While the development troubles faced by the studios working on the upcoming Battlefield game – codenamed Glacier – have been recently documented by an exhaustive report by Ars Technica, problems for the single-player campaign of the game have also come to light.
The single-player campaign for Glacier was set to be handled by developer Ridgeline Games, but it was seemingly unable to hit required milestones. According to the report, the top leadership working on Glacier were dissatisfied with the progress made by Ridgeline. The studio was ultimately shut down, with development handed over to Criterion, DICE and Motive.
However, sources have indicated that Ridgeline faced quite a few issues as it attempted to develop the campaign, especially owing to the studio’s attempts to grow the development team. “They kept reallocating funds—essentially staff months—out of our budget,” said one person. “And, you know, we’re sitting there trying to adapt to doing more with less.” There were also reportedly other issues, including the lack of internal reviews and “proper check-ins”, which essentially hid the real status of the project until the review that led to studio’s closure.
When it came to handing the development to the other studios, according to a source, “There was essentially nothing left that Ridgeline had spent two years working on that they could pick up on and build, so they had to redo essentially everything from scratch within the same constraints of when the game had to release.”
As Glacier as a whole made slow progress through EA’s internal milestone system – referred to as “gates” – with gate three having been cleared by the project as of May this year, the single-player campaign was seemingly still far behind in development. This essentially means that, besides the single-player, game modes like Conquest and Rush that the Battlefield franchise is known for at least have alpha builds ready.
While the game as a whole – as well as the single-player campaign – is being developed by a number of studios teaming up, there has also reportedly been quite a bit of tension between the studios. Some of this tension came about from the culture shock of having development teams across different countries and even continents like the Sweden-based DICE, Battlefield 2042’s failure to meet internal expectations has also been a source of problems.
“DICE being originally a Swedish studio, they are a bit more humble. They want to build the best game, and they want to achieve the greatest in terms of the game experience,” said a developer. “Of course, when you’re operated by EA, you have to set financial expectations in order to be as profitable as possible.”
EU-based team members have also expressed being dismayed at leadership from other countries giving top-down directives for the development of Battlefield – a franchise which was essentially created by DICE. US-based staff, however, have seemingly not seen this as much of a problem, instead referring to general growing pains as a bigger source of trouble.
