Fawzi Mesmar, DICE's head of design that worked on the Battlefield and Star Wars: Battlefront franchises, has decided to leave the company following the launch of Battlefield 2042.
As reported by VGC, his departure was announced via an e-mail sent to DICE's staff, and it "revealed he'd been planning to leave for some time once the studio's latest shooter has been shipped." Mesmar had served as DICE's head of design since 2019, a job he took after being Candy Crush developer King's studio director, production & game design.
“It was an absolute pleasure to serve on the best design teams in the galaxy,” Mesmar wrote in his email to staff. “The incredible design work that you do continues to inspire me every day. Thank you for putting some faith in me, I hope I didn’t disappoint.
"I have been made an offer I couldn’t refuse at another company that has been kind enough to wait for me until we have shipped [Battlefield 2042]. It was super important to me to be here with the team as we achieve this historical milestone.
"While Oskar [Gabrielson, studio GM] and myself have been discussing my succession plans for some time – and it will be announced in due course – we opted to delay this communication till after launch to keep the focus – rightfully so – on the game we’ve been putting a monumental amount of effort on.”
Mesmar's official final day will be November 26 and his currently unknown next position will also be based in Stockholm, Sweden.
Battlefield 2042 was released on November 19, 2021, and its launch was a bit rocky. Despite that, DICE has committed to releasing patches to address the various technical issues and gameplay balancing problems many players are running into.
In our Battlefield 2042 review, we said that its "highpoint is its powerful Portal mode, which lets you relive the series' past glories and tweak them to your liking. Its current batch of modes is overstuffed with players and utter chaos, though Hazard Zone scales things down in an interesting, high-stakes way."
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.