DICE Design Lead Leaves Studio Following Battlefield 2042 Launch

Soon: Fawzi Mesmar, DICE’s chief designer who was part of the Battlefield and Star Wars: Battlefront franchises, will be leaving the company following the disastrous launch of Battlefield 2042, although he says the move has been planned for a long time.

VGC reports that Mesmar announced his departure to staff in an email revealing that he had been planning to leave DICE for another company following the launch of Battlefront 2042.

“It was an absolute pleasure to be part of the best design teams in the galaxy,” Mesmar wrote in his message. “The incredible design work you do continues to inspire me every day. Thank you for putting a little faith in me, I hope I am not disappointed.”

“I was made an offer that I could not refuse in another company that has been kind enough to wait for me until we have shipped [Battlefield 2042]. It was very important for me to be here with the team as we achieved this historic milestone. “

Mesmar had previously been Director of Game Studio, Production and Design at King, the maker of Candy Crush, before assuming the role of Head of Design at DICE in September 2019, where he worked on Star Wars Battlefront II and Battlefield V.

“While Oskar [Gabrielson, studio GM] and I have been discussing my succession plans myself for some time, and it will be announced in due course, we opted to delay this communication until after launch in order to rightly maintain focus on the game that we have been putting a monumental amount of effort, “added Mesmar.

Sadly for Mesmar, his final project at DICE, Battlefield 2042, launched with so many issues and missing features that it quickly became one of the worst Steam games of all time according to the classification of user opinions; more than 40,000 of the 57,000 reviews of the game are negative. The second game update, which arrived today, addresses some critical server issues and reduces bullet spread, improves zoom, and more, although there are still many more issues to fix.

Mesmar’s last day at DICE will be tomorrow, November 26. His next position, which is currently unknown, will also be based in the Swedish capital of Stockholm.

Be sure to check out our Battlefield 2042 CPU benchmark with 128 player battles and how 30 different GPUs handle the game.