A DICE producer has conceded that Battlefield 2042 was overly ambitious and did not land with players, and says the studio feels much more confident about Battlefield 6 after feedback from an open beta and Battlefield Labs experiments.
“I think 2042, for us, was a very ambitious goal,” Jeremy Chubb, producer at DICE, tells PCGamesN in an interview. “Trying to embrace the possibilities of 128-player and even larger-scale maps. For a lot of our audience, it didn’t quite have the right feel.”
2042 scored 68 on Metacritic and drew harsh user reviews, which plainly shaped the studio’s approach to the next title. Chubb says those lessons pushed the team back toward what worked in Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4, and that those older elements are present in Battlefield 6.
“This game, Battlefield 6, is much more in tune with what we built in Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4, particularly,” Chubb says. “Aspects of those games come through really strong.”
That emphasis on the series roots has come alongside a program that puts rough builds in front of players early. Battlefield Labs has been used to test ideas with the community, and Chubb describes that process as a route to regular, practical feedback rather than quiet internal guessing.
“There’s an energy that we’re getting from the audience right now which is overwhelming,” he says. “There’s a confidence to us because we set out to work with the community. We have this program, Battlefield Labs. We put sometimes quite crude software in front of people, and that was a journey we all had to go on together to show in-development experiences.”
Players should see differences from the open beta, which drew praise for some systems and criticism for others, such as map sizes. DICE says full release maps will be larger than those in the beta.
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