EA blames Battlefield 2042 failure on COVID, Halo Infinite

It’s no secret that Battlefield 2042 bombed horribly among its player base, whose frustrations got them so far as to create a petition asking for refunds on all platforms. EA is pinning the blame for the game’s failure on the COVID-19 pandemic and Halo Infinite.

According to an exclusive report from Tom Henderson of Xfire, EA allegedly held a “town hall” meeting yesterday to discuss how the launch of Battlefield 2042 went wrong. Chief studios officer Laura Miele cited that, on top of technical difficulties with the Frostbite engine, developers had trouble adjusting to the work from home environment thrust upon them by the pandemic.

“Add up all of this new innovation, all of this ambition for the new project, and then you add a global pandemic halfway into the project, where the game teams had to work from home, we ended up with more new variables in development than we have ever experienced before,” she said.

Miele also revealed that despite the initial praise for Battlefield 2042 during its beta testing stage, the amount of bugs reported after launch reached “historic levels for a DICE game,” which made Halo Infinite look better by comparison. She did not appreciate the comparison because the surprise release of Halo Infinite was more polished than Battlefield 2042, which she admit hurt its sales.

The bugs may very well have been born from the fact that the Frostbite engine needed to be upgraded for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, which took over 18 months of development time to do. This is because the version of Frostbite EA worked on was so old, the devs basically had to create a new one.

To avoid issues like this in the future, all of Battlefield’s teams will be restructured “to ensure a more streamlined process.” The first season of Battlefield 2042’s live service launches this summer, so EA will have to keep its word to improve on the game and win back its players by then.