Battlefield 2042 and the Importance of Thematic Cohesiveness

So. Battlefield 2042. So many terrible things to say, so few things that haven’t already been said thousands of times on Reddit. Everything from the gunplay to the bugs to the lack of a campaign – there are plenty of things to hate here. So, am I here to contribute to this unending flood of criticism? Well, yes, a little, but perhaps with a little bit of a different perspective. See, I didn’t play the game. Nor do I play many Battlefield games (the last one I appreciated must have been the Bad Company 2, which is positively ancient at this point). Why am I writing about it then, you might ask? Well, I think as a bit of an outsider, I am uniquely positioned to simply not care about much of the more minute details of actually playing the game. After watching a few reviews (and more than a few angry rants on Reddit), I believe I understand where Dice, the studio behind the series, is coming from, and how they failed so miserably. So, here I go: the core issue behind Battlefield 2042 is a severe lack of thematic cohesiveness. The failure of the game to link together the many different aspects that make up a game into a unified whole has led to disjointed design decisions that seem diametrically opposed to each other, leading to a mess more unstable than my mental state in my university years. With that, let’s dive into how this problem arose, and how it manifests itself in the game.

        The issues start with the marketing campaign for the game itself. Our first exposure of the game comes in the form the cinematic trailer, with no-pats (their version of mercenary soldiers, which I will revisit later) doing crazy stunts like flying around with wingsuits or driving Humvees into helicopters from the top of skyscrapers. A lot of the public saw this as Dice embracing the crazier aspects of the Battlefield multiplayer experience, taking inspiration from the viral clips people post on YouTube of hilarious things they can do in the game. It was all fun and games, literally – except for a little issue. See, the backdrop of all this stuff is a little bit grimmer and darker than we would’ve expected from such a cheery clip. So in this near future (see: 2042), the world is falling apart due to global warming. Extreme weather events are becoming more severe, leading to entire cities being destroyed, such as the one entirely covered by a massive sandstorm in one of the maps. The characters you play as (you play as characters now, rather than having classes) are called no-pats, soldiers with no home who fight for money under the superpowers of the world. In this desperate world where anyone would do anything to survive… you have fun spamming out hovercrafts?

        And here comes the dissonance. See, Battlefield’s formula might seem unique – it’s a semi-realistic representation of a battlefield (what a coincidence), complete with vehicles and key sectors to capture. It’s not nearly as circumspect as actual mil-sims like Arma, but it’s the closest experience to fighting on a battlefield without having to deal with the messiness of actual warfare that other games try to simulate. But at the end of the day, you have fun taking points, blowing up tanks, and killing other people. At the same time, the game wants to make grand points about the cost of war, the danger of climate change, and the never-ending greed of humans. Usually, all this stuff would be left in the campaign, such as with Battlefield I having you play as members of the Harlem Hellfighters. Every time you die in game, you are presented with the name of a member of the Hellfighters who died in that battle – complete dates of birth and death. Although a little heavy handed, it was still an interesting way of reminding the players of the human costs of war. With the ability to craft these set pieces in the campaign, the creators can evoke certain emotions through the manipulation of game mechanics, music, and narrative. Then once it’s done with the story, they let you loose in the sandbox of multiplayer, where you run around fighting armored trains and giant airships without much thought. With Battlefield 2042’s campaign – oh wait, it doesn’t exist. So, to make up for that, Dice decided they would use multiplayer to tell the story.

            Multiplayer is complicated. People come to multiplayer to compete or to have fun with friends. Because of this, developers are much more concerned about balance or gunplay, to ensure that fun can be had with the least friction. No limitations, no directing – this isn’t story mode, after all. They want emergent stories, ones that are organically developed simply from having a big enough sandbox with enough people and enough toys to play with. But here, Dice wants to have their cake and eat it too. Having done away with the campaign, they wanted to make sure that their story about the sad, sad state of the world was prominent enough even in the multiplayer. In my view, they did this through two vectors: the maps and the music. The maps are usually self-explanatory. Renewal’s loading screen shows the map cut in half between a lush green paradise and an empty desert, while Hourglass has the city covered in a terrible sandstorm. Global warming bad! The music emphasizes this, with the main theme exemplifying the new mood. The normally bombastic and heroic theme of the series is turned into a screeching, twisted monstrosity, backed by thundering drums and industrial noises, perhaps meant to symbolize the death of ideals, perverted by ever-encroaching consumerism that has doomed us all. It is discordant, it is impactful, and it is horrifying to listen to. And most of all, it is entirely inappropriate.

        Most people playing Battlefield 2042, when listening to this song, will be appropriately horrified. But rather than being terrorized by the prospect of the world falling into ruin due to the megalomanic wishes of the richest few, they’re just freaked out by the game. They came in expecting a fun time driving hovercrafts off skyscrapers, jumping out of jets to shoot down another plane – all that fun stuff they saw in the trailer. Instead, they are forced to listen to this strange, unnerving soundtrack with no real context, no real understanding of why the theme now sounds this way. And once they get into the game, they find themselves playing as no-pats, supposedly grizzled veterans without a place to call home, working day and night under the whims of those richer and more powerful. And then they laugh and joke with each other, each little bark just a little more cringe-worthy than the last. “Hahaha, did I go too far?” laughs one, talking about the fifty potential fathers and mothers and children of those parents she killed in the last match. “Don’t be sad, this is just how it works out sometimes,” says another, presumably trying to make you feel better about potentially dooming an entire country by depriving them of a source of fuel. These specialists seem to be taking cues from popular shooters like Overwatch or Apex Legends, hero-shooters with stand-out characters that, apparently, make the big bucks. And Overwatch’s story isn’t exactly bright and cheery either, but they relegate the atmosphere and mood-making to the comics and external media, rather than try to embed it into the core gameplay. People are here to have competitive fun, not talk about global conflicts! For Battlefield, the story-mode was meant to take on that role. Instead, we have a strange mishmash of a multiplayer that wants to have funny specialists in Santa costumes fight alongside to their gritty, industrial, discordant soundtrack. Other elements, like the lack of a scoreboard, further muddies the water, making the player confused as to why they’re playing multiplayer in the first place. If they want an experience without a scoreboard, they want to play a campaign – but since Dice took that out, they instead made multiplayer into an incoherent mess, both tonally and mechanically.   

        Battlefield 2042 feels like a game where writers, gameplay directors, publishers, and CEOs clashed at every step, making strange compromises that led to the creation of a game without direction. The music wants to go one way, the gameplay another, the story yet another. By taking away the campaign, the linchpin of thematic cohesiveness, Dice has created an aimless, mass-marketed, focus-grouped game that pleases absolutely nobody despite ticking off so many boxes.