Bah humbug
Battlefield 2042 has only been out for a few weeks, but in that short time, its issues have made it one of the worst launches of the year. The game is plagued with a variety of bugs, a lack of features, and overall design flaws, and now DICE and EA are scrambling to save face and basically redesign whole aspects of the game post-launch. When things were already looking bad enough for the studio, they pre-emptively showed off some of the Christmas-themed cosmetics items that would be introduced during the next update, and let’s just say players were not happy. The game’s third update since it was released introduces weekly missions, improvements to the menus, and over 150 much-needed fixes — but the real star of the show on social media was one of the new Specialist skins called Father Winter, which turns the Battlefield 2042 character Boris into a gun-toting version of Santa.
The first complaint is that the skin didn’t fit into the aesthetic of the game at all. It feels kind of ridiculous to be playing A Very Serious War Game, only to see a literal Santa Claus run around the corner and melee you to death. Players have noticed an effect where these types of games will start off with skins that are pretty tame, but as time goes on, they feel the need to keep one-upping themselves with the over-the-top skins. But Battlefield 2042 just launched so… what’s the excuse there?
Then there’s the fact that players don’t care about fancy skins right now — they just want the game they paid for to work. Rather than doling out obligatory seasonal updates, Battlefield 2042‘s community has expressed that they would much rather EA spend that time fixing the game and adding the features that they want. While it is pretty silly that a game that tackles topics as serious as climate change chose to include a playable Santa, the real crux of the problem is that players are losing faith in developers on a large scale, especially after the previous failures of games like Cyberpunk 2077.
The devs have since taken to Twitter to do some damage control after seeing the response — the story now is that DICE won’t be implementing every item that was shown this year, and that most of the wackier stuff we’ve seen will be accessible in the game’s Portal modes, rather than in the main game. Even if this was always the plan (which seems unlikely), it still doesn’t really make up for what annoyed the fanbase in the first place.
