Following a tumultuous launch and struggling player counts, Battlefield 2042 now finds itself at a new threshold as a result of a concentrated effort from developer DICE to revamp and revitalize the title. One of the key gripes that players held against Battlefield 2042 was the title's lack of features that have been present in nearly every other game in the series, effectively taking a step back when many expected that the Battlefield game would be a leap forward into the future. With a new live-service model and a sixth season fast approaching, the team at DICE has been hard at work on delivering something for Battlefield 2042 that it has never done before -- completely reworking and redesigning the game's launch maps.
Having just completed the redesign of one of the game's most notorious maps, Hourglass, the reworking of all of Battlefield 2042's maps is now complete, opening the door for DICE to focus on delivering more of what fans have requested. Recently, Game ZXC sat down with DICE producer Nika Bender and lead level designer Shashank Uchil to discuss not only the level rework but also the importance of fan feedback in that process. It's clear that there's a palpable sense that DICE is continually working hard to deliver the best possible Battlefield 2042 experience and course correct the game's rocky perception. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Specifically in online communities like Reddit and other online forums, the Battlefield community is super vocal and it’s not uncommon to see members of the team at DICE contribute to the discussions regarding requested improvements to the game. How has DICE factored these conversations and community feedback into the redesign process?
Bender: So contrary to popular belief just because not all of us are engaged in conversations, I know a lot of us are reading all the forums out there - Reddit, Twitter, it doesn’t matter where it is because we do…first, we are game developers. We are very passionate about what players are thinking about our game and how they’re playing our game and, you know, “Are we fulfilling their expectations?” So I know a lot of us just reach out and make sure that we check all the feedback. Then on the other side, we have an amazing community team that also helps us provide in case we’ve missed something or if we need more filtered feedback. Because again, there’s a lot of information out there on the Internet. They also help us filter and understand “Okay, these are the actual core issues that our players are experiencing,” and they’re the ones that go through everything.
So that feedback has been taken into account heavily. I would say, very significantly. We do have our telemetry, which is the data in the game, and then we try to understand “Okay, what are the pain points?” Because quite often when you play the game and when you play multiplayer shooters like Battlefield, you need to understand if the actual problem is what the player is saying. Like, “Hey, I don’t like this,” but the actual cause is something else that makes you feel that way.
Uchil: Community is a big thing when it comes to live-service games like Battlefield or anything that is going on for, say, years and year because it’s a way for us to see sentiment. And how we usually use it on the level design side is “Can we correlate what we feel ourselves?” when you play it: What we see from telemetry and then what we see from players saying things on Reddit or Twitter. We have this three-pronged thing where we have three sorts of data. One is how we feel, we can look at telemetry as to what is actually happening numerically, and then you can see sentiment-wise what’s happening because there are a bunch of times when sentiment and numbers don’t match. You might feel something, but the numbers say something else. I’ll come back to that.
In terms of what we do with all of this data is, in the end, we make a game for the players. That has a lot of weight as to what our players are actually saying. If they say like, “Hey, we don’t like this aspect,” and like Nika said, what is the core issue behind that specific feedback? So we get into like, “Okay, they’re saying this, and we solve it with that. ” Not just because. Usually, you see players are like “Just do this, and it’s going to get solved.” No, it won’t. We get what the issue is and we’ll solve it, but that's almost never exactly how it’s going to get solved.
In terms of the level rework specifically, we knew what we were going to make. When we made the levels, we knew they were going to be big. We knew there was going to be distance between flags. But we said, “Hey, but if we have call-in vehicles, then you can just call in vehicles whenever you want, and then you can go from A to B.” Then, what we saw is players didn’t see it the same way that we saw it, where players would still run across big spaces and then players are like “The maps are too big!” I get it, but the solution we had was to have vehicles, but players didn’t engage with that.
That is the difference between what we think players will play and what actually happens in the real environment. Then, we’re like, “Okay, it’s not working clearly, so what can we do with that?” Players were very vocal about maps being too big or it taking too long to get into action. The three big things for us were how do we reduce distances, how do we fix scale, and how do we add more cover? Also, the feedback we saw from players was “maps look too pristine.” If you play Kaleidoscope, when it came out it was too clean and we were like, “Okay, let’s make it more wartorn.” So the three things we did, the rework, is actually what came from the player base to begin with. So that is a lot of feedback we definitely take from players.
Season Four had a new map, right? So when it came out, the breakthrough feedback was people were like “This is completely imbalanced” or “It’s favoring defenders a lot.” But numerically, if you look at the data, it was 50/50. What we see with that is the perception of that map is imbalanced, but numerically, it’s balanced. When you play it, it feels much more fair and much more balanced. You can’t just look at data because it might work perfectly in data, but as human beings, we have emotions and we might feel or perceive it to be different. You have to be careful where both can be right. As designers, you have to make a choice like “which one will we go with?” Do we go with perception or do we go with numerical data? And then, yeah, it’s a case-by-case basis.
Q: So it’s almost like the team is triangulating actionable data with what players actually engage with in the game versus what they articulate as far as the problems they want fixed?
Uchil: Exactly.
Bender: Just to follow up on what Shashank said, when it comes to the original maps, when it comes to distances, I think it’s not anyone’s fault in a way. We envisioned this design and once you know what the design is, you know how to use it. But when you get the game into the hands of millions of players who are like “I’m just going to jump in and play,” obviously we didn’t figure out that’s not what the players wanted, and they told us “This is not what we wanted.”
We were like, “Okay, doesn’t seem like we landed where we wanted to land. Let’s go back, let’s figure it out." That’s where Shashank and his team did an amazing job on all the reworks. And I think the more changes to the narrative, the “wartorn” as we call it, have also been due to feedback from the players. Live-service pretty much drove the changes and what we identified as the core feedback from the players. Then, we also worked on the data and tried to understand what changes were needed to address that core feedback. All for the players to feel much better and have a much more positive reaction and experience when playing the maps.
Q: Is it possible for the team to speak on the impetus toward redesigning launch maps versus adding additional new maps to the game? What were the motivations to focus on one over the other?
Bender: Yes, it's very much a production thing. I was involved in the discussions about it as well. When we launched the game, we already knew “Okay, we want to do the seasons, we want to do live service.” We knew what the seasons would look like. However, the feedback that we got from the players, especially when it comes to the maps, made it very clear that We needed to go back. For the first time in a Battlefield game, we did go back. During the break that was between the launch and the actual start of Season One is where we identified player feedback, core issues with our maps, and how we can improve them.
So, the decision was made that the most value that we’ll bring to the players is to release the new maps as a part of the seasonal content that has been planned, but also in addition, try and work through reworking the maps. We thought that just seemed, honestly, the best way to go based on the players’ feedback. Then we started going through them because we still have a limited number of people, there's a certain team, and that team can do a certain amount of things, so we just went with “Okay, pretty much as soon as the map rework is done, we just start releasing them in the patches.” Outside, of course, of the new maps during the Seasons.
Q: From a resource standpoint, is it easier to iterate on a map that's already been designed rather than to design one from the ground up?
Uchil: Oh, for sure. But if you ask someone from the level design team, you always want to make new shit, right? Where can we make new maps, right? And then when you tell the team, “Ah no, you're going to go back and fix the old map," it could go two ways. One is where the team thinks it sucks or in the way we took it, which was like, “You know what? It's a good call. We should actually do that." There is no point in releasing new maps constantly when players are concerned about what's already shipped.
The compromise was some people were going to make new maps and some people were actually going to work on all maps. I think it was the best call for the players because we had never done this before. It would be very easy for us to just ignore it and make new stuff because everybody's happy. At least the developers will be happy because we just make new maps. We can be creative once again, but I would say the good call for us was we get to fix the things we shipped because that’s how we do right by the players. Even if it means being less creative in some way, we can work on problem-solving as a creative aspect for us.
Bender: We agreed as a team that, for the players, this is the right way to go. It just didn't seem fair for the players for us to be pushing “No, we hear your feedback, but we're just going to keep throwing new things at you” when it was very obvious that players were like “We really want to enjoy these maps." That was the main reason why we then continued working on both new maps as well as reworking the launch maps.
Q: So with the new maps, how does the team approach the design process in terms of trying to cater to both infantry and vehicle players? Obviously, it’s not easy to try to cater to all players. How does the team tackle that challenge?
Uchil: How we see it from the design side is not every map is going to cater to everybody. We are okay with that, because if you go for that, then you make a very…there's a Swedish word called “Lagom”, which means very…it's in-between. It's not good for anybody because if something has to be good for everybody, it's not good for anybody. It's going to be a very average infantry map. It's going to be a very average vehicle map. What we are going to say is, “We can have big maps, and it's better for vehicles. We can have smaller maps like Stranded.” If you play Breakthrough, it has no vehicles and that is a pure infantry experience. We are okay with that. We're okay with saying some maps are going to be tilted towards infantry, and some maps, like the Hourglass rework, is still quite a big map. With Irreversible, which was…
Bender: Breakaway.
Uchil: Breakaway, it's quite a big map. We didn't shrink it to the size of Kaleidoscope. But then you have Kaleidoscope, it's quite a small map. The plan is to always have a lot of variations. It might not be great for “this,” but we’re totally fine with that. When we make maps, say for the new maps, we always look at “What is the map we have?” and “Okay, if this is an infantry-focused map, can we do something for the next map?” We go back and forth where we can have variation between maps as well.
Bender: From a production point of view, our main goal is to provide a fun experience for the players that they really enjoy, which is why we would rather provide a more specific, but also a more fun and enjoyable experience to the player. But then when we look at all the maps…What we often do is we actually look at all the maps that we have and try to see, “Oh, did we miss certain types of players, do they miss some experience that we need to add in the next map?” So we still cater to everyone, but in a different way.
Q: are there any plans at this point or down the line in the future to implement a server browser feature into 2042 so that players can specifically focus on maybe one map or a selection of specific maps?
Bender: That is a bit of a future thing, which I can't really say much to be honest. Nothing is committed. We are not able to answer that at the moment, to be honest. It is a requested feature, we're fully aware of it, but I'm not able to provide any answers.
Uchil: Even internally, this comes up every month, somebody brings it up, “server browser?” and then, yeah…
Q: Throughout the entire process of redesigning these launch maps, how much have the changes in the map layout and the player behavior that’s been gathered through data contributed to other changes like adjusting vehicle counts, rebalancing the specialists, etc.?
Uchil: The tricky thing for us, or for us right now, is the weapons have been balanced for the vanilla maps, so they were balanced for long ranges. The difficult thing that Core Gameplay is having is the smaller we make maps, the more difficult it becomes for them to balance them. Because we still have big maps like Hourglass and Breakaway, then you have small maps like Kaleidoscope and even some smaller maps like Stranded or Boulder, which are much smaller. For them, they're constantly balancing it. I empathize with them because they have to balance it for big maps and small maps; they're in a difficult situation where it's not the easiest job they have. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes because, to balance everything across all the maps, given how varied the maps are…it would’ve been very easy if you had said “All maps are 500 by 500 and this is the range, and you can balance all the weapons for that scale.”
But given that we have maps that are one by one, and then you have maps that are 200 by 500, it is a bit tricky. What happened is when we made the new maps, and we decided we're going to make smaller maps, the first thing they were like was, “We need to tweak numbers now because they're going to break our numbers that we had planned in mind because we hadn't planned small maps." They're constantly going back and forth as to, “Okay, the maps are changing, what do we do with it?” They're always constantly looking at, “Okay, what can we do with vehicles where - how do we change, how do we update vehicles based on the changes you order?” It's a constant back and forth with Core Combat and Level Design.
Bender: Luckily, we have built the tooling where we can fairly easily and very quickly adjust a lot of the numbers because that's what they are - to make sure and to try it out, but also to find as much balance as possible. I mean, we try to do it during development internally of course with the playtests and discussing within the teams, but then also once the content is out, we get the feedback from the players.
Uchil: One example is where we had tanks and tanks were quite fast because we had really big maps. When you would take that same tank and put on a smaller map, it just felt odd that the tank is really fast and like, “What's going on?” No, it's fine if you're playing Hourglass, but it feels a bit strange otherwise. I think that the redesign tweaks the numbers for that as well to make sure it works. It feels fine across multiple maps, but yeah, it's a tricky thing to solve.
Q: So the team is using the same three-pronged approach used for the redesign as far as taking data feedback and actual player sentiment, then trying to balance those things as far as the playability of each of these new spaces?
Uchil: Exactly. I mean I keep saying where Core Gameplay has the most difficult job of all of us, where… With Level Design, we can make it small and we can fix all that stuff, but the Core Gameplay would balance weapons across vehicles, across soldiers, and abilities and the equipment, all that stuff. There are a lot of numbers to balance across each other. So when people are like “Just fix it!," I wish it was that easy of a thing to do.
Q: Hourglass is the most recent and final launch map to go through the redesign process. Were there any specific challenges that led the team to save that map for last?
Uchil: I mean, back in the days when we first started doing this rework and you mentioned player feedback, the player feedback was like “Hourglass. Fix Hourglass.” We had a choice where we could start with that, but then we said “No, we will not start with Hourglass.” That was my call. I said, “No, we're going to start with Kaleidoscope because Hourglass is the most difficult map to solve.” Because of how it's been built, where…this is more of a technical thing…where the sand dunes are not an easy thing to tweak because of the way they've been built. It's a bit tricky to just move things around because of the way the map has been built from the ground up. Kaleidoscope was more of an easy one where it's a small map, we can try out something, and then see how it works.
And we kept Hourglass for last because we were like, “What can we learn from everything?” and then use it for Hourglass. And also, because it was the most difficult one to solve, the questions were like, “How much smaller does it need to be? Do we make it really small? What can we live with?” At some point, we were like, “It's okay to have a big map” and we won't solve everything in Hourglass because the issue with Hourglass is grounding. Because it is sand on top of the city, usually if it's a city and it's a flat normal city, you can just put stuff on top of it - put some military barricades, put some houses, put some walls and you have cover. Or you can put trucks. But because it's Hourglass, the sand has gone on top of everything. It's very hard to put anything on top of the sand. It's just going to look silly as to - if you put in a truck, how is the truck on top of the sand? It should be below the sand because the sand has taken over the city. So it made it very hard for us to justify putting stuff, even containers. Like okay, you can put a container, but what's a container doing on the sand? It makes absolutely no sense.
Bender: [Laughs] It looks weird, It just looks weird.
Uchil: It looks very weird, so there's all these challenges with that as well. That's why we made a hard call of “Let's cut the stadium.” We like the stadium. It's a very expensive asset to have in the game, but that's what I meant - it is so challenging to fix that level. We had to chop something as significant as the stadium to make it work. And yeah, it's the sand. The sand was the biggest thing. In hindsight, if we had made sand in a different way, it would have made our lives easier. But yeah…
Bender: I am traumatized by the sand, by the way. Someone mentions sand and I’m like “No sand, no.” [Laughs]
Uchil: No sand [Laughs].
Because, as an example, where Breakaway and Hourglass were always the two biggest maps we ever made, Breakaway was at least ice and then it has a big city space. It was easier to just do stuff with that. Whereas Hourglass was just…the sand made everything much, much more difficult. Anything that should have been easier became four times as difficult with the sand.
Bender: In the beginning when we were discussing what should be the order of the reworks, it just didn't make a lot of sense to pretty much tell players like, “Oh no, wait until we figure out the most…the one that we know requires the most work and it's the most unknown” instead of getting other reworked maps into players’ hands much faster, even though it's not the one that’s most-requested. They got it much, much faster.
Q: One of the most requested features from the community are maps that feature more densely packed urban spaces. So, now that the launch maps for 2042 have been successfully revamped, does the team have any plans to push out new maps that aim to address that particular feedback?
Bender: You will love the future. Probably.
Uchil: Yeah.
Bender: Maybe.
Uchil: That's all we can say, but…
Bender: This is one you'll have to stick around [for] and find out. Who knows?
Q: Battlefield 2042 had a bit of a bumpy launch, but it's in a much better state these days. With Season Six recently confirmed, what other plans does DICE have in store for the future of the title? Any insight as to what's coming down the pike?
Bender: Season Six. [Laughs]
I know, I'm being cheeky, I'm sorry. I apologize. Okay, so I'm the one who always spills the tea and I'm struggling to really not tell you everything because I want to share all the amazing things with you. I really do, trust me. I would just like to go and take you through a tour of the whole thing, but I can't. I can tell you there's Season Six. There are a lot of fun things in Season Six. I know we are all very excited. I’m just really struggling to kind keep it in because we are so excited. We can't wait to actually get it into players’ hands and then hear what they're saying. And then, we'll see. Again - stick around, find out.
Battlefield 2042 is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.