Battlefield V: The End of the Line

Battlefield V is now on the market, and you all know what that means; does it mean the salt will stop and everyone will just come together and play Battlefield V and be happy and friendly? no, of course it doesn't, this is the real world, you faggot, and Battlefield V, even in its darkest hour, has continued to self-immolate and I cannot stop laughing. After keeping up with this disaster from day one and writing three previous posts on the subject, I suppose a eulogy is in order for a game that's been snowballing out of control from the beginning and, surprise surprise, is dead on arrival.

Since it's been a while and this is (hopefully) the final chapter of this sad, sad tale, I reckon a recap is in order. In May, after a bafflingly boring reveal event hosted by Trevor Noah in which DICE claimed that Battlefield V was going to be the most immersive and authentic game they've ever made and that they'd be focusing on the lesser known stories of the War, the world got treated to a reveal trailer that, depending on how optimistic you are, was either very confusing, or the most cancerous example of political pandering and ideological gesturing of the year, or at least that was the case in May, 2018's been a long year. This is because the trailer was a confusing, poorly thrown together mess of visuals with ugly colours, action movie violence, terrible editing, and a disabled woman with a cricket bat dying and then coming back to life and killing Germans, oh, and war paint, blue war paint, oh, and Katanas being wielded by British soldiers, and teddy bears. This confused and angered a great many people, including myself, because DICE had previously stated their intentions to make an authentic World War II game, only to show off a wet fart of a trailer that impressed nobody and gave a lot of people the impression that their definition of authenticity was actually ideological revisionism.

Their claims of authenticity were swiftly dashed followed the inevitable backlash, with DICE affirming that their priority wasn't authenticity but fun, which contradicts their previous claims but might explain all the weird shit like katanas and metal arms as mere cosmetics, because money and microtransactions and money. But the controversy probably would've died there and wouldn't have killed the game were it not for the subsequent actions of EA and DICE, because rather than just leaving it alone, they just had to put their foot in their mouth, and then again, and again, and again, and again. First with DICE dev Alan Kertz claiming that he will be "On the right side of History," and using his daughter to try and emotionally justify his blatant agenda pushing, and then with EA big wig Patrick Soderlund also using his daughter as an emotional excuse for their politicising of the game. That wasn't the only thing Soderlund said however, and I reckon it was the other thing he said that killed Battlefield V, because he also said, "these people who are uneducated," referring to the backlash to the game's historical revisionism, and "either accept it or don't buy the game." Oh yes, he had the balls to call the game's critics stupid and challenge them to not buy the game, a decision that most likely cost him his job as he resigned/got fired a short while later, only a day before news broke that Battlefield V's pre order numbers were disastrously low, two events that happened too close together to not be related.

The pre order numbers being as low as they were could be interpreted in a few ways, but how I and many people saw it was Soderlund's challenge to gamers being accepted; people not buying the game because he told them not to, which would go a long way in explaining his suddenly jumping ship and or being tossed overboard by EA, after getting a handsome bonus, that is. The futility of it though was that, whether he really did resign or whether he was forced to, it doesn't matter in the end because the damage was already done, like the trailer, Soderlund's words tore a massive hole in the game's reputation, a hole that would have been hard enough to fix anyway and especially hard for EA, the most hated company in gaming. Now you'd think, with the situation looking as bleak as it does, that maybe EA would just keep their heads down and try to get Battlefield V out the door with no further trouble, you'd think that, wouldn't you. Battlefield V got delayed by a month, it was originally going to launch in October alongside Call of Duty Trash Ops 4 and Red Dead Redemption 2, but with the ongoing controversy and pathetic pre order numbers, EA decided it'd be best to abandon that release date and move to a more comfortable November release, going up against Fallout 76, which ended up being as big a disaster for Bethesda as Battlefield V was for EA, but for different reasons, reasons that I, not being a huge RPG or Fallout guy, don't care as much about. This was apparently to further polish the game and make it as good as it possibly could be, which was a load of shit considering the state of the game at launch, not that it matters because everyone knew the real reason, it was EA being terrified that the controversy combined with the competition would result in Battlefield V being a complete failure. This was actually a smart move, all things considered, sure, Trash Ops 4 had its controversies, with yours truly even boycotted the game, but Red Dead was always going to be a juggernaut, it was the real threat, and even though they inadvertently revealed their complete lack of confidence in the game, running away from Red Dead was a reasonable idea. But as I put it in a previous post; the Battlefield V batshit train has no brakes, because then the beta happened, and things got weird.

Since I never had any desire to play or support this game, I naturally didn't play the beta and had no interest in whether or not it was any good, the reason I paid attention was because of the game's chat, which had a very funny habit of censoring words; harmless, random words like 'Spaghetti', more suspect words and phrases like 'lag' and 'dlc', and really suspect words and phrases like 'white man' and 'Nazi'. Yet another incident that this game's reputation simply couldn't afford, the game's chat being completely broken and censoring random words, but with some of those words being very suspect in their censoring, what with the game devs' obvious political biases and agendas, I went into way too much detail about this debacle in my last post on the subject; The Plot Thickens, but to cut a long story short, the progressive left are racist to white people and fetishize non-white people, hence the forced diversity of the game and the chat's censoring of 'white man' because 'white' and 'man' are dirty words to a progressive, something something white privilege something. But maybe it was just a mistake, after all, there's nothing wrong with Spaghetti, it's delicious with meatballs, and if it was censored, maybe the chat really was broken. Sorry, I'm much too cynical to believe that, in fact I'd be more willing to believe they censored a bunch of harmless words intentionally to give themselves plausible deniability, or maybe I just need to have a little more faith in my fellow man, who knows. This is where my dwelling ended until now, even though before launch there was another controversial development, but I figured it wasn't massive enough to be worth the time; it was DICE looking for interns to study Toxic behaviour. Weirdly this still isn't the strangest development about the game, that comes later, but yes, EA and DICE really did put out a job listing for university students to come and study toxic behaviour and dream up solutions for it. The listing was worded like it was written by a busy body, obviously, and mentioned that they want to investigate the types of disruptive behaviour, what causes it and how they can prevent and punish it. Now, to a normie or someone with thin skin, this sounds very reasonable, looking for vague solutions to equally vague and undefined "toxic" and "disruptive" behaviour, but given all we know about the politics of Battlefield V, it isn't hard to work out just what those words are defined as, it's going to be shit talk; it's going to be the armada of edgy bois on there calling each other faggot and nigger, a problem that has existed since the dawn of online gaming, and a problem that will literally never be fixed.




 I tried to find the listing on DICE's website but all I found was a 404, I did however steal this image from Reddit for your convenience

Fallout 76's solution to this little issue was slapping lifetime bans on offenders, which seems a tad unreasonable considering that a lifetime ban from a game you probably already regretted buying is sure to be a real kick in the balls. But this issue of people talking shit to each other has been around for decades, anyone who ever played a Call of Duty game on the Xbox 360 knows that, to that end this will always be more an issue with the people than with the game, with people trying their best to be edgy and spicy and offensive, and their victims; the poor, innocent, thin skinned little mommy's boys who can take a joke about as well as they can take a dick, not very. Short of outright controlling people's behaviour IRL, which the progressive actually want to do, the only solution is in game punishments; suspensions, in game handicaps, bans, but trolls are like the heads of a Hydra, kill one and another appears, and it's as much a problem with them as it is with the people who can't handle being called a faggot by someone they don't know. DICE's solution however seems to be a little more complex, they want to study the trolls, like they're some unknown species or something, they want to understand them and figure out a way to control their behaviour to make them stop their rampage across the online game lobbies of the world. I would say it seems creepy that they want to investigate people's behaviour, but I honestly don't know if the plan would be effective enough to be creepy, there isn't really anything they could learn outside of [people+anonymity+mic=arse] and no solution outside of the usual banning offenders. As power hungry and domineering as the progressive left is, DICE is still just a video game company, it has no power over people's lives outside of the game, much to their disappointment, I'm sure. And the cherry on top of this internship; it's unpaid, that's right, you're not even getting paid to sit there and listen to shitlords talking smack to one another and 'study' their behaviour. It really is just a complete waste of time and effort for everyone involved, so who on Earth thought putting that listing out was a good idea.

Weirdly, Battlefield V had its title of most controversial game of 2018 snatched by another game not that long ago, with Fallout 76 being thoroughly loathed by most people, and with Bethesda doing their utmost to seem even more incompetent and out of touch than EA. And all this mess about buggy games, false advertising, duffle bags and people's personal information being leaked really has stolen the thunder from Battlefield V, but at least it wasn't at risk of stealing sales, because Fallout 76 sold terribly, so maybe this will work out in Battlefield V's favour, right? Not very long after launch, news articles started coming out about how in my jolly little nanny state of Great Britain, physical sales of Battlefield V were down by as much as 60% on Battlefield 1, more than half. A very bad sign, though these numbers are just in Britain, maybe it's doing better in America, as much as I doubt it, but surely it doesn't matter so much as people are turning to digital distribution nowadays, yet that doesn't explain such a massive drop in such a short span of time, especially since Battlefield 1 was such a juggernaut, even against Infinite Warfare. Also take into consideration the amount of hype surrounding Battlefield 1 before it launched, remember how insane people went over that reveal trailer, and that includes me because Battlefield 1 looked awesome. This is reflected in the game's sales because it managed to put up a fight against Call of Duty. Now lets look at that in contrast to Battlefield V's hype or lack thereof, with people being turned away by poor marketing and the people behind it being complete and utter cunts, and consider how this might reflect in sales, consider how if EA tells people not to buy the game, people might actually not buy the game. But those numbers still aren't reliable enough to say for certain as, again, they're only for Britain, so how about this, the game is on sale and the discounts are massive; just a week after it came out, I saw it on sale at my local Game where it was discounted by £20, a quick look on Target's website as of me writing this shows a discount of $20, same on Walmart, this for a game that's only been out a few weeks and retailed at full price on launch, while Red Dead 2, the sales juggernaut, is still full price and has been out a month longer, that does not suggest good sales to me, in fact that suggests a desperate need to ship more copies because they aren't shipping enough.

The game isn't even being received that well by the few that actually did buy it; a quick look at Metacritic shows an admirable critic score of 81, but the game has also been the victim of some pretty hardcore review bombing with and audience score of 3.0, with many people saying similar things like the lack of content, the lack of recognisable World War 2 elements, and technical issues like time-to-kill and bugs, as well as many talking about the controversy; the politicisation of the game and the disrespect of doing so, as well as the disrespect EA and DICE have shown to their fans. What's weird is the amount of critic reviews talking about the lack of content as well, while still giving the game 80's and 70's and 90's, a mystery that becomes a bit clearer when you find some of them sucking the single player mode's dick, the same single player that implies that the French literally edited black people out of historical records and wrote men out of a real life story and replaced them with a Waman, suddenly those high scores don't seem so weird, it's almost like the game purposefully misrepresents and distorts history in such a way that it validates the progressive worldview. I suppose it's here that the anti-SJW entertainment side of Youtube's favourite catchphrase becomes relevant; "Get Woke Go Broke," a phenomenon which is observable everywhere in entertainment that social Justice rears its head; Ghostbusters, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Star Trek, and now, Battlefield 5, because outside of the isolationist pockets of progressively minded people, the ideas said progressives hold and love to share vociferously are actually really unpopular. Clearly the issue as it relates to Battlefield V is the devs idealising the War through a Progressive lens, which, as I've said many times, is disrespectful to history and a dangerous lie to tell in our modern world where no one gives a shit about history, not to mention where Progressives actively try to poison our view of history based on their own sensibilities, their own progressive sensibilities. Is it really any wonder that people aren't interested in Battlefield V when you consider everything that was wrong with it before it launched; the terrible trailer, getting woke, Soderlund calling people stupid and telling them not to buy the game, the chat censoring suspect words, what a surprise that such a cluster fuck would end up failing. Battlefield V is not just a game at this point, the endless controversy is as much a part of the game's identity as the game itself, and all that trouble, all those chains have, to no one's surprise, resulted in a flop, a complete failure to launch, and a game that even Battlefield fanboy and social justice apologist Angry Joe isn't willing to defend.

But it's still not the end, Battlefield V's self-immolation is somehow not yet complete as even in the shadow of its own failure, the batshit train refuses to stop. Not long after the launch, there was a launch party held by EA and DICE where they proceeded, seemingly, to triple down on everything they've done to kill Battlefield V, and it all happened with a single image, one that probably wasn't meant to be seen by the outside world, and that image was #everyonesBattlefield. The caption was shown on a massive screen surrounded by quotes openly critical of the game, things like "Genderfield V," "What the fuck was the developers thinking," and my favourite, "Feminazies are trying to rewrite history," because of how blatantly true it is in the very nature of Battlefield 5. Given the very harsh and critical nature of these comments, overlaid in contrast to the single caption of #everyonesBattlefield, looks like self-justification to me; like the devs are trying to use the words of the trolls and misogynists to justify their own position and to position themselves as the good guys, saying that their game is for everyone, everyone being all the oppressed, underrepresented and marginalised groups of the world. This would also suggest that "everyone" doesn't include people who said those quotes, which to me confirms that Soderlund's sickening position of gamers having to "except it or don't by the game," is a far more widespread one than just one dickhead. It all comes across as the devs saying; Our game is for everyone, unless you disagree with our politics, then you can fuck off. This is not a good look, but it is the look that Battlefield 5 has rocked since its announcement, so if this was indeed EA mocking their critics, which there's a slim chance it wasn't, I wouldn't be even the least bit surprised, its par for the course from a company whose former CDO openly showed contempt for the customer. This, in light of the game's disastrous launch, is a stunning lack of awareness; one that was made inevitable not by online misogynists, but by EA and DICE themselves, as I and many others have said over and over and over again, they dug this grave for themselves, they got woke, and now they've gone broke, Very broke in fact, as EA's stock value has seen a massive, massive drop, putting the company in the worst state it's been in for years, and while the downward trend is noticeable across the gaming world, the sharpness of EA's drop is particularly interesting, and I bet you that the complete failure of Battlefield V is a primary culprit.


The End of the Line
It's unlikely that EA and DICE will learn anything from this disaster; EA's still going to dream up ways of squeezing money out of people and Progressives, being the self-righteous, virtuous and infallible cunts that so many of them are, simply refuse to learn from their mistakes because it's never them that's wrong, it's always everyone else.  But to normies and anti-Progressives alike, this is just one more casualty in the war against progressivism, a war that has claimed the lives of many a beloved franchise, but more pressingly looms large over our IRL lives through their absolute grip on corporate and political power. I suppose there are a few morals to this story, firstly being that going woke is a bad business move. But more optimistically, it shows yet again that people will not stand for Progressives encroaching on their entertainment, which gives me hope that when they come even harder for our very lives, the normies will rise and resist the progressives, be it in the ballots, in the streets, or for now, in the sales charts and online lobbies. There is hope for the future after all, and as bleak as our world seems to be, and as bleak as it will inevitably become, things will get better, and I know this simply because people have a habit of not tolerating bullshit, sooner or later the pot will boil over, and in the case of EA, it very much has. This story has been a lot of fun to keep up with, but this story does, finally, appear to be at an end, so thank you Battlefield V, thank you for giving me a dead horse to beat these past few months, it really has been fun, but I've got to let you go, bigger, scarier foes loom and I must face them. But don't think I'll forget about you, you best keep your head down because there are actually people out there who like you and you can't afford to lose them, and if you decide you can, I won't be far away, my productivity notwithstanding.