00:00Gaze upon the Battlefield 6 season 2 roadmap and witness its mediocrity.
00:05Notice its cramped images, its boxes of varying sizes, and its text that's too small to read
00:12without loading the image in a new tab. What we have here is everything wrong with the multiplayer
00:17FPS. The many botched roadmap, delivered every three months without fail, is the death of surprise,
00:24a scoreboard for the terminally online, a symbol of a gamedev environment that sees players as clients
00:31who expect results. Our relationship with the biggest shooters around have contorted from player
00:41to investor. We track steam concurrence like their share prices, dogpile games that threaten to disrupt
00:49the ones we already like, and spend all day on social media playing armchair analyst about what
00:54developers should have done differently to be successful. We're like Wall Street but even less
00:59real. Fueling that behavior is the quarterly roadmap, the investor report that dictates whether a game
01:06will be so bad or dying for the next three months. To what degree is it healthy to care about
01:13a game's
01:13popularity status? If you can still play it without a problem, if it's still being supported, does
01:20anything else really matter? It's live service brain rot and it sucks so hard. It's no wonder that
01:27developers are now more interested in the appearance of always having new stuff than what that stuff
01:33actually is. Battlefield 6, much like Call of Duty, which is much like Apex Legends, which is much like
01:39Fortnite, which is much like everything, just got so much new stuff. Can't you just tell by the 22 boxes?
01:47It's a new era of Battlefield. Not really, right? I count five, maybe six boxes on that roadmap that
01:54represent significant, lasting additions to Battlefield 6. You get two new maps. Cool. That's great.
02:01Though one of those is a close quarters map, which is the opposite of what BF6 is lacking. You get
02:06a recon gadget
02:07that lets you zap rockets out of the air. Neat. Sounds useful and unique. The return of the little
02:12bird chopper, always a crowd pleaser, a third helicopter type, is appreciated. And there's a
02:18dirt bite, which sounds fun, but it's probably not a game changer. But those five guns? They're more of
02:24the same featureless gray boxes that Battlefield 6 is already loaded with. I asked DICE the other week what
02:31makes these weapons special additions that people should be excited about, and they told me that they're
02:36pretty good in close quarters, I guess? Okay. And those new modes. They're limited time events that
02:42rely on FOMO as a means to get people back in the door. You know what would be better? New
02:48modes that
02:49don't disappear for no good reason. You know, it's worth asking, does Battlefield 6 even benefit from
02:55more modes? In my experience, most people are perfectly happy with conquest and breakthrough.
03:00They just want more maps to enjoy them on. Does Battlefield 6 need more guns? I'd argue it needs
03:07more gadgets or attachments that meaningfully transform the guns we already have. Battlefield 6
03:13is falling into the same boring habits as Call of Duty. It's pumping itself full of guns that nobody
03:19cares about, maps nobody remembers, and modes that are adopted and dropped on a weekly basis. It is so much
03:27work, so much talent expended on filler. But that is the law of the roadmap. The modern live service is
03:35not concerned with what the game needs. The roadmap is about volume, payloads of content that must expand
03:42in all directions and must do so quickly. That directive is a proven recipe for mediocrity. But you can't
03:50run a proper live service if you aren't creating more maps, vehicles, guns, gadgets, events, and battle passes
03:56all at the same time. Except that you totally can.
04:03You don't even have to go back that far to remember when developers, or even just Battlefield
04:08specifically, were more targeted with updates. Between 2011 and 2012, DICE made five major expansions
04:16for Battlefield 3. You know, we're talking about the days of paid DLC for multiplayer shooters here,
04:21so it was a bit different than what we have now. But it's interesting how DICE rolled these out. The
04:27first one came out less than three months after launch. Then the next one took a whole six months,
04:32followed by three more roughly every three months after. It was sort of like the seasons we have now,
04:38except the game wasn't trying so hard to string you along. It wasn't slowly doling out morsels of maps,
04:45and modes, and guns, and little chunks like every game does now. You get at least four maps, usually
04:51new vehicles for those maps that fit a theme, and sometimes guns. A new expansion was a moment,
04:58a true occasion to jump back in and enjoy some matches after taking a break. Then you'd have your
05:04fun and probably go take another break. I know some people prefer to totally know life their favorite
05:10games, and I get that. But walking away and doing other stuff for a while is like a provably healthy
05:17way to enjoy our hobbies. There is no such theme as a bottomless well. Everything dries up eventually
05:24if you don't give it time to replenish. The seasonal roadmap, its schedule, its true purpose, is to
05:31obfuscate that reality. The roadmap has no patience for breaks. It does not allow for replenishment. It does
05:38not want to quench your thirst. It wants you begging for water all the time. Then there's the element
05:44of surprise. DICE was already selling premium subscriptions and laying out what its DLC would
05:50roughly entail by the Battlefield 3 days, but there are still modern examples of games that are still
05:55able to keep us interested and invested without setting an exact schedule or just showing all of
06:01its cards months ahead of time. Warframe, World of Warcraft, even Destiny 2 will take long breaks for
06:07major updates and then reappear with expansions that become major moments.
06:14It's actually those exact qualities that people love about Helldivers 2, the shooter that's doing
06:20live service better than anything else right now by keeping players in the dark. There is no roadmap,
06:26nothing in particular to look forward to. It's awesome. Notice how the ongoing conversation around
06:33Helldivers 2 is surprisingly normal. Players come, players go, and the internet doesn't get so serious
06:40about it when the game drops out of the top 20 most played on Steam. That's because Arrowhead doesn't
06:46operate as if Helldivers 2 has to be the biggest thing in the world. You can't get invested in what's
06:53coming or even set unrealistic expectations because the only thing players know with certainty is that
06:59Arrowhead is cooking up something. Tanks can appear overnight. Terrifying new weapons can show up
07:06in a $10 DLC pack or for free or hidden on a new planet. Planets can blow up. There might
07:13be a road
07:14like mode someday. Who knows? Who cares? Helldivers 2 doesn't treat its players like investors that it's
07:21desperate to prove it's worth to. It has an honest to god audience and that audience doesn't want spoilers.
07:27The roadmap saps the magic out of the amazing potential that video games have specifically
07:33to expand and surprise over time. It sets us up for our own disappointment and it pushes developers
07:40to over promise and under deliver. And the worst part is that it's making people weird. I'm tired of
07:46this environment where announcements about the games I play feel like quarterly investor reports and where
07:52the fans of those games end up sounding like financial bros rather than people who are having fun.
07:58It's a terrible setup and it simply doesn't have to be this way.
08:03Hey, thanks for watching. This is adapted from my FPS column, FOV90, which you can read on PC Gamer
08:09every other week. That's pcgamer.com. It's a cool website. You should read it. But if you want to
08:14watch more PC Gamer, you'll want to subscribe.
