Has Electronic Arts lost its midas touch?
Hyderabad: February has been a very busy month on the gaming front, as I have sunk significant hours in Sifu and Dying Light 2 and that’s even before the release of the much-awaited Horizon and Elden Ring. With Sifu and Dying Light both turning out to be solid 3.5/5 games, and the promise of Horizon […]
Hyderabad: February has been a very busy month on the gaming front, as I have sunk significant hours in Sifu and Dying Light 2 and that’s even before the release of the much-awaited Horizon and Elden Ring.
With Sifu and Dying Light both turning out to be solid 3.5/5 games, and the promise of Horizon and Elden Ring, we gamers have great options to consider this month. However, not all recent gaming news is as positive as February’s game selection as I choose to dwell on Electronic Arts’ decision to not disclose the sales and revenues from Battlefield 2042.
2042, the latest game from the iconic franchise was designed as only multiplayer game and shipped broken and unplayable because of widespread issues with the game’s servers and some very inconsistent gameplay. Such were the problems with 2042, that the game’s cheat-code makers refused to search for anymore exploits because even cheating in the game wasn’t consistent.
As problems persisted EA began to offer refunds, and 2042, one of the worst reviewed games on Steam, lost its players like sailors deserting a sinking ship. While the failure of a game that was supposed to hold its own against CoD: Vanguard and Halo Infinite isn’t difficult to explain, what’s difficult to digest though, is EA throwing it under the figurative bus and refusing to try and salvage a game from one of its most iconic franchises.
What we see with 2042 isn’t something new, EA has experienced these challenges earlier too with its other games like Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda. Anthem was a new franchise, supposed to headline EA’s games as service model for the next decade and Andromeda from a studio that had never made a bad game but as the criticism piled up EA did what it could to fix both games, albeit unsuccessfully.
With Anthem, content and developer teams worked well over a year after the game’s dismal launch but here 2042 is barely three months old and watching it sink without as much as a splash is difficult to digest.
While pertinent questions like “how and why was an only multiplayer game launched without reliable servers”, and “how was an FPS experience supposed to succeed without consistency” are important to ask, I am more interested in asking if this is a company-wide problem? Servers for EA’s annual titles like FIFA and Madden have long been unreliable, while the games’ player communities have often spoken for years about how the gameplay is less than ideal and inconsistent and with 2042 these problems have reached a new nadir. Such is the damage here, that I don’t know if Battlefield as a franchise can recover from this mishap.
In my examination, the last five years of EA titles have been underwhelming to say the least as gigantic titles have flattered to deceive and success has been found in smaller games like It takes two, Lost in random, Unravel 2, and Sea of Solitude.
A trend that should be especially worrying for a company that looks at each of its flagship games as potential billion-dollar vehicles. I guess major fixes are required when games cease to be fun, has EA factored in the bottom line too much, I wonder. Either way, trying to fix 2042 would have been the right thing ethically or even in terms of PR and the “optics.” It would have meant that the franchise and the players mattered. Its not always in the game.
Now you can get handpicked stories from Telangana Today on Telegram everyday. Click the link to subscribe.
Click to follow Telangana Today Facebook page and Twitter .
