10 Video Games You Regretted Pre-Ordering

The 12th main instalment in the Battlefield series was expected to bring new life to the property after its predecessor, 2018’s Battlefield V, underperformed commercially and was criticised for lack of content and innovation. Regrettably, Battlefield 2042’s development team overshot by a country mile and released a game that was heavily criticised for being both uninspiring and making significant unwanted changes to the typical gameplay.

Having ditched the single player campaign entirely, Battlefield 2042 mistakenly boasts an exclusively multiplayer experience, and features a hero based character roster of Specialists for players to choose from — something that deviates critically from the one-soldier-among-many tone of the previous games, and which many fans disliked.

If that wasn’t enough to stir the gaming community’s collective pot, removal of features such as the previously ever-present scoreboard, a host of bugs and technical issues, and lack of story content meant that players abandoned the game in droves.

What little story content there was didn’t help matters, as the premise of a near-future world war with Russia and certain morally dodgy cosmetic names against the backdrop of ongoing Russo-Ukranian tensions was considered by many to be in poor taste.

Less than a month after release, 70% of Battlefield 2042’s initial players on Steam had been lost, likely along with their money. Though EA blamed stalled development and work from home conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic for the state of the game, realistically they probably just need to give this series a rest.