How should the Battlefield and Call of Duty franchise to get improvements by 2022 and beyond?

Dear first-person shooter fans

So far, I've heard the following complaints of Battlefield 2042 and Call of Duty: Vanguard from last year is:

Battlefield 2042

• Rushed in terms of development as DICE attempted to get it done prior to its scheduled release date so it resulted to have so many bugs.
• The graphics weren't as good as one of its previous installments in the franchise.
• A lot of features were missing including a single-player campaign mode, scoreboard, etc.
• Bad physics.
• Falsely bans users for using RGB software on the PC version.

Call of Duty: Vanguard

• Inaccurate recreation of the true story of World War II.
• Lacking the proper detailing of destruction on objects and the environment.
• Boring single-player campaign mode.

Also not to mention that Call of Duty has been releasing every single installment per year, remaining as the same genre and sub-genre but may have a different story/in-game setting.

Here is what I think, Battlefield 2042 needed to have more time in development plus the PC version of whichever installment of Battlefield always needed an anti-cheat system at all times (To prevent hackers from ruining everyone's enjoyment) while Call of Duty needs to stop releasing annually so the gameplay and features can get improved by their respective developers.

Call of Duty needs a break and its support teams need to be allowed to make their own projects instead of being remoras to the COD shark. That said, I'm excited about this year's rumored Modern Warfare sequel, which is the first time I've been excited for a Call of Duty game since my (misguided) faith in Black Ops 3. If it's at least on par with MW 2019 with next gen bells and whistles, I'll be satisfied.

As for Battlefield, that series needs a fundamental rethinking from the ground up with a cohesive, focused vision. Bugs aside, 2042 seemed like such a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas chasing trends, I'm not surprised it's flailing.

Anime girls in bikinis shooting water guns at each other.

@facelessvixen: Yeah this reminds me of Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash.

@gtxforza: That's exactly what I was referencing, albeit facetiously since either franchise taking the "girls with guns" route has shitstorm written all over it, especially with Call of Duty because of all of the shit that been revealed about Activision-Blizzard over the past several months. But I will say that my last playthough of PBS was very interesting by switching to mouse and keyboard and replacing the music to various death metal albums and Mick Gordon's DOOM soundtrack. It really changed the vibe of the game from "big titty anime shooter" to "this actually feels like either Quake or Unreal," similar to the the various pieces of fanart of mixing Animal Crossing: New Horizons with Doom Eternal. ...but I digress.

Anyway, I've got nothing for Call of Duty since that only one I played was Infinite Warfare, but I wouldn't mind Battlefield revisiting Bad Company.

@facelessvixen: Oh I see, so how about the Girls und Panzer series?

I feel like the gritty war game with linear shooting alleys littered with set-pieces and brainlessly running around the map multiplayer has been done to death and I can't think of a feature that would make me interested in it. But I'm not a game designer so it's not my job to come up with anything either.

I could go for another Brothers in Arms game but that's probably too complicated for fans of these games (apologies if that comes off as condescending).

Call of Duty did dramatically improve in 2019 with Modern Warfare, the developer was given the time and resources to rebuild the game from the ground up and the results blew everyone away, but now we're back to relatively small iterations with each release.

I'm with Jeff G, Cold War was a surprising step back using older tech and not capturing any of the amazing game feel introduced in MW, but... i'm going to go against the grain and say Vanguard is good, it's not great but it is good, it's a WW2 total conversion of MW with an interesting twist on attachments that allows for loads of wacky customisation while maintaining a unique feel for each gun... i also like the campaign... one day i might talk more about that.
I do have issues with it, the maps are a little better than MW but still not amazing, the first season battle pass was crap which is actually good for me cus i didn't want to spend any money on it, some kill streaks grind the game to a halt and the spawn system and matchmaking are still incredibly bad.

I don't know what's required to impress the wider audience but for me the Call of Duty fan they can improve it pretty easily, on paper at least, improve matchmaking, better maps, better spawn system and a more solid overall gameplay balance, and don't put out something half baked like Cold War.
If Microsoft does take it on longer development cycles could be possible, they delayed Halo Infinite A LOT to try and get it right, if the series does see a decline from here it could be more profitable to not rush development and put out something more impressive that can be supported for longer, instead of smothering itself with yearly releases.

@gtxforza: My knowledge of Panzer isn't first-hand, but sure. Battlefield 🞩 Girls und Panzer sounds about as good as Call of Duty 🞩 K-On!.

Call of Duty needs to step back from the usual formula and create a full Zombies game with a AAA budget. Add a multiplayer versus mode and Warzone mode and the game will take off. Yes, a lot dedicated gamers who play the games annually will be pissed, but who cares. CoD will get a bump from the Zombies fans and reach a whole new audience making it a new major IP. It's those type of big risk big reward moves that creates new franchises. Then release the standard repetitive version a year from then, just so it will be clear that fans are about the Zombies now.

Battlefield's solution is a lot easier. They just need to make Bad Company 3 with a AAA presentation. Yes, the cast from the first two games might not return, but as long as they stick to the black comedy storyline, it will be a hit.

@cikame: I can't speak to the campaign but I agree with you on the Vanguard multiplayer. It is basically WW2 Modern Warfare. It's my default shooter to fire up when I am at my PC and just want to screw around for 30 minutes with some low stakes PvP multiplayer. I personally have more fatigue with modern settings and guns, but it seems like a lot of shooter fans are the opposite. 30 round ARs are just so boring compared to a good M1 Garand where you are trying to make every shot count.

As for revitalizing Battlefield, Just do the Bad Company 2 thing again. I think increasing player counts hasn't really added much to the series. Focused 24 or 32 player matches with tons of destruction in BC2 are some of my fondest Battlefield memories.

I've never been a COD player so I can't speak for that, but Battlefield is a really easy fix.

1. Remaster BF3 and spend longer making the next Battlefield.

2. Stop throwing the baby out with the bath water and iterate and improve on good ideas.

3. Your live service starts day 1 not 3/4 months later, if its not ready don't launch.

4. Have a cohesive vision and stick to it, stop trying to be all things to all players. The Battlefield community doesn't want counter strike or battle royle.

5. The game should just work day 1.

What 2042 is trying to do is not the problem the larger player counts and specialist are fine. The maps however are really really poor when you have 7 bolts, 3 attack heli's and 4 mbt rocking about on wide open fields with no cover, no one is going to stick around getting vehicle farmed, especially when the most popular maps have always been infantry focused.

I'll be totally honest I'm not convinced DICE in its current state is capable of making a good Battlefield game. 2042 is such a regression in every possible aspect that I think it's time to give it to a different team entirely. One less interested in pathetically chasing trends ideally.

CoD I have ZERO idea, and frankly I don't think it really matters. Warzone, despite how broken and infested it is, will never die. Almost everyone who complains about it constantly still plays it routinely, and buying packs to get the new busted guns.

And as long as they keep putting the newest guns(which are always busted) from the main game into warzone, those will keep selling.

Battlefield....I honestly don't see the huge deal. The only reason I don't play it is because everyone is crying about it and put it down because they're afraid of change.

That said, the maps need to be reduced in size. The 64 player special mode they had was the best that games has felt since launch. Other than that, more guns. But that's about it.

The specialist system, while it could use some balancing, is fine. The bugs have mostly been fixed at this point. The most glaring of which was the hit reg. I and none of my friends have encountered a single bug other than that.

The people who wanted Battlefield to succeed so much ironically are the ones who killed it. It's not like if they fixed everything people would come back. We're in the age now where people stay salty regardless of what amends are made.

I know this was a goof, but it is important to note that the most recent Senran Kagura game revealed itself to have been a pro-Imperial anti-Western propaganda machine. The crossover game between it and Neptunia is all about kicking out "PC Westerners" trying to get nudity out of anime.

I know you're kidding, or rather, dear god I hope you're kidding, because I've seen that way of talking about censorship in games enough times on MyAnimeList and Steam over the past several years where I... well, let's just say that it's one of the reasons why I haven't posted much on MAL for the past couple of weeks and why I don't accept friend requests on Steam.

I still signed up for Ninja Wars' beta.

Call of Duty should have one free-to-play package which includes zombies, Warzone and the classic Call of Duty modes with separate seasonal battle passes for each. A modern military theme for the whole package and maybe some annual story mode DLC.

Battlefield accidentally hit upon something interesting with Battlefield Portal. EA could meld WW1, WW2, Cold War and modern military themes into one free-to-play game with separate modes. Something similar to the Master Chief Collection or War Thunder etc. Multiplayer hoppers could mix these different eras so that first you might be playing a Cold War themed match and next something with a WW1 setting.

That's an awesome idea!

I absolutely agree with your ideas about the Battlefield franchise's future.

I think both IPs should take a break. The whole FPS genre needs a break in my opinion. We've had more than a decade's worth of these games coming out every year or bi-yearly with soft reboot versions of other games sprinkled in (Halo Infinite and MW2019) and it all just feels very same-y every time one of these games comes out.

I'm tired of it and not very interested in what the future holds for these IPs.

The future of Battlefield is going to depend on the quality of DICE as a studio and their Frostbite team. They lost a lot of senior engineers (including the Frostbite lead) to Embark Studios a few years back, and judging by the state of BF2042 they don't seem to have recovered from that yet. Maybe they'd be better off just moving to UE5 down the road rather than trying to build their own tool chain and engine in-house again.

@isomeri: This is the best idea I have seen. Other than Portal, I say break the glass and take 3-4 years to make Bad Company 3.

Bad Company VR. I know it's cool to hate on VR and stuff, but I'd just love to see Bad Company 2 (or even 3) either made for VR or with deep VR integration. Doesn't even need to be Bad Company, I'd take pretty much anything in the pre-BF3 style. Before the series got really zerius. Hell, if push came to shove I'd even take the newer style.

There's a limit to what you can really do in FPS games on a screen these days, everything has been done to death. There's a reason all these games stopped evolving a good long while ago.. It's just gonna be the same year after year after year like it has been for the past 10-ish years. If they take a 5 year hiatus they'll come back with yet another game that's pretty much exactly like what is available now. It's easy to think they don't have time to innovate cause they're on such a tight schedule, but then you look at every other game out there and they're just as stale and unchanging AND getting buggier year by year...

Stuff needs to fundamentally change for these kinds of games to feel fresh again. The game Contractors VR got custom map support recently, and playing those old CoD maps again just made me long for innovation and change from the big dogs. Flat screen games will continue to disappoint me until the day I die... Absolute snoozefest those games. Just sitting there with my mouse and typewriter, what can we even really expect with these ancient input methods and a screen on the wall? How long is it going to be fun to control a camera around with a mouse or joystick? For me, that time is over, there's no innovation there and it's just a grind for new guns. I crave new stuff, and for the past 10 years nothing has happened on the fps or 3rd person shooter scene aside from BR. A game mode we had in the early 2000s in OFP....

I have no hopes that they'll actually go the VR route. They'll continue to crank out middling shit until that whole scheme finally fails. Probably not until 2035 at least, cause people keep buying these things and unlocking them AKs and scopes and stuff... Gotta get that fix even if it's just the same shit again and again.

Anyways.. The glacial pace of flat game innovation leaves me cranky...

@colonel_pockets: I'm not so sure current Dice could make Bad Company 3 or if its just nostalgia talking anyway. Given the most popular game modes and maps have been the meat grinders like metro and breakthrough, what would a BC3 do for those players?

Bad Company 2 broke the franchise on console but the audience is in a different place now, BC2 wasn't a big seller to begin with either. Having a game focused on small scale engagements and lower player counts would be extremly divisive unless were talking a spiritual successor, then at that point it would be BC3 in name only.

The biggest problem for Battlefield is the live service Dice has to charge for something to continue to make post launch content but the community goes mad at anything other than generic soldier skins which no one likely buys.

I think DICE is a lost cause. They are alread in over their heads selling DLC, Tokens, and other money maming schemesn that their games are always carved-up and feel incomplete. If I buy a game for $70 and then must blow another $30 on DLC, that is just a terrible game - no matter what.

I find it funny though. The online thing is to push the idea that PC people are mostly a specific group but it works for just about any westerner group since westerners are taught or groomed in a mostly puritan society of dealing with things. (example you could hear a left leaning person angry that women in a game are treated with weak subplots, then you could hear a right leaning person say they didn't like the male being portrayed with a weak subplot, or the amount of diversity seems forced to someone and not another/not enough. It doesn't really have a side in fights cause overall westerners have a set of ideals and everyone is vastly interested in their own and screams it out on say Twitter for millions to jump on and solidify their opinion on. Even if a game is too this or that won't matter once its released the first knee-jerk take will become consensus till its switched. Many games come out broken, fixed later, the knee-jerk take stays that its trash. Years later the take is that it wasn't that bad cause all the hyperbole overlooking the good aspects and so on the cycle.

For Battlefield, I am not sure I want a BC3. I liked BC and BC2 well enough, however I do not think I need more of that. I am enjoying my time with BF2042. I don't mind most of the changes; I just need DICE to fix the technical issues. Sure, put in a scoreboard. People seem to want that. Voice chat would be nice, but going from past BF games, it will rarely be used.