The Battlefield series has been one of the most successful franchises in video game history, with nearly 70 million copies sold. The latest iteration promises to bring players into a world where they will have to adapt new roles and tactics while using technology that is more advanced than any previous version.
The Battlefield series is known for its intense, competitive multiplayer. With the latest release, EA has continued to refine and innovate on that formula with a new loot system and much more than just guns. The developers tell us they’re still working out the kinks but we’ve had enough fun so far to know it’ll be worth playing in 2042 when this game comes out!
Battlefield 2042 Review-in-Progress – A Promising, but Flawed Multiplayer Battle Royale Game. The game has a lot of potential and is an exciting multiplayer battle royale game to play in the future.
Battlefield 2042 is the first game in which, while shooting adversaries over beautiful digital dunes, I was startled by a sly tornado that hoisted me into the air without any effort, rather than a stealthy tank urgently hunting for a high-speed embrace. I was thrown back to the respawn screen with one more thing to fear while attempting to live the life of an almost half-decent sniper after a few seconds of barely riding the wind, my parachute proving totally unsuitable to withstand its fury.
Battlefield 2042 is a multiplayer-only game with 13 maps and three major game types, each striving for a unique taste of first-person mayhem. The following impressions are based on around 12 hours of gameplay in all three modes at a review event sponsored by publisher Electronic Arts. Despite the fact that the version we played was almost similar to the one that goes live on Friday, it had all of the goods generally locked behind advancement easily accessible and was, in the end, a controlled environment. We won’t give this review a grade until we’ve spent some time on live servers, but there’s a lot to discuss.
A Case of All-Out Warfare in the Modern Era
Under the All-Out Warfare banner, Battlefield 2042’s territorial control-focused Breakthrough and Conquest modes are housed. They’re names that any seasoned player should recognize, and they’re undoubtedly a key reason for the franchise’s success. Breakthrough divides squads into attackers and defenders, with the former being tasked with taking sectors by controlling all accessible control points at the same time. Defenders may spawn indefinitely and recover positions when attackers have limited tickets, but only before the sectors collapse.
Due to the reduced play area, you’d expect a mode like this, which focuses on certain sections of Battlefield 2042’s enormous landscapes, to seem more confined. Not only does this not show up in the moment-to-moment action, but entire matches highlight the maps’ vastness, environmental diversity, and ability to accommodate many sorts of engagements. On Renewal, you spend the closing seconds of the game fighting between futuristic structures surrounded by beautiful greenery, with attackers channeled via a few narrow entrance points.
Breakthrough always makes it simpler to locate areas where combat are extremely heated, as well as allowing for less tactical thought and rewarding hasty actions. Certain technologies, such as wingsuits, become even less helpful than they were in Conquest, but you’re less likely to notice when everything around you is exploding – and what a fantastic sensation that is. As you go from sector to sector, you’ll have the opportunity to battle in close quarters, over huge open regions, and in situations where defenders have an early edge due to verticality. When vehicles are involved, or when a cunning team manages to flank your position, battles get even more chaotic, and it is this unpredictability and intensity that distinguishes the mode.
Conquest maintains much of its previous flavor, but now allows up to 128 people, with AI keeping you occupied while servers fill up. The AI is hit-or-miss, capable of killing you in one shot with a DMR on rare occasions but often failing to react effectively when flanked, to the point where it’s clear you’re not dealing with a real person. The seven maps of Battlefield 2042 are bigger and are divided into sectors with several points to accommodate this. To begin depleting their opponent’s tickets, each side must acquire control of whole sectors, which produces hotspots similar to those seen in Breakthrough. You can battle on top of skyscrapers in one corner of one map, while you can fight across flat gardens or within an amphitheater facing a large sea of sand in the other corner. You’ll often get the impression that you’re playing maps inside maps, which says eloquently about the diversity available.
However, there are a few limitations to this technique, since hiking through these vast regions is a far more lonely experience, particularly if you single queue and do it on foot. Outside of target regions, I seldom met other players throughout my time with the game. Instead, everything looked to be a little too concentrated on the sectors themselves, giving the impression that a significant portion of the maps was underutilized. While Battlefield 2042 looks fantastic, the transition to a contemporary environment comes with a subdued color palette that makes me miss the golden rapeseed fields of Arras or the poppies on the Rapture level from Battlefield 1.
There’s a lot of color, and storms — whether thunder or sand – change the landscape in a noticeable way. However, as compared to the two preceding games, 2042 seems to be visually depleted. Massive derelict ships in the midst of the desert and towering rockets poised for liftoff, on the other hand, stick in your mind without any effort. Varied locations inside sectors also make you to alter your loadout to combat at different ranges, which you must accomplish on the go. Why parachuting down to defend the control point at the foot of a tall structure, the high-magnification scope used to shoot players won’t aid you much, which is when switching to a close-range scope makes a big impact. Similarly, if you’re a strong enough shooter with your assault rifle, the underbarrel launcher comes with an enormous payout, but it also comes with more recoil while shooting genuine rounds.
You still have to pre-assign the attachments you’ll be bringing into combat from the Collection screen, which dictates loadouts in all modes, but this flexibility makes you feel less powerless than in prior games, while not giving you complete control over every circumstance. Battlefield 2042’s on-the-go personalization is accompanied by a major overhaul of the game’s class system. Although you may create generic loadouts with the names of the game’s four standard roles, they are not included in All-Out Warfare.
Instead, you’ll take on the role of Specialists, who are drawn from BF2042’s tale of non-patriated people abandoning their homelands and fighting for the United States or Russia after natural calamities have wreaked havoc on their lives. You won’t see much of this plot throughout the game, and their backstories are ultimately unimportant. Each Specialist is associated with a certain class archetype and wields a unique gadget. Irish deploys portable barriers, Falck fires healing darts, and Paik scans her surroundings for adversaries hiding behind cover. They also have a passive ability, and although medic-type Specialists seem to be the only ones who can resurrect other players, any of them may equip any weapon.
This removes a barrier that was crucial to the franchise’s character, but it seems that this expanded flexibility needlessly corrodes one of the franchise’s most recognized features while adding nothing to its main modes. Placing a turret behind an ally’s barricade may assist protect a place, but these powers seem a little too much like gimmicks utilized by completely forgettable characters, based on the brief time I spent with them.
Because of a larger variety of character models and markers, readability is much better than it was in the open beta, but it’s the latter that do all the work, and having to kill three of the same Specialist you’re playing as because they have a small symbol above their head never stopped feeling strange. Current may pass with time, but for the time being, Specialists do not feel exceptional or required, at least in this scenario.
On the subject of freedom, vehicles may now be airdropped while on the battlefield, albeit you can still get into one via the static spawn points attached to your deployment region. Their fleet consists of a variety of transport vehicles, helicopters, jet fighters, and a few armored big boys. In the hands of a good driver and a decent gunner, the minigun-equipped hovercraft is a beast, skimming over any terrain and mowing down soldiers, at least until an opponent helo shoots you up with its rockets. Ground-based vehicles were easier to control than aerial vehicles, but attack helicopters can put a lot of pressure on ground soldiers when they’re not trying to figure out how to keep the stupid things flying straight.
The franchise is famed for its superb gunplay and sound design, which Battlefield 2042 generally nails, much as it has always pushed the edge in terms of aesthetics. Across the board, the weapons are a joy to wield. Guns have a lot of power, and scoring faraway headshots gives you that distinct feeling of wanting to go on a rampage. On the other side, you could hear a lot of muted player footsteps that don’t always indicate where adversaries are coming from, giving the impression that you’ve somehow found yourself underwater. The characters’ barks are a considerably more dependable tool for locating enemies, which isn’t ideal. When you’re truly being fired at and the sound of war envelops everyone caught up in it, that’s luckily not the case.
The additional animations included in Battlefield V have likewise been removed in Battlefield 2042. You may now get into cars very instantaneously, and movement is more streamlined yet still fluid. Regrettably, recovering other players wasn’t always successful, and there doesn’t seem to be a method to designate who you’ll resuscitate next. Spotting is likewise limited to a few Specialists, with the rest of the team having to depend on the ping button to point out the overall position of enemies.
Zone of Danger
The Battlefield series has experimented with small-scale modes in the past, from team deathmatch to the ill-fated Incursions game in Battlefield 1, but nothing quite compares to Battlefield 2042’s Hazard Zone. It’s a squad-based game that concentrates upon gathering data discs from crashed satellites and surviving. It includes elements of the excitement of a battle royale while emphasizing the need of cooperation, loadout, and specialist selection. You enter the fray, facing off against other teams eager to do the same, as well as AI that seems more brutal and capable than its All-Out Warfare cousin. With just two chances to extract — one early in the game and one towards the finish – the stakes are unquestionably greater.
A scanner may be used to designate sites for data drives, ammunition boxes, and uplinks, which allow you to call in vehicles or increase your redeploy count. Any squad member may revive you while you’re downed, but if you die twice in a row, you’ll have to depend on redeploy tokens to get back into the battle. When all four members of the squad die, the game ends and you lose all captured data drives, leaving you with just a small quantity of Dark Market Credits gained by killing AI troops and players.
Specialists have the most potential to flourish in Hazard Zone if they didn’t feel required in Conquest and Brekathrough. A squad cannot have duplicate characters, and having a member who can heal or restock makes a difference since you can’t always ensure you’ll have the credits for a medic or ammunition box. Irish’s defensive plates and Boris’ turret are supported up by Falck and Angel to feed the team with health and ammunition, allowing you to go for more mobility teams or concentrate on protection.
You will live longer if you communicate well. Even if you opt for the second extraction, Hazard Zone battles aren’t overly long, and they’re ideal for both team duels and ambushes. As I discovered when an AI drove me over with a car after narrowly surviving a skrimish with an enemy squad and ready to revive my team, fair deaths are never guaranteed, but remaining alive has its own joy.
Hazard Zone does contribute to overall account advancement and will be integrated into the future Battle Passes, but it also has its own economy based on Dark Market Credits. You earn them by destroying AI troops, players, and, most critically, data drives. If you successfully extract the cash, you will get a refund, but if you fail, you will lose it permanently. You don’t have to spend it every time, but it is the only method to use anything other than the limited free loadout, which only allows you to use one item in each slot and prevents you from using attachments.
The mode also includes tactical upgrades that provide additional benefits like as carrying 5 data drives instead of only 3, and recovering quicker, but you can only utilize one unless one of your Specialists is on an extraction streak (streaks apply to individual characters, rather than accounts). Although you may get stuff from fallen opponents, Hazard Zone includes characteristics that seem to appeal to hardened gamers. At the same time, it runs the danger of alienating newer or lower-skilled players who may be trapped with utilizing the same loadout over and over again, which conflicts with the short match duration, which should, in theory, make the mode simpler to enter into than Conquest or Breakthrough.
Although my team did successfully extract once — without the need of any hard disks – losing streaks aren’t really enjoyable. Hazard Zone, on the other hand, essentially allows you to approach it however you want, so it’s perfectly fine to focus on the main objective, play as an ambusher scoping out extraction points, or simply use the tactical upgrade that increases Dark Market Credits from AI kills and treat it as a less efficient method of gaining currency for future matches. Finally, the mode’s unpredictability seems to be something that will appeal to certain players while repelling others from sticking around for too long.
Time Traveler’s Portal to the Past and Future
The Portal mode in Battlefield 2042 was undoubtedly the highlight of the review session and the one with the greatest promise. The first time I saw it was in a small-scale match on Bad Company 2’s Arica Harbor map, when the classes from that game were pitted against those from Battlefield 1942. Even though the World War 2 arsenal seemed significantly more restricted, this fight of Carl Gustavs versus Panzerschrecks and XM8s against BARs was more exciting than I imagined.
As the major targets were removed, VIP players were highlighted in red and visible throughout the map, with their status randomly shifting to others on both sides. The battle was won by the first team to get 15 VIP kills, providing for a fast-paced, more concentrated, and dynamic Team Deathmatch encounter that performed surprisingly well. Then we switched to a Free-for-All mode with BC2 classes, which eliminated the fallen animations and health regen while introducing quick respawns, very rapid movement speed, and more devastating firearms. It was enough of a demonstration to illustrate that Portal allows you to change classic modes to give them a little different taste if you want to.
You can, however, do much crazy things. We then had our arsenals removed, except for a knife and a rocket launcher that arrived with one missile, using the same FFA template. The trick was that you could only reload after you had shot the rocket by leaping five times. Even if the melee system felt fiddly and lacked accuracy or any real feedback outside of executions, I’ll be the first to admit that playing the mode for 40 minutes dragged on a little, but ideas like these could be extremely fun distractions in between longer bouts of Conquest and Breakthrough, even if the melee system felt fiddly and lacked accuracy or any real feedback outside of executions.
A developer demonstrated the precise steps required to create the mode in the editor. It’s not simple, particularly if you’re just getting started, since you’ll need to use blocks to represent if statements and variables, but it also didn’t take long.
The cherry on top were the classic experiences, which brought back BF1942 and BF3’s conquest modes, as well as BC2’s Rush mode. This is the icing on the cake that makes Portal a viable main mode option. The spirit of the three games was captured in each session. With fewer attachments and bells and whistles than subsequent versions, the 1942 maps seemed a little more sparse and concentrated on the action itself.
Crossing the sand dunes of El Alamein with nothing but a rocket launcher on my shoulder and blowing out opposing Sherman tanks was pure nostalgic fuel. It was awesome witnessing the antenna on Caspian Border slowly collapse to the ground as my unit was battling its way up the hill in BC2 Rush, with no choices to strafe or go prone and a lot of killing snipers with rocket launchers. They’re realistic recreations that bring back a chunk of the arsenals from those games, as well as the way spotting used to operate.
Even though Conquest and Rush don’t support the Rules Editor, I fiddled about with the Portal editor and it seems to be a strong tool that enables you modify things around. However, depending on the existing templates, this should result in some pretty unique modes and tastes. It is, however, a daunting tool at first, and it may be simpler to get into if you have some programming experience. Every block has a help text, and you may share URLs with the community to obtain assistance, and it will be incorporated to some degree in the Battlefield website’s Tips & Tricks section.
Performance
Outside of its 128-player variants, however, Battlefield 2042’s performance was barely steady. Even with ray tracing switched off, reaching 60 FPS on Conquest and Breakthrough on an i7-8700K, 16 GB RAM, and Nvidia RTX [email protected] was a problem. Although it performed better than the beta, as soon as anything happened around us, the frame rate dropped dramatically, fluctuating between 40 and 60 frames per second, with occasional dips into the 30s. When Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion was enabled, it resulted in a loss of roughly 20 frames per second.
While playing Breakthrough, the decline in performance had a noticeable impact on both the experience and accuracy, especially when both sides were urgently chasing the control points. Although Conquest’s bigger play area resulted in fewer of them, they were nonetheless there when multiple players concentrated on one point or sector, tanks began shooting, and debris began falling everywhere. Worse, applying the various DLSS settings and lowering settings to low appeared to achieve very nothing on a setup that — despite sporting an older CPU – met the necessary system requirements.
Hazard Zone performed much better, owing to the reduced player count, with just a few frame drops with Ultra settings and Ray Tracing/DLSS off. Small-scale modes and 64-player conquest matches in Portal are the same way. Your mileage may vary, as it does with various PCs, but that’s something you should be aware of before you start.
Accessibility
There are a number of accessibility choices in Battlefield 2042, including menu and text chat narration, as well as colorblindness options such as alternative color schemes for squad, friendly, enemy, and neutral hues. You may also turn on or off subtitles, change their font size, and toggle between toggle and hold for things like steadying your sight, asking or skipping revives, zooming in with your weapon, and more.
Battlefield 2042 has a strong launch lineup that caters to both nostalgic gamers and those looking for something fresh. The decision to remove the single-player campaign was certainly the correct one, as it resulted in three fully fleshed-out multiplayer modes that not only give various flavors of gameplay on their own, but also show what may be the finest multiplayer shooter of the year doing something new.
It’s not without flaws, such as Specialists feeling more at home in Hazard Zone than in Conquest and Breakthrough, audio mixing issues, and stuttering performance on 128-player maps, but I’ve enjoyed the majority of the 12 hours I’ve spent with Battlefield 2042 so far, and I’m looking forward to jumping back in and playing some more when early access goes live.
Battlefield 2042 is a promising game that has been released on the PlayStation 4. The review-in-progress for the game will be updated as more information becomes available. Reference: battlefield 2042 review ps4.
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