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If you’re a Battlefield 5 player confused by its post-launch content roadmap’s spread of conflicting and missed dates, you’re not alone. So are the developers at EA DICE.
In a candid parley with fans on the Battlefield 5 subreddit on Tuesday, community manager Jeff Braddock conceded that some content promises made in June wouldn’t be met. Moreover, “Let’s be honest, even our ‘current’ roadmap is not accurate at this point.”
Braddock was responding to a player who wanted an update on the “new weapons, vehicles and gadgets” for Battlefield 5 multiplayer, which EA DICE mentioned back when it introduced Chapter 4 of its post-launch content, “Defying the Odds.” Braddock told the commenter that the image he was pointing to isn’t a current roadmap and pointed them to the latest one, although “yes, it’s already missed some items.”
He took the question to developers, anyway, to find out when new vehicles were coming. “The answer I received from the vehicle dev was ‘What are you talking about? … The next big push of vehicles and gadgets is with the Pacific.’” That references Chapter 5, announced at EA Play 2019, which brings the Pacific theater, Iwo Jima and two other maps, and new U.S. and Japan playable factions. That content roadmap image also promises “at least 7 [weapons and gadgets] before 2020,” plus new vehicles, “including boats.”
Braddock said the matter was being brought to the attention of studio leadership and the marketing team. It seems the original roadmap image was incorrect from the get-go as the article published alongside it never talked about vehicles or gadgets. “It talks about weapons and Elites,” Braddock said, “so the image is inaccurate. I’m sorry, man. Sigh.”
Even by the fluid expectations of a “living game” in a long post-release cycle, Battlefield 5 has seen lurches in its rollout of new things to play and equip. Most notably, the game’s highly anticipated battle royale mode, Firestorm, didn’t launch with the game in November, and arrived in late March. Our review called Battlefield 5’s multiplayer “a rough draft for an excellent multiplayer shooter,” noting that DICE faced a tight schedule of delivering new content while it addressed balance and performance issues in the game’s core systems.
That’s partly the reason developers said last week that they were canning a competitive 5v5 mode, which predecessor Battlefield 1 had, to focus on bug-squashing and new content.
