Trivia / Battlefield 2042

• Christmas Rushed: Even with a one month delay from October to November 2021, it didn't prevent the launch being an obvious rush job that had to be out the door before December. The bugs, design changes and being viewed as incomplete resulted in the game being savaged by fans and general audiences, despite selling over 4 million copies in the first week.
• Fake Nationality: Canadian specialist Webster Mackay is played by the Irish-American Ronan Summers.
• Posthumous Credit: Michael K. Williams, the voice of Capt. Kimble "Irish" Graves, died from a drug overdose on September 6, 2021. Most of his actual work had been shown some time prior in various pre-release narrative videos.
• Troubled Production:
  • The aging Frostbite engine needed 18 months of development to bring it up to the level required to run 2042. COVID also impacted the development. The amount of bugs on the internal tracking systems ended up reaching levels not previously seen for a DICE game. The executives began to panic when Halo Infinite launched on November 15, right before 2042's full retail launch as Halo was seen as a very stable release vs 2042 which was another typical EA/DICE bugfest.
  • An insider report by Tom Henderson claims that 2042 was fraught with struggles from day one. The first canary in the coalmine came when between the release of Battlefield V and before 2042 was given the greenlight, dozens of senior developers at DICE, from producers to directors to even studio founders, had left the company, almost all of them citing concerns of creative freedom as a reason why. Once 2042 began production, Electronic Arts sent DICE a memo to "copy what's popular", pressuring them to turn the series into a Battle Royale Game in wake of the successful Apex Legends, one that they could charge full price for (EA had wished to do this for Apex, but Respawn Entertainment fought hard against it). This change in genre is what led to the scrapping of Battlefield's class system, and further complications arose when DICE shifted back into a more familiar team-based multiplayer affair circa mid-2020 (reportedly as a result of Apex being solidified as a steady money-maker for EA and concerns of squaring up against Call of Duty: Warzone), turning the battle royale into a side mode. This ended up leaving DICE just over a year at best of proper production for the title, prompting their announcements of requiring additional studio help in March 2021, despite EA just a month prior announcing that the game's development was "ahead of schedule" (past and current DICE devs have called these statements out as a blunt lie built on baseless predictions). It was clear to DICE that even with the extended November 2021 release date deadline, the game was barely in beta and they were forced to ship it out as is.

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