Battlefield 2042 is finally getting a scoreboard 3 months later

This story about missing basic features, boiled down, in 1:41 minutes.

What’s the fuss?

It’s hard to believe that a basic feature such as a traditional scoreboard in a competitive shooter game would be missing when it releases to the public. Well, it took a well-funded developer months to figure that one out.

The situation

Battlefield 2042, released late last year, was supposed to be a revival to the long-standing Battlefield first-person-shooter series.

• Given the poor initial response to the series’ previous entry, Battlefield 2042 stayed longer in development presumably in order to ensure a positive gameplay experience.
• However upon release, the game was panned for its numerous bugs, glitches, and missing features compared to its prequels.

Months later, Battlefield 2042 is finally getting one of those missing features — a scoreboard that allows players to see how they are stacking up against others.

• Fans were upset that the current scoreboard feature that exists in-game doesn’t show the amount of kills, deaths, and assists (K/D/A) of other players which makes them unable to compare performance with each other.
• The updated scoreboard, which includes the aforementioned as well as other helpful metrics, will roll out mid-February.

Boiling it down

Much like any traditional sport, it’s pretty important to see how players are comparatively doing with each other to gauge performance.

• Competitive video games have known this for decades and have implemented tried-and-true scoreboards which rarely needed innovating.
• Although the developer designed their scoreboard to protect players from toxicity (i.e. players trash talking each other for performing poorly), fan outcry clearly was louder than the perceived benefits.

We live in a world now where features in games are becoming rarer upon release, with developers implementing them post-release via Internet patches in favour of getting the game out the door sooner.

• Battlefield 2042 is a poster child to this “modern gaming” outlook, with many basic features such as voice chat still absent.

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