The many-boxed roadmap represents everything I hate about shooters right now
Welcome to FOV 90, an FPS column from staff writer Morgan Park. Every other week, I cover topics relevant to first-person shooter enjoyers, spanning everything from multiplayer and singleplayer to the old and the new.
Gaze upon the Battlefield 6 Season 2 roadmap and witness its mediocrity. Notice its cramped images, its boxes of varying sizes, and its text that's too small to read without loading the image in a new tab.
What we have here is everything wrong with the multiplayer FPS. The many-boxed roadmap, delivered every three months without fail, is the death of surprise, a scoreboard for the terminally online—a symbol of a game dev environment that sees players as clients who expect results.
Our relationship with the biggest shooters around have contorted from player to investor: We track Steam concurrents like they're share prices, dogpile games that threaten to disrupt the ones we already like, and spend all day on social media playing armchair analyst about what developers should have done differently to be successful. We're Wall Street, but even less real.
Fueling that behavior is the quarterly roadmap: the investor report that dictates whether a game will be "so back" or "dying" for the next three months. To what degree is it healthy to care about a game's popularity status? If you can still play it without a problem, if it's still being supported, does anything else really matter? It's live service brain rot, and it sucks so hard.
It's no wonder that developers are more interested in the appearance of always having new stuff than what that stuff actually is. Battlefield 6, much like Call of Duty, which is much like Apex Legends, which is much like Fortnite, which is much like everything, just got so much new stuff. Can't you tell by the 22 boxes? It's a new era of Battlefield!
Not really. I count five, maybe six boxes on that roadmap that represent significant, lasting additions to Battlefield 6: Two new maps, a Recon gadget that lets you zap rockets out of the air, the return of the Little Bird chopper, and a dirtbike.
Those five guns? More of the same featureless grey boxes BF6 is already loaded with. I asked DICE last week what makes these weapons special additions that people should be excited about, and they told me they're pretty good in close-quarters. Cool. Those new modes? Limited-time events that rely on FOMO as a means to get people back in the door. You know what would be better? New modes that, uh, don't disappear for no good reason.
Does Battlefield 6 even benefit from more modes? Most people are perfectly happy with Conquest and Breakthrough, they just want more maps to play them on. Does it need more guns? I'd argue it needs more gadgets, or attachments that meaningfully transform the guns we already have. But that doesn't fit the law of the roadmap: A roadmap adds everything at once. You can't run a proper live service if you aren't creating more maps, vehicles, guns, gadgets, events, and battle passes all at the same time!
The roadmap saps the magic out of the amazing potential that videogames have to expand and surprise over time.
Except that you can. It's possible to keep people interested in a game without setting an exact schedule or just showing all of your cards months ahead of time. It's actually those exact qualities that people love about Helldivers 2: there is no roadmap, nothing in particular to look forward to.
Notice how the ongoing conversation around Helldivers 2 is surprisingly normal? Players come, players go, and the internet doesn't get so serious about it when the game drops out of the top 20 most-played on Steam. That's because Arrowhead didn't hand everyone a scoring sheet.
You can't get invested in what's coming or even set unrealistic expectations, because the only thing players know with certainty is that Arrowhead is cooking up something. Tanks can appear overnight. Terrifying new weapons can show up in a $10 DLC pack, or for free, or hidden on a new planet. Planets can blow up. There might be a roguelike mode some day, who knows? Who cares? Helldivers 2 doesn't treat its players like investors that it's desperate to prove its worth to, it has an honest-to-god audience. That audience doesn't want spoilers.
The roadmap saps the magic out of the amazing potential that videogames have to expand and surprise over time. It sets us up for our own disappointment, and it pushes developers to overpromise and underdeliver.
I'm tired of this environment where announcements about the games I play feel like quarterly investor reports, and where fans end up sounding like financial bros rather than people who are having fun.