So, I don't discuss gaming very much on here, because this isn't a gaming blog. But I do sometimes discuss these subjects when I feel they are of a certain specific cultural and political significance. And I feel like this is one of these times.
So let's discuss Battlefield, and the controversy over Battlefield 2042 and its new class system.
Battlefield, for those who don't know, is a very unique franchise. It's a military first person shooter that features combined arms warfare on large maps. I love the franchise generally speaking because it offers a large scale game play experience few games do. You have large maps with generally 64 players with tanks, aircraft, boats, and of course lots of infantry combat too. The main mode is called conquest, and the purpose is to capture objectives. And people normally duke it out on a map roughly a square kilometer, although a bit bigger in the recent game (recent game also has 128 players).
The franchise is 20 years old, and after a franchise gets over a decade old or so, it starts to splinter into factions, with some people being...let's just say stuck in the past. I've seen this happen with a lot of old franchises that are now 10-20 years old. You get these people who are stuck in the "good old days" and are super nostalgic for the past games, and think they're perfect, and that we just need to make games the same way we did back then, flaws and all, and don't seem to realize that the world has moved on. They're also very obnoxious and gatekeepy and hostile toward other peoples' opinions, deeming them "not true fans" of the series in question, and yeah, that's what I'm talking about here.
The first experience with these kinds of people was in the Unreal Tournament community. UT had its glory days from say, 1999-2005ish, but the franchise dropped off significantly since then with UT3 in 2007, which was considered highly disapponting by the community, and by the time UT4 came around in 2015, these guys who were giving feedback on forums were in their own little world so hard that they really didn't realize the community had moved on, that what worked 15 years ago was no longer in style, and that no one wanted to play a game like that. The game failed. It was a play ground for a bunch of old sweaty has beens with an insane learning curve that no sane person wanted to learn the game to compete with people who had been playing since the literal 1990s. And Epic eventually cut support and shifted their resources to fortnite.
And then you have Halo. I discussed halo last year, and the opposite problem, how younger gamers seem to not be able to adapt to a free to play system with paid cosmetics. But there were a lot of old guard people with the same attitudes, and ironically, the zoomers were also..boomers. because they were nostalgic of the days of halo from when they were in middle school playing halo 3 and reach on xbox live, and not wanting the franchise to change. This put 343 in a weird position where they had to both appease the old guard while making a game that worked in the modern era, and while halo infinite largely hit the right notes, they kinda mismanaged it in other ways, and didn't seem able to properly release content and deal with issues in a timely manner. People will circlejerk that 343 bad, but I don't really think they are that bad. Not as good as bungie, but they had a tough act to follow after the original trilogy and I think they were in a position where they were screwed.
Now, back to battlefield. Battlefield has had this issue too lately. 20 year franchise, and in the past 5 years, the community has become more divided between what makes a good battlefield game. Here's my experience with the game. The franchise has a long and flawed history. I got into the series with battlefield 2, and while I liked the game, I found it flawed. It felt so unbalanced. Vehicles were way too overpowered, and to comment on the class system, it was either you played engineer or you died. Thankfully, later games addressed these flaws, with Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3, and Battlefield 4 largely being the golden era of the franchise. I think most would agree with that. The game felt more balanced, it was more dynamic, and it had varied situations allowing for flexibility on how you played. Battlefield 1 was also a solid game, but it was also where the game started feeling flawed.
This is where the series hit the 15 year mark, and this is where things start going bad for these old franchises. We started having the "battlefield boomers" come out of the woodwork. These guys are long term veterans who had played the series since its inception, and they started going on about the "good old days". They claimed that the series had become too casual, and people were allowed to do whatever they wanted and how they needed to be forced to play as a team. They complained about lone wolves just running off on their own and tipping the tide of the game.
Now, I'm going to be honest, I am a lone wolf. I don't play this socially, and that's been the great thing about it. While team play was encouraged, it wasn't mandatory, and I'd regularly go off and do my own thing, try to turn the tide of the match, etc. Even when I played with friends, we played more parallel to each other than directly with each other in a squad like fashion. Like just screwing around. But...these guys hated that. They envisioned battlefield as a more team effort, and they wanted to PUNISH lone wolves.
So, with Battlefield 5, they made the game a lot more hardcore and punitive than previous games. This was around the time when esports and games becoming more "hardcore" took off, so I initially thought it was part of that trend. You got these sweats who act like they got something to prove, and they want to make the game as difficult as possible so they can stroke their egos and go on about how much better they are. The problem is, games with high skill ceilings suck if youre casual. because you just get stomped. I'm not great at gaming. I'm average at best. My KDR in franchises like COD and BF are around the 1 range (0.9-1.1 more broadly). I'm not great, i'm not terrible, I'm just...average. So, I hated these changes. But, these changes also tried to force team play. TTK (Time to kill) was reduced to the point of damage being darned near realistic (like 2-3 bullets and you're dead), you had limited health regen, this was to encourage people to stay with their squad and rely on medics for healing. They also reduced the ammo count we spawned with from 150 rounds or so to like 60-90. Again, this was to stop people from going off on their own. Stay with your squad and get ammo. So this also encouraged people to play as a squad and live up to their role. You needed some to be medics, some to be anti vehicle, some to be support, etc.
Now the real question is, do people play like this? And the answer is an overwhelming "NO!" They do NOT play like this. Most people go off and do their own things, and die, and there's never enough medics, and not everyone drops ammo, and despite these weirdos having this ideal of team work, no one actually plays as a team. I could have said I told you so, because I called it all along, I felt like these guys were smoking crack or being high on their own sense of nostalgia or something to think this was a good idea, but suffice to say, it wasn't fun, half the community complained, the other half wanted it the way it was, and they changed it back to make it more casual. But because the game was designed around team play, the game suffered an identity crisis. The game is remembered as one of the worst battlefields in recent memory, until, at least, 2042 came out and was worse.
Which brings me to Battlefield 2042. There were high hopes from this game, but I was always kinda leery. I kind of felt they were pushing the envelope. Pushing too hard to make it next gen, with the specs being too high for most PC gamers to handle. Pushing 128 players over 64, despite after playing planetside 2 and realizing too large of a player count actually makes the game feel more spammy without helping it. Stuff like that. I will admit, in marketing it seemed rather promising, they promoted it as a very big budget top of the line game with lots of moments of fan service to the community.
But...the game came out and it blew chunks. Like, it was BROKEN. Full on BROKEN. Even I admit this. The game ran like crap on my computer, it still runs kind of janky. Moving to 128 players put stress on the CPU you need a literal top end computer to properly handle. The maps were large, open, and empty. Vehicles dominated and people were just killed out in the open after spending 5 minutes traveling between points. Everything felt rather generic. There wasn't a ton of content, and yeah. It just felt off.
Still, it wasn't as bad as others stated. Once I got over the technical issues and played the game for a while, I kinda liked it.
But the community just hated it and circlejerked about that, unsurprisingly. One common circlejerk that didnt' make much sense was the emphasis on the "specialists". basically, these were characters who you could play as, and they had special abilities to add an extra dimension to the game. This came at the expense of the previous "class" system, where people had a role for people to play as. I was neutral at first about whether classes or specialists were better, but most people never gave the system a chance. They just glommed onto this weird hate circlejerk about the specialist system, going on about how battlefield was about being a faceless soldier on a battlefield and that it's not a "hero shooter". It just seemed irrational. Like they hated the idea of games like overwatch and apex legends and felt battlefield was jumping on a trend that other games didn't. As I said, i wasnt really on this circlejerk at first, I don't hate hero shooters and dont define my points of view by irrational circlejerks, so I decided to give it a chance.
And honestly, I'm going to be honest, i REALLY liked this system. It gave me freedom not present in previous games. With the original classes gone, i could mix and match equipment. I could run a grappling hook with a rocket launcher like an engineer, or a squad beacon like a recon, or an ammo box like support. I could mix and match specialist abilities with whatever equipment i wanted, and this allowed me to use interesting combos that literally radically changed how the game played. I could use my grapple hook to go some place high like a roof and then put a spawn beacon down for my squad, and then my entire squad would spawn in on me and hit the enemy from behind, stuff like that. I could run anti tank while also giving myself ammo. I LOVED this. It gave me freedom and flexibility no other game did. Combine this with swapping out attachments on the fly and i was a one man killing machine.
But thats where the battlefield boomers came back. Between their hatred for the specialists, and still having this weird battlefield 5 mentality of LONE WOLVES NEED TO BE PUNISHED, they circlejerked incessently about his this game "isn't battlefield" because "battlefield is classes" and blah blah blah. Most of these people havent even played the game in a year by now. They played at launch, went on about how it was trash, and left. And they are doing this weird gatekeepy thing about how the class system always defined battlefield and if you dont like classes you dont like battlefield. They'll go on about how if only we played the previous game we'd understand classes and blah blah blah.
And to this, I have something to say that I cannot say on reddit these days without being moderated:
SCREW OFF!!!
Really, I've been playing this franchise since 2009, I have about 200 hours on average per game, at least 100 in every mainline game except 1942/vietnam, and like 300+ on 2042. 2042 has actually been one of my main games for the past year and I play it almost every day. I came to like it, despite its many flaws, and unlike them, actually gave the game a chance. It has many many flaws, but the specialist system is the one thing that i would argue that they did right, relative to past games.
I played the past games. I liked BC2 and BF4 in particular. Those are my favorite, and i think most people loved those games. Does BF2042 hold a candle to them? No. It is a fundamentally flawed game, and to some extent can't be saved. They made too many poor design choices where the only solution to the game is to start from scratch with the next title.
But again, the specialist system is not the problem. If anything, given 2042's other flawed like the wide open maps and how vehicle dominant the game is, the specialist system is the only thing giving people a fighting chance, and by giving people more freedom, it actually led to more team work. As people can cross roles a bit better, they play more coherently as a unit. You get more ammo, you get more revives and health packs. You get more people dropping spawn beacons behind enemy lines giving more people more ways to attack.
Yet people who just never really played the game and circlejerked about how past games good, current game bad, crapped on the game. And gatekept us and said we werent really battlefield fans if we like the new system. Again, screw off. I never realized it until now, but this new game taught me that the traditional battlefield model was always flawed. Classes were at best, a neutral feature that worked with the game decently enough, and at worse, a hindrance. And idk where these weird team play obsessed people come from, but i NEVER played battlefield in a super team oriented way. They dont get to gatekeep the game for everyone and tell us we need to find another franchise if we don't like the system they wanna force on us. They had their way with BF5, it sucked, it was also fundamentally flawed in its own ways, and while it was better than 2042 in some ways, on this issue, it was worse. The forced class play was always the worst part of that game, and the game was very punishing and sweaty to lone wolf casual players like me. While this game was very flawed, the specialist system was fundamentally sound and worked well with the game.
But the battlefield boomers got the devs to change the game, and now, much like 5 after it rolled back the more hardcore elements, it feels like it suffers an identity crisis. The classes are shoehorned in, and dont work well with how complex this game is. Like some maps like manifest are more vertical and limiting mckay with his grappling hook ability to assault doesn't work. People can't adequately approach situations as well as they could. Either I get torn apart from random snipers on cranes, or i get torn apart by tanks on the ground. I can take on one of these threats adequately, but not both. Either I lose my mobility by going anti tank, or i lose my ability to fight vehicles by going assault. This is not good, and this is not fun.
The battlefield boomers are rejoicing, they're going on about how "now this game feels like battlefield", being extremely obnoxious and antagonistic on forums about how now we have to play as a team and how if i dont like it i should play another game, and I'm sorry, but this isn't fun. This game sucks now. They removed the best thing about this game relative to other battlefield games, and now the game is just flawed.
I'm not saying class systems are always bad. You can make them work if you design the game from the ground up around them. The old battlefields did it all of the time. The earliest ones sucked at managing this but the middle aged ones that everyone loved seemed to be able to make everyone happy. But shoehorning classes into THIS game? Yeah, I'm sorry, but classes suck here. The game is too open, it's too vehicle heavy, and forcing people into roles is too punishing. I really don't get what these guys go for. I mean, sure, forced team play, but these guys seem to be trying to force people to play around some BS arbitrary ideal, instead of designing the game from the ground up around the players.
That's actually my big problem, and why this issue is ultimately political. It's like these guys are the equivalent of IRL conservatives. They romanticize the past, look at it with rose colored goggles, go on about how it was so much better than the present, want to change things back based on vapid sentiments of "it's always been this way" and "if you don't like it screw off" ("if you dont love it leave it" in political terms), and trying to force people to play to an ideal that never worked and was never that great anyway. These guys literally ARE conservatives.
I feel like the gaming community has this issue a lot. Just as with society, I believe we can either design society around people, or force people to follow some ideal of society that isn't that great and doesn't actually work, I believe the same with gaming. You can either design a game around the players and design it for maximum enjoyment and engagement, or you can force people to play to random ideals of team work and then scream at people when they don't actually play that way. It's your choice, but I'm very much a "human centered society" kind of guy, and would rather have a game work with my natural inclinations, then trying to force me to play according to some ideal I don't find fun.
But battlefield boomers won't do that. Much like IRL conservatives, they're like these crazed authoritarians who insist on trying to force people to play to their theoretical ideals and punishing people for daring to be themselves and do their own thing. And I hate it. I hate these people. I wish THEY would screw off and find another franchise to play. Battlefield has always slanted casual. Hardcore players could always go play arma, or squad, or hell let loose. They dont have to take over battlefield, drive out the casuals, and make it yet another team oriented sweat fest. I'm going to be honest, i never enjoyed games that have a forced team play ideal, I didn't particularly enjoy BF5, and I think my enjoyment of 2042 is gone now.
THis reminds me of overwatch. We had these debates there too. We had people who wanted to play as they wanted, and people who wanted to lock people into roles and force them to play according to a specific ideal of team work. Well, no one actually enjoyed playing medic, so we ended up with 6 minute queue times for the fun roles, whereas before it was abnormal to spend more than one minute finding games. Eventually I think with OW2 they finally changed it back, after the semi open beta had the same exact issues, with people spending forever trying to find games, but yeah. That sucked. Screw weirdo team play authoritarians who want to force people to play a certain way. These people aren't fun to play with, and they often ruin games for casual players like me. I hate this crap. Ugh.
Anyway, just wanted to vent about this crap since it's been pissing me off. I hate that these people got their way, that they can rub it in my face, and that i cant play as i want in battlefield any more. This game is nowhere near as fun now and i plan to spend less time than i otherwise would playing it as a result. Thanks a lot, guys, thanks a lot.
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