What’s wrong with AAA games? The development of the next Battlefield has answers.

IbizaPocholo

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman
arstechnica.com

What’s wrong with AAA games? The development of the next Battlefield has answers.

EA insiders describe stress and setbacks in a project that’s too big to fail.
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com

Today, publisher EA is in full production on the next Battlefield title—but sources close to the project say it has faced culture clashes, ballooning budgets, and major disruptions that have left many team members fearful that parts of the game will not be finished to players' satisfaction in time for launch during EA's fiscal year.

They also say the company has made major structural and cultural changes to how Battlefield games are created to ensure it can release titles of unprecedented scope and scale. This is all to compete with incumbents like the Call of Duty games and Fortnite, even though no prior Battlefield has achieved anywhere close to that level of popular and commercial success.

I spoke with current and former EA employees who work or have recently worked directly on the game—they span multiple studios, disciplines, and seniority levels and all agreed to talk about the project on the condition of anonymity. Asked to address the reporting in this article, EA declined to comment.

According to these first-hand accounts, the changes have led to extraordinary stress and long hours. Every employee I spoke to across several studios either took exhaustion leave themselves or directly knew staffers who did. Two people who had worked on other AAA projects within EA or elsewhere in the industry said this project had more people burning out and needing to take leave than they'd ever seen before.

Each of the sources I spoke with shared sincere hopes that the game will still be a hit with players, pointing to its strong conceptual start and the talent, passion, and pedigree of its development team. Whatever the end result, the inside story of the game's development illuminates why the medium and the industry are in the state they're in today.
Click to expand...

Check the link for more.

Culture Clash & Studio Tensions


  • The project involves multiple studios worldwide, leading to a "culture clash" between teams—especially tensions between European development teams and EA's U.S. profit-driven, quarterly mindset.
  • Insiders suggest top-down mandates and business pressures are overshadowing creative autonomy .

⏳ Crunch & Development Hell


  • The project has experienced extensive crunch, with long working hours, stress, and crunch practices becoming widespread across the team
  • Milestone delays impacted Alpha, with the game missing major features (notably the single-player component), leading to two-year campaign delays

💰 Massive Budget, Massive Pressure


  • With an estimated budget reaching $400–500 million, expectations are enormous. EA reportedly needs tens of millions of players and high microtransaction revenue to justify the cost

🚀 Alpha Signs vs. Warnings


  • Despite internal setbacks, the closed alpha reportedly performed well in playtests and impressed some testers
  • But sources warn that Alpha passed with many tasks incomplete or underestimated, raising risk of future compromises


✅ Summary


The upcoming Battlefield is a high-stakes AAA gamble—the most expensive in the franchise to date. While early gameplay (alpha) looks promising, development has been marred by inter-studio friction, long hours, and delays. With EA depending heavily on monetization and massive player engagement to recoup costs, the project risks becoming another crunch-fueled battlefield—on and off the screen.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Western creative has been awful across media. Games, movies, music, tech.

A vision is something only one person has, and since you can't say no to people or "you're wrong" anymore, you end up with a mess.
 
ADiTAR said:
Western creative has been awful across media. Games, movies, music, tech.

A vision is something only one person has, and since you can't say no to people or "you're wrong" anymore, you end up with a mess.
Click to expand...
Yeah it's weird. It's almost like the West stopped hiring talent based on how good they are at the role in question.
 
This is EA, tho. They've been like that since forever. And i don't know what i want from the next BF. It's been ages since a good BF came out, it'd be nice to play something on par with bf3, bf4, bc2, but at the same time, i kinda want them to face plant as hard as 2042, just so EA loses a fuckton of money and see all the shareholders mald. EA truly does deserve to be deleted from the industry.
 
  • With an estimated budget reaching $400–500 million, expectations are enormous. EA reportedly needs tens of millions of players and high microtransaction revenue to justify the cost
Click to expand...

To be fair, they're essentially making 2 games.

It's a shame the development is this fucked up, because this is the most excited I've been for a Battlefield game since Battlefield 3 coming off the awesomeness of Bad Company 2.
 
Projects are too big for current organizational structure and thus they lose manageability
There should be some change in structure, probably big team split in smaller ones and which one has clear deliverables
East has rougher corporate culture so they deal with increased numbers of people working better.
 
Culture Clash & Studio Tensions
  • The project involves multiple studios worldwide, leading to a "culture clash" between teams—especially tensions between European development teams and EA's U.S. profit-driven, quarterly mindset.
  • Insiders suggest top-down mandates and business pressures are overshadowing creative autonomy .
Click to expand...

Smh, Wilson. You're so desperate for this franchise to become CoD that you're going out of your way to shed anything that remotely made it stand out. You're not going to reach that wild "100 million players" expectation you crave. Your, and your team's, mandates have already soured any chances from that happening.
 
Last edited:
EA. Battlefield does not need single player. Return to your fucking roots.
Edit: You know what it also doesn't need? Different time periods and woke shit.
 
Last edited:
Just drop the fucking useless single player for battlefield and focus on its strenght, the multiplayer. Who the fuck cares about a mediocre 4 hour long SP military campaign. Im playing BF for the multiplayer.
 
Small John McCarthy said:
Yeah it's weird. It's almost like the West stopped hiring talent based on how good they are at the role in question.
Click to expand...
Basically. It's all the result of the open door policy that swept though the industry a decade or more ago. You know, let everyone in. Diversity is good. All nice and dandy, but the problem is that those people that are let in are not as open when it comes to hiring new talent after them. So as the old, experienced staff leaves basically no good new staff is recruited but exclusively the sorts of people that are let in because of diversity sake.

Do that a couple of years and you erode the talent completely and are left with a lot of incompetent people.
 
I just want a Remake of Battlefield 3

The next Battlefield has been looking like absolute garbage, alpha play test and all

This is gonna be 12 years straight of me playing Battlefield 4 😑
the PS4 version of a PS3 game on PS5

And with how poorly Battlefield 6 is developing, seems I'll continue to be playing BF4
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Donkey Kong Is Getting the AAA Treatment. What Nintendo IP Is Next?
2 3
110
324
TheChadOfGaming replied
AAA Games Are Developed More than ONE Person
2
87
1K
Embearded replied
  • Locked
What's the next Sony AAA IP to go third party on Nintendo Switch/Switch 2?
32
432
StueyDuck replied
Tom Henderson: The next The Crew game has been greenlit at Ubisoft
Rumor 
8
168
Shubh_C63 replied
The Next Battlefield Campaign Is Inspired By Civil War And Lioness
Opinion 
15
349
Von Hugh replied
Top Bottom