[2020] BF5 summer trailer today!

A true classic, one final swing (and miss).

To add in what else I shared (and why we simply didn't straight away change it and release it), we produce our trailers in different formats, languages, and in different crops for different platforms and storefronts. That's some 20GB worth of renders and a further stack of Projects and their source files that need reopening and the like.

So it stacks up as a big task to solve a small (and it's 12pt font small) problem.

We were very much considering a world where we never released this trailer, we revisited that late last week to ask what we did want to do and its simply a tiny detail thats easy to miss. We caught it and asked ourselves if we were happy with it and decided no, so we're changing it

Will still be this week - and I'll keep folks updated.

For sure, and I'll volunteer that in a normal world, this was set to be a very straight forward affair in the world of communications, and we were originally working towards a cool moment where things happened in a manner where we'd reflect differently on the topic today.

Here's more dull and dry explanations/rambling if you're interested

The trailer originally would have gone out on the Wednesday before the update (the following Tuesday), patch notes would have followed on the Thursday, and the update out the following week. EA Play would originally have then been on the following week where we would have talked about the whole Battlefield franchise coming to Steam.

That's a plan that for a campaign team (not talking development or production here) gets produced as early as 4-6 months before at a high level, associated work gets mapped out, folks get to task, and then pulled together over the course of that project's timeline. The work itself all gets done, and 2 weeks out from needing to execute the plan, you're generally ready and good to go, holding all the things that you need in your hands.

The thing about plans is that they're always subject to external forces.

In this instance, an already exhausted world where we all live with the changes brought about by COVID, we observed the more important challenge of a world needing to have a conversation about the ways in which Black people, and persons of color are treated by the world.

We recognise that there is a value in getting out of the way, and so that's exactly what we do.

You modify the rest of the plan as best is appropriate, and in recognition of what can be changed (publishing trailers, delaying EA Play), vs what can't be changed (publishing updates, releasing games).

In those final moments before executing any plans, we always work to challenge ourselves if the plan is even right anymore.

If we need to make a new plan, we work to do it mindful of the fact that there are other workloads that need managing to keep other things moving forward. In this instance, the appropriate thing to do here was to focus on those other, next plans, to avoid creating new issues for other things.

Not releasing a trailer until after the content has gone live then comes without any of the usual expectations. We're not measuring it to any particular sets of standards like would normally happen for a Marquee Asset like a Trailer. Without expectation, that work then becomes de prioritised.

Late last week, we asked ourselves if we wanted to release the trailer. We've seen people asking for it, and we know that releasing it completes the story of Battlefield V.

It doesn't come without one final trip over the shoelace for sure, and we've chosen to swallow the misstep of one final delay over a piece of text in 12pt font that maybe 99.9% of folks in the thread here wouldn't notice, or if they did, even care about.

But we ask ourselves what's important for that final entry and if pausing for a further 24-72 hours helps us to do it the right way, we know that ultimately we're not sacrificing anything because the measurements are off the table.

So we'll release it later this week, those who wanted to see it for whatever reason can see it, and those who find themselves looking at the game when it's on sale down the road can use it as a way to benchmark the game. It won't set the world on fire, but we think it's another great piece from a team of talented Media creators at DICE and we're all for sharing that with those who care to see it.

A few more days at most, one last meme.

It was a few final facepaints and I think a haircut that will get used as potential login rewards. They were likely already in the files for a number of months but carried bugs that prevented them from ever being used.

Works gone on hold for the Summer while the teams take their vacations.

We had the option of deploying it but there was an issue where all Squad leaders would be ejected from the game when the systems activated. That's counter productive, so we rejected the update.

What we had otherwise developed so far is working as we want it too, but not wanting to release something that would completely ruin the experience for the summer we've put it on hold until we can pick up the work once the teams are back from their annual vacations.

Belief is that we can still develop a change as we know where the faults are, it's just subject to more testing and more engineering work to get us to a place where we're comfortable releasing it.

We'll evaluate and share more when we can.

1. Later in the year is the current expectation, date not set but we are still committed to expanding community games.
2. These systems are continuously updated and improved and have been throughout the lifecycle of the game
3. It's not live yet, but check through my comment history as someone else has asked recently on this topic. TLDR, we have a design and something in testing but I can't set a date for when or if we may activate it
4. There was a change made a few patches back that alters the behaviour of this to protect against Spawn>Death. It has some minor known issues similar to the previous behaviour but it's overall change to limit how much you could potentially spawn and be shot in the back was by design. I appreciate the feedback from you on the current behaviour, I've not been told to expect any further changes
5. There are no changes currently committed to adjust existing AA/Aircraft balance

There are two types of content currently known to folks, unfinished and unreleased.

I can't publish a full list of where things sit, but unfinished content was never moved into the unreleased category because we ultimately deprioritised it - there may well be small items still in the files which are known to cause issues or we simply felt didnt add anything substantial to the experience and so will never release.

Unreleased content is just that, unreleased (yet). There's still plenty more rotation to come through the Armory. If the day comes where I'm giving the ability to publish a complete rotation calendar, I will.

We've continued to develop and release content and updates since transitioning to a WFH status because of the COVID outbreak. The only impact we experienced was combining 4.4. and 4.6 (minor updates) but otherwise haven't stopped working or extensively delayed anything because of it.

We otherwise stopped marketing the Summer Update because we acknowledge that there are more important things happening in our world and are completely unashamed of that.

Our development teams are otherwise made up of Human Beings, who take vacations. You're welcome to read up about how it is that Sweden as a nation approaches Vacation, and seperate to that, how Production Cycles are benefited from teams taking Vacation together, than independently at different times all throughout the year.