Ryan McArthur, Senior Producer at DICE, has explained in a new interview why the Specialists in Battlefield 2042 failed to resonate with players initially.
For those unaware, the Specialists replaced the traditional Battlefield classes and were not exactly popular with longtime fans at launch. DICE overhauled the system back in Season 3 to bring them closer to the class system in the original games, which was met with positivity in the community.
When we look back at the data, and when we really started moving forward with introducing the class systems, one of the big things we really started to understand was that a lot of our issues came from the fact that players didn’t understand how the Specialists were supposed to work. And if you don’t understand how something is supposed to work, of course you believe that the old way was better. Feedback from players was really good around this. So we had to find a way to give them what they wanted, but still allow us the freedom and flexibility that we originally wanted too.
Each of these Specialists were originally designed to fit within the class structure that we had in previous games. We just didn’t land that communication, or execute it in a way that players understood what role each Specialist was supposed to play…We underestimated the need to make sure that we constantly tie these things back to the original pillars of Battlefield – class gameplay, squadplay, and teamwork. This is one of the big places where we fell.
Battlefield 2042 was released in November 2021 for PS5, PS4, PC, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One. You can read the latest patch notes for the game here, which introduces a rework for the Hourglass map and switches up Squad management options.
[Source – GamesRadar]