If you’re a fan of the Battlefield series, you know that 2042 is not in a great place. Not only was its first season delayed to well over half a year after its release, all it added was a single map, a single Specialist character, two helicopters and two guns. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that GamesBeat journalist Jeff Grubb claimed on the premium Giant Bomb show Grubbsnax that the publisher has left a skeleton crew to manage the game.
According to Grubb, EA is leaving just enough people to work on Battlefield 2042 to fulfil obligations promised by the game’s Ultimate Edition, which includes a Year 1 season pass. A year’s worth of seasons usually means three to four seasons by live service standards.
The situation was described by Grubb as “abandon ship time”, where the publisher is looking to “pump that stuff out the fastest and the cheapest it possibly can”. And while the skeleton crew is working on that, the “core crew” of developers are already working on the next entry into the Battlefield series.
My position for these things is consistent: If you hear two stories about what is happening, look for the space where both things are true.
I'll talk about this more on an upcoming Morning Mess on Giant Bomb so that I can also get their statement on the air.
— Grubb (@JeffGrubb) June 8, 2022
EA has since reached out to Grubb to deny the statement, stating that “there is a significant team across studios focused on evolving and improving the Battlefield 2042 experience”. While Grubb didn’t retract what he said about the situation, he instead asks that players “look for the space where both things are true”.
Which is a fair argument to make. After all, for a publisher as large as EA, a skeleton crew for the company may well be more significant than entire teams in smaller dev studios. At the same time, the first season of Battlefield 2042 is only arriving seven months after the game launched. After all that time, seeing only one new map, one new Specialist, two new helicopters and two new guns and finding it underwhelming is probably not unfair.
(Source: Jeff Grubb / Twitter via VGC)
