I have played many shooting games; many of them are not good. Whether it is through game mechanics, narrative equipment, fascinating systems, or stylish looks and feel, I am always attracted to.
Battlefield is my go-to multiplayer shooting game, and whenever I complete a specific shooting game fix, I rely on this game. In this sense, this is my comfort food, which I cannot get from any other series. I’ve been waiting for the next battlefield, because obviously DICE doesn’t have a clear idea of what it wants to do with Battlefield 5.
So here we are, at the start Battlefield 2042, This is the game I have been playing since the early release. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the game I am most looking forward to this year, but when I try to open it every night, this enthusiasm has become painful.
It has always been a challenge to express my feelings about Battlefield 2042 in words, not because I have any confusion about the needs of the battlefield, but because it is difficult to judge the game work based on my own merits when it is usually not clear how they should be.
Battlefield 2042 is in a rough technical state. I cannot honestly point out a system, mechanism, or pattern that is completely free of errors or some kind of strange accident. The frustrating thing is that some of these issues, which the community calls “legacy errors”, exist in most recent games.
Resurrection bugs, entering/existing animation issues, crossing the ground, rubber bands under certain conditions, overlapping UI elements, etc. are all issues that many series veterans should be familiar with. However, they continue to appear.
I have never understood why DICE would give up years of work, experimentation and improvement when it started making every new battlefield-instead of building and perfecting it. However, even if you are willing to forgive minor errors and technical issues, they are usually intertwined with the core design of Battlefield 2042, so that they are always affected.
Excessive bullet scattering/blooming can make fighting anywhere at short distances frustrating, because your bullets are happy to land anywhere but wherever you want. The continuous stuttering is the result of poor server performance and low CPU utilization, making it difficult to keep the frame rate consistent, and introducing hit detection problems that make me confused.
When you have witnessed all of this enough times, you will not always be able to determine which error caused your current dilemma. Did I miss it because I was bad, or because the flowers messed me up? In fact, no, it may be that unstable network code swallowed my good shots. The list is endless.
Before the release of “Battlefield 2042”, Beta and Alpha players often heard complaints that this is a game that suffers from an identity crisis. I rejected this view at the time, partly because it was unfair to judge something as important as design identity based on a limited, outdated pre-release version. But also because I have never looked at it that way.
Now that we are on the other side, I can’t help but agree with some Reddit hot topics. Even assuming that the release is flawless-in any case, you can get as many things as possible in the post-pandemic family-the crisis of Battlefield 2042 is not so much the failure to borrow content from other games. In your own sandbox, it is more related to wrong vision and hasty execution.
From the very beginning, DICE set out to build the largest battlefield in history. But for the studio, this means expanding the number of players and designing a larger game space to support this. This is its first stumble. The battlefield has never had a scale problem; it has provided one of the largest number of players and one of the largest maps in the field of shooting games. Frankly speaking, this is a problem that does not need to be solved. Although I understand that innovation does not always stem from challenges, the promotion of 128 players and the things they bring only need to have a greater impact, and even make sense.
In all the time I play the game, the conquering game feels neither larger nor smaller than the standard 64 people. Sometimes, both teams seem to be gathered at one capture point, seeming to be trying to test the limits of this newly discovered scale, but nothing more.
Those moments may be interesting, but the feeling is fleeting. First, none of these skirmishes has a class or team structure to make people feel organized and meaningful enough. It only really helps to generate instant dopamine from multiple killings, and provides the content creation side on Twitch and YouTube.
Leaving aside the lack of class dynamics (which we will talk about later), larger numbers usually tend to make the balance more chaotic than action. This is especially true for Breakthrough, DICE seems to have just given up. The way the map was designed did not make it interesting for two teams of 64 players to bump their heads into each other in 40 minutes. Determining who owns a department is often a ruthless battle of will.
Going back to the conquest, emphasizing the map size seems to have encountered technical obstacles in the development process, because almost all maps have a large dead zone between the occupation points-they themselves are about half/quarter of the classic battlefield map. It is no exaggeration to say that sometimes it feels like DICE stitched together traditional-sized battlefield maps with large patches of snow, sand or grass.
It’s not uncommon to see infantry or vehicles running at a quarter of the animation frame rate through a scope, or to find a 3D model flipped to its basic low-poly version when the distance is far enough-the game’s N64 fog.
Battlefield 2042 tries to solve this problem by providing free vehicle calls to alleviate the impact of all dead zones, but the system-like many other systems-is often problematic and chaotic. Even so, it is a band-aid, and it does not solve the root cause of the problem.
The maps are not very fluid at all, they feel like different battles in the same general area. Apart from the obvious benefits of having a skyscraper to provide a camping sniper, any hot spot of the game has almost no strategic value.
When DICE talks about introducing sectors into conquest and connecting two or more points, I hope this dynamic will inform each other of advances and retreats and give meaning to the battle.
One change that really turned Battlefield 2042 from another broken but ultimately solid battlefield into a parody of the series is the removal of the class system. Teamwork has always been one of the core principles of the battlefield. To mess with it is to destroy the structure that holds all these together.
I really don’t understand why we no longer have traditional courses. While keeping the class intact, the freedom to allow anyone to equip their favorite weapon can be achieved. I always support limitations in game design because they are usually necessary for a satisfying experience.
What the new free-flow system does is to provide players with the freedom to not let go of any shit.
The expert design seems to satisfy this point. If you avoid the cynical view of why we have Rainbow Six Siege heroes in the battlefield in the first place, then each expert actually serves only one-usually selfish-purpose.
To be precise, how can someone with a grappling hook or wingsuit help the team play its role? Doctors are universally useful, but the two that exist unnecessarily open up their own niches in the classic definition of class. You can of course use Rao’s jammers to play the role of anti-vehicles, or Casper to play the role of scouts-but their tools can easily exist as gadgets, at least so that you will know who you are facing.
Some experts feel that in a sense they bear the burden of absent from the professional system, while others are to solve perceived battlefield problems. The map is too big? Fly around! Too open? Put down the shield!
Experts are more meaningful in the danger zone, and PvEvP extraction of the royal mode provides a more relaxing experience for escaping from Takov and hunting: Showdown. Hazard Zone inserts players into the same Conquest map to find the data drive, you need to extract the data drive to make any progress in the mode’s own individual meta. Throughout the process, you will encounter AIs that protect these caches, as well as enemy players trying to do the same.
Each team can only choose one same expert. Through this restriction, the dynamic becomes more meaningful. The problem is that the danger zone is so barebones that there is no depth to prove that it is reasonable to propose different combinations, or that it is indeed an attractive reward for players to care about.
All this left us with a portal, which eventually became the default savior of Battlefield 2042, because the rest of the game failed. At launch, the Portal included two map remakes from Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 1942-as well as a large number of weapons and gadgets from these games.
The Portal developed by Ripple Effect (formerly DICE LA) is full of love and respect for these classic games. This can be seen in the way they are presented visually and the extent to which the team tried to recreate it in the 2042 mechanism. For example, the class has the same single gadget restriction as in the main game.
Ironically, the sheer number of weapons and gadgets in each of the three games found in Battlefield 2042 outweighs them. Moreover, considering the good balance and balance of these classic arenas, the portal map finally becomes more interesting and diverse. Although I am really obsessed with nostalgia here and there, I cannot give Battlefield 2042 a pass because of Portal, even once the community is transferred from the XP farm server, the modification tools it contains may produce some true classics.
This review mainly judges the new game-Total War, because this is the purpose of most people buying Battlefield 2042, frankly speaking, this is the main event. With this in mind, I can’t conscientiously recommend Battlefield 2042, not when we have really interesting shooting games in Halo Infinite and Call of Duty: Vanguard-both have better shapes, even free!
I have always said that there is nothing to replicate the battlefield. I still believe that this is the case, but I know very well that even Battlefield 2042 is not interested in copying Battlefield.
Nevertheless, the future looks bright. DICE has promised to release two patches before the end of the year, one of which will be important, adding many UI updates and a large list of fixes. By the holidays, I expect the game will be in a better state.
But I can only judge what I have been playing. More importantly, the experience at launch—players paid more than $120—is ultimately an experience worth criticizing today.
I hope 2042 will become a more interesting battlefield game sometime next year, but this series has gone through various levels of rough release-from BF 2142 to BF 5-I can’t say that I have the stamina to execute due to technical issues and missing Function and punish DICE’s dance, only when the game is inevitably “good now, actually” turn around and celebrate a year later.
Test version: PC.The code provided by the publisher.
For practical tips and tricks for Battlefield 2042, check out the guide in the link.
