Battlefield V has been struggling with content release updates for some time now. EA and DICE have made a lot of promises to fans of the game that have taken a long time to bear fruit: although Battlefield V Firestorm finally launched yesterday, the battle royale mode had actually been part of an assignment requirement for weeks before its release. Prior to that, the game also sandbagged a Battlefield V co-op mode that had been missing at launch and was met with negative feedback once it was finally introduced as a lackluster addition to the game.
The Battlefield V soldier dragging feature is one that was supposed to be present at launch back in August of last year, and has been repeatedly delayed ever since. The mechanic was supposed to allow teammates to drag wounded soldiers to cover and help them, and was a pretty big selling point for the game in the leadup to its release. Today, EA finally divulged more information about the feature, although it won’t make fans happy, as the soldier dragging function will never come to Battlefield V after all. Here’s EA’s statement:
Obviously, it’s another example of EA and DICE over-promising features prior to launch and then failing to follow through. Battlefield V soldier dragging was supposed to be a unique element that set it apart from a field of similarly-structured competitors, and to see it give way to a variant of the battle royale genre that has been such an attractive, lucrative business model is likely to make fans quite upset. This is on top of the missing cosmetics and slow content rollout issues that have been plaguing Battlefield V since launch.
“Having discovered that soldier dragging would negatively impact the core gameplay loop, we’ve decided to not add the feature to Battlefield V. To make soldier dragging look and play well, complex and long animations are necessary. This would make reviving feel slow and unresponsive, which would affect the pacing of Battlefield V’s gameplay.
We’ll continue to explore ways to improve Battlefield V, but in doing so we have to ensure that the core elements, the essence, if you will, of the game remain unaffected. It’s been great reading the discussions on this subject and your feedback continues to play a part in all our decisions. Please keep that feedback coming, and we’ll keep consuming it.”
There’s also a pretty simply takeaway from this for EA and DICE: don’t promise things that the companies have no intention of testing or keeping. The fact that the team “discovered” that Battlefield V soldier dragging would negatively impact the game’s mechanics post-launch is, quite frankly, absurd. The mechanic was supposed to be there when the game released. Apparently, it took eight months for the publisher and developer duo to finally discover that one of Battlefield V’s most interesting selling points was never a possibility in the first place. Not a good look for a major publisher, especially one already under fire for having an overpaid CEO and laying off hundreds of employees multiple times in the calendar year.
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Source: Electronic Arts
