It’s been a bittersweet kind of birthday forBattlefield. This weekend will mark 20 years since the legendary war shooter series first landed on the beaches on Normandy and in the DVD drives of thousands of PC gamers with Battlefield 1942. DICE has every right to make a bit of a thing of the occasion and it duly has done, reflecting on the good times, ignoring the kind of crap times it’s going through right now, and looking to the future in a way that leaves me feeling, well, a little bit wary.
To supplement the 20th birthday celebrations, the series' General Manager Byron Beede came out withan announcementthat covered quite a few things. that it has formed a new studio, Ridgeline Games, headed up by former Halo designer Marcus Lehto, which will be working on a new ‘narrative campaign’ for Battlefield (which won’t be part of Battlefield 2042). At the same time, Ripple Effect Studios is “creating an entirely new Battlefield experience that will complement and build upon the series' foundations.” This leaves the core Battlefield team at DICE to “continue developing Battlefield’s one-of-a-kind multiplayer suite.”
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Before we continue, can we all just take a moment to collectively wince at the clinical reference to the multiplayer Battlefield experience (you know,the actual game!) as a “suite?” It sounds like the game has been condensed into a collection of drab mid-2000s writing programs, and doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence that the current leadership over there understands what’s made the series endure since the turn of the millennium while so many others fell face-down in the dirt.
It sounds like a lot of mysterious new stuff, all of which will be congealed into a “Connected Battlefield Universe.” Frankly, that sounds a bit ominous, like it will involve a lot of greyed-out menu options that only get unlocked once you exchange your money for ‘Battle Tokens’ or ‘Dog Tags’ or whatever the in-game currency in a full-on Battlefield service game would be called. Amidst all these projects and scary new concepts, it feels like Battlefield - once such a majestic yet simple idea that entailed two teams of 32 people each battling for domination over richly realised battlefields - has been lost, trampled in a blitzkrieg of buzzwords.
The announcement also mentions further down that DICE Creative Director Lars Gustavsson, who’s been with the company since the Battlefield 1942 days, would be leaving after 22 years. That marks the last of the DICE-Battlefield old guard heading out the door - a mass exodus that began at some point in the wake of Battlefield 1 in 2017 (with a tangible and most would say negative shift in the series' identity since then). Taking the franchise into the future will be former Call of Duty head honchos Byron Beede and Vince Zampella, which probably sounds a lot more exciting for investors and shareholders than it does for those of us who have been with Battlefield from the beginning.
So it’s out with the old and in with the new over at DICE. The problem is that everything ‘new’ DICE has done in recent years has pulled the series further and further away from its roots, and perhaps on its 20th birthday it would’ve been better to reflect on what’s really made the series great over the years rather than bombard us with a bunch of nebulous marketing speak and the sobering news that a franchise veteran is leaving.
The essence of Battlefield is right there in the name. Everyone will have their opinion on when the series was at its best, but for most people it will be somewhere between Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield 1 (we could even narrow it to Bad Company 2 - Battlefield 1, at a stretch). The wonderful thing about the series until that point is that it was so singularly focused around the battlefield itself. There were no named operatives trying to give the game an unnecessary dose of personality, no misguided battle royale modes, no attempts to tie each game into some wider ‘Universe,’ and no gimmicks to distract us from the core experience. Many people praised 2042’s Portal mode, but the fact that people are more drawn to a mode that largely recreates experiences from older Battlefield games says a lot about the current state of the game. It also reveals that maybe those who love Battlefield would much rather it remained focused on what it’s always done best rather than trying to homogenise into the modern shooter crowd.
On the one hand, it’s good to hear that DICE are being allowed to focus on the multiplayer experience (just stop calling it a ‘suite,’ please). It doesn’t sound like DICE will be spread thin internally, but with two other Battlefield projects on the go from subsidiary studios, itdoessound like the franchise itself is being spread thin. EA’s Battlefield budget and focus is clearly not laser-focused on that core experience that fans have always rallied around, and it really should be. 20 years on, Battlefield is best known for the same thing it always was: a condensed theatre of war that throws 64 players together for a combined-arms shootout that manages to straddle cinematic immersion and exhilarating online mayhem.
I’m delighted that the series has made it to its 20th birthday and grateful for the memories (especially withmy beloved Battlefield 1that I’ve been playing all week in celebration), but for the next 20 years to be as illustrious the new-look DICE needs to remember where it all came from.
