In brief: Fawzi Mesmar, DICE's head of design who was part of the Battlefield and Star Wars: Battlefront franchises, is leaving the company in the wake of Battlefield 2042's disastrous launch, though he says the move has been planned for a long time.

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

"It was an absolute pleasure to serve on the best design teams in the galaxy," Mesmar wrote in his message. "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."

Mesmar had previously been the studio director, production & game design at Candy Crush maker King before taking up a position as DICE's head of design in September 2019, where he worked on the likes of Star Wars Battlefront II and Battlefield V.

"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 added.

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 as ranked by user reviews; over 40,000 of the game's 57,000 reviews are negative. The game's second update, which arrived today, addresses some critical server issues and tightens bullet spread, improves zooming, and more, though there are still plenty more problems 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.

Make sure to check out our Battlefield 2042 CPU Benchmark featuring 128-Player Battles and how 30 different GPUs handle the game.