to be a crazy diversity fest. It was meant to demonstrate the players' ability to customize their characters. It backfired because every character design was stupid and the battlefield shouldn't consist of legions of vegan furry rave hobos.

The reason I accuse DICE of incompetence is that I came up with this idea the second I'd seen the trailer. The problem of customizable ridiculous character designs being historically inaccurate has an extremely easy solution that involves changing the visual rendering of the battling squads. I call it the "Spezial Schneeflocke" initiative, or "The SS". Basically, every player can customize their character any way they wish. Those who insist on authenticity can make a character that represents someone who actually might have been a World War 2 combatant on whichever side they're playing on. Those who don't care about authenticity get to customize their character in any way they want. The game doesn't even need to limit the customization to anything remotely WW2 related or even historical. The thing is, once a player gets into a game, every British soldier they see on the side of Britain accurately represents the demographics and standard issue of the British military in WW2. Every German soldier on the German side accurately represents the demographics and standard issue of the German military in WW2. Et cetera. -But that player sees their own custom character exactly how they made him or her. They're special. They're the one exception that proves the rule. And every player on both sides sees that player as just another soldier who accurately represents the demographic of their historical faction. No matter what, every German soldier you shoot is a white man in a Nazi uniform, and every Japanese soldier you shoot is an asian man in a Imperial Japanese uniform. The battlefield is historically accurate, minus you, except if you decide to be historically accurate as well.

[Brenker]

Objectively speaking the game is good, it has all the features, the servers are full of players that are playing so I can't see how it is failing miserably but I guess thats how people look at games, completely subjectively and disregarding facts

[fenrif]

Mostly bad marketing that failed to pull in anyone new and a poor product failed to captivate existing fans.

Yeah, pretty much this. DICE haven't been making good games for a while now. At least since the first Star Wars one. I assume that the people at the studio who made Battlefield a good series no longer work there anymore. The people who do work at the studio are more interested in historical revisionism to push their ideology rather than making good games. Which they probably consider to be toxic. They certainly do not understand how to design a large scale combined warfare game anymore, which is odd because all they have to do is copy the earlier games in their franchises. But I guess earlier games in their franchises didn't have good enough monetisation streams. Plus what are they going to do? Tell their 12 year old daughters that there weren't any teenage girls singlehandedly defeating nazis? That'd just be downright sexist.

[isturbo1984]

Mostly bad marketing that failed to pull in anyone new and a poor product failed to captivate existing fans.

[FrameZ]

I played BFV with a friend, we got the game on release (pre-ordered via a key reseller, didn't pay full price for it) both of us dropped it though. Reasons why is that the game is really lite on content and their updates have been a joke.
Their 1st update pushed both of us out a bit, mainly the nerf to planes and the new map, the game felt a lot slower after it and the new map sucks, it's one of the worst map I've ever played, they also added new weapons locked behind timed challenges which I'm not a fan of, to top it off they were buggy and had problems tracking the progression.
Then came the ttk changes, one of their "solutions" to the ttd problem and because they thought "players may be getting frustrated with dying too fast that they choose not to log back in and learn how to become more proficient at Battlefield V"
Then they decided that they create separate playlists with the different ttk and then ultimately backtracked on the changes all together. Me and my friend didn't bother to play the "new" ttk patch but we tried the game after they reverted it and for some reason the game just felt laggy for us now we stopped playing all together.
I'll say this, I think us both have gave up on the Battlefield franchise, I also have no faith in Dice anymore, to me just look incompetent.

[Hopeless Wombat]

I'm starting to think this extends to something even larger: IP and studio fatigue. The PS4 just turned 5 years old, and DICE has made BF4, Star Wars BF, BF1, Star Wars BF2, BF5 and I believe they were responsible for a large part of Hardline's MP, which is more games than years. They don't even get the luxury of having 3 year cycles that the CoD developers now have while still adding content for a whole year running. You'd have to imagine that this has cycled people in and out, which may be a contributing factor to their recent misfortunes.

I mean, has DICE done anything not remotely battlefield like? I honestly don't know.

[Baron Baldric]

It's the same thing that happened to Bethesda with Fallout 76, they believed that even if they lost 90% of their fans, the remaining 10% would spend so much money on micro-transactions that they would make more money.

[Last_Dragoon]

I'm surprised these executives of billion dollar corporations forgot one of the most important rules: It is cheaper to retain loyal customers than to find new ones. Why the hell did anyone think its a good idea to constantly insult your fanbase? Not once, but twice and to continue doubling down expecting shit to change.

[Noobc0re]

Series went downhill after BF2.