All credit for my first attempt at a Cortex belongs to a Flakfire's YT channel. As a BF1 fan I started following him before I had a GPU that would run the game. While I don't agree with all his opinions I think he is insightful and well-informed. I am a major honk for Battlefield as the franchise has been a long-standing Shacknews multiplayer favorite for nearly two decades.
Here is a link to his recent piece on Stockholm's gaming dev scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ7htuEuODs&pbjreload=101&ab_channel=Flakfire
Have you ever been to Appelflappen? I have and it was glorious. BF1942 opened up all sorts of new opportunities to compete in various vehicles on land, sea and water. New physics and improved net coding promised more ways to move around, more things to blow up and less reliance on low ping for hit detection. Each iteration in the franchise seemed to add more layers and tease improvements. But it has not always been easy and opinions about DICE and other franchises like Warfare are as varied and vociferous as it gets.
In my opinion, major publishers become too risk averse as they grow larger and this can impede the progress or introduction of new ideas. And for good reason as popularity for online games has soured and smaller upstarts have made major in roads in short order. At one time DICE was a small upstart mod team but has had a hard time pleasing some loyal fans after the release of Battlefield 5. I am not one of those people as I rejoined multiplayer FPS after a ling hiatus playing mostly MOBAs and having a sub-par GPU. Fortnite and PUBG showed how hungry the market is for new. The pillars of the myultiplayer shooter scene are almost all some form of mod which started from scratch them exploded. From CSGO to PUBG the next big thing often starts small.
There is something about the magic that can happen inside a smaller, newly formed team with a big idea. One of those kinds of upstarts in Stockhold. Embark Studios is formed from many DICE vets and has some new tools which could unlock creative potential putting more power in thehands of players like Dreams has for PS4. They are innovating machine learning to rapidly create entirely new photo realistic levels. All this is very promising and if your are looking for a job they are hiring. Studios with this kind of pedigree usually form when they environment they left wasn't able to do the things that inspire greatness. I have many other thoughts on what kinds of new layers and challenges await but for now we can only begin to imagine the possibilities.
