The many-boxed roadmap represents everything I hate about shooters

Welcome to FOV 90, an FPS column from staff writer Morgan Park. Gaze upon the Battlefield 6 Season 2 roadmap and notice its cramped images, boxes of varying sizes, and text too small to read without loading the image in a new tab. This many-boxed roadmap, delivered every three months, feels like the death of surprise—a scoreboard for the terminally online and a symbol of a game dev environment that treats players as clients who expect results.

Our relationship with the biggest shooters has contorted from player to investor: we track Steam concurrents like they're share prices, dogpile games that threaten the ones we already like, and spend all day on social media playing armchair analyst about what developers should have done differently.

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. If you can still play a game without a problem, if it's still being supported, does anything else really matter?

battlefield 6, season 2, roadmap, fps, shooters, game dev, quarterly roadmap, steam concurrents, social media, player investor