When the DICE developers officially announced that the Battlefield series was moving back to the modern era after years spent in the First and Second World Wars, there was undisguised enthusiasm among the fans. They had to combine the best things from the third and fourth part, which was very successfully demonstrated by the first trailer with more than 20 million views, a million inches up and 90,000 comments. But who would have thought in June that the trailer would probably be the best we would see from Battlefield 2042 this year, when the players a week ago released an apparently incomplete and untuned version, making the series a surprisingly great disgrace. I was embarrassed every time I launched the game last week, and I can say quite openly that I still don’t fully understand what really happened to DICE and why Battlefield 2042 had to end like this.
Multiplayer bet
As you probably already know, Battlefield 2042 has no story campaign. I see this as an evolution in deciding what the people of DICE should pay the most attention to, considering that the story part was made up of unique missions of considerable length in the previous two parts. On the other hand, the clearly communicated signal was understood by the fact that the developers redirect their efforts to multiplayer and, despite the impossibility of direct comparison with Call of Duty, show the competition how it is done. In this respect, the Battlefield series has only the highest ambitions and the constant reminder that the golden age will come, accompanied by disarming graphics, a destructive system, dynamic weather and great shooting, it is now very unpleasant in the face of the result. But it doesn’t make sense to walk around the hot mess, Battlefield 2042 acts as a title that was supposed to stay in the DICE offices for some time and not rush to launch during the fall season.
The whole experience from the main part is divided between just two game modes, which is already quite striking. You can play Conquest and Breakthrough, which in the case of PCs and new consoles – where we’ve tested the game over the past few days – means 128 people running around huge maps in an effort to do what everyone expects from Battlefield. In the case of Conquest, it is the traditional occupation of checkpoints, but now divided into their own sectors within giant maps. In the case of Breakthrough, it is a matter of defending checkpoints against the attacking team, which tries to control them and move the battle line deeper into the field of defenders. Nothing complicated on paper, but simple concepts are not copied into the game itself as successfully as it might seem.
Cascade of problems
Finding the real reason why Battlefield 2042 fails is not easy. This is a combination of many factors that could be used to describe stacks of paper. One of them would undoubtedly be maps, or rather their design, which corresponds more to trying to do something nice than functional for a multiplayer shooter. There is a lack of strategically placed covers that would naturally copy the possible path of moving players to other points and not leave them in wide spaces to the snipers. You might say that this can be solved by transport by plane or simply by smoke screens, which will take care of covering your transfer. But that only opens Pandora’s box with many other arguments and answers as to why it’s not that easy.
If you do not play with friends and you come across players in matchmaking who are not willing to cooperate or fulfill the assigned tasks, you will not have much experience from the game.
For example, the game lacks an effective way of communication, which no longer has set gestures or text chat. Battlefield 2042, as a cross-platform title game, set on large maps and in the presence of dozens of soldiers, lacks voice chat for some reason. In other words, if you do not play with friends and you come across players in matchmaking who are not willing to cooperate or fulfill the assigned tasks, you will not have much experience from the game. However, the area of maps, which is respectable, also has a share in the overall gameplay, is ready for a long run through completely depopulated sectors to checkpoints, which your comrades-in-arms are guaranteed to occupy exactly when you will still miss a hundred or fifty meters. to join the occupation. Therefore, there is nothing left but to turn around, run to the next point and hope that you will be useful this time.
If you are wondering why at such moments the player simply does not take the vehicle and does not move to the desired place faster, I have another painful answer for you. It is related to the huge number of players and the persistent desire to control at least a jeep or a completely inadequately powerful hovercraft, if not a straight fighter or attack helicopter. So even if you have the opportunity to call ground equipment directly at your position, tickets will usually always be busy and you will not run. This allows us to return to the absence of voice chat, difficult coordination of your four-member unit and the whole team and a strange uncontrolled chaos, in which the game breaks down into lifeless and not very clear cells of individual fights. For a change, they pay extra for a scandalously low number of weapons, but even worse for a completely random scatter of projectiles fired. Instead of compensating for influences such as wind or distance, the impact of missiles is decided by server coincidence, which leads to really strange situations and the inevitable feeling that there is something wrong with weapons in Battlefield 2042. Unfortunately, it all too often happens that you simply don’t hit the enemy even at medium range, regardless of the fact that it completely fills your sights and you are convinced that you were accurate. And perhaps I prefer not to mention the problems with netcode, player desynchronization and general lag, which of course make the situation worse and the first patch from the end of last week does not solve anything significant in this field.
All against all
Unfortunately, even here the criticism of the processing of Battlefield 2042 does not end – another inconvenience is the playable specialists, who replaced the members of the traditional classes. The result is the ability to adjust all equipment to a single special ability, which is completely meaningless and contributes further to the opacity of the matches. Even a large number of players on the map does not compensate for the fact that clones of a handful of soldiers are competing against each other, who, moreover, are not visually distinguished from each other. They are all members of a huge group of people who have lost their homes due to natural disasters and are now fighting each other. Nice story, applause, but Battlefield 2042 is primarily a multiplayer shooter that has to respect a few basic rules to make it enjoyable to play. But DICE said no – probably because of the easy monetization of other universal specialists who will fit into the game without any need to balance their strength. The result is wild shooting on your own before you register their blue pointer and unexpected death if you don’t notice the red dots indicating the enemy. Again, it probably sounds like a complete banality and you may be tapping your forehead, but at the speed that Battlefield 2042 is showing and the chaos caused by all the above mistakes, doing so is a lot of fun and does not provide motivation to keep playing.
Nor is the way of allocating experience that rewards the way you sow death in the ranks of your enemies. Did she shoot over half the map? Standard 50 XP. Elimination of the entire enemy unit? No bonus. Head? Standard 50 XP. Healing a comrade-in-arms? 5 XP each time, no matter how many health points you have actually restored. If you add to this the impossibility to look at the classic table with the number of kills and deaths during the matches, because they do not exist in the game, or to go through statistics, because they do not exist in the game, Battlefield 2042 remains an empty box, which has its indisputable potential. but the people of DICE will probably be digging it out for a few more months.
Otočme list
In order not to offend the new Battlefield, in addition to the two described modes, it also contains a Hazard Zone. In it, 32 players in four-member teams try to find hard drives on the ground of fallen satellites and be at the right time at the landing site of the transport aircraft, which is a ticket from the battlefield to safety. The course of the game is special precisely because of the absent voice chat, pinging is not completely accurate, so it does not adequately mark the ammunition box, and if you happen to enter the game without scanners that are able to detect the location of hard drives, you will have a lot of running and running. Even here, Battlefield 2042 does no good to players in terms of displaying important information or clear labels that would make it easier to meet a given goal, so playing the Hazard Zone usually slips into skirmishes with players and soldiers controlled by artificial intelligence, which is not your primary task. Nevertheless, the experience – especially with a group of friends – is much denser and more complex than in massive but anonymous multiplayer, and it attracts to play repeatedly thanks to the progress system, which counts the games played and accumulates more through success with money and the opportunity to take get better gear for the next match.
What’s missing?
At a time when Battlefield 2042 could be played by premium pre-ordered people or EA Play subscribers, fans have put together a lengthy list of things that the novelty is missing from previous episodes. Comprehensive list things put together by a user of Reddit with the nickname Jellyswim, which lists not only elements such as disengaging players after each match, fewer weapons or the absence of hardcore mode. It focuses on sub-aspects that had their standard set in previous years and include infantry, military equipment, XP award system, maps or sub-elements of the interface. It is not possible to list everything in the review, but I also recommend the post to view and understand the extent of everything that is unfinished at Battlefield 2042.
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A breath of nostalgia
And then there’s Portal mode, which does most things the opposite of the rest of the game and is much friendlier to players. It is the combination of content from previous episodes, including Battlefield 1942 or Bad Company 2, that gives players the opportunity to create very interesting games in traditional modes and return clarity and fun to the game. Smaller maps pleasantly intensify the duel, only three or four points in the conquest suddenly clearly define what a team of lower players should strive for, and most importantly – easily recognizable soldiers, fighting each other for their nation. The basic menu of modes is not very rich here either – only traditional conquest and rush – but thanks to the web editor you can create a lot of interesting variations, or add your own conditions and small scripts affecting many situations and their impact on the game or individual players. It is therefore no coincidence that even here you will find basically always full servers of people who are basically just waiting for the content from other parts to come and be able to stop playing the basic part of Battlefield 2042. Actually, I would not be surprised at all if the Portal became a standalone game and the ultimate sandbox that can constantly swell and not put any obstacles in front of the player.
But together with the new content, it would still like to work on the technical state, which is no better than the gameplay itself. Glitches are like poppies in the game and they are not always just from the sidelines of smiling physics or falling through the game world. The errors concern, for example, the inability to change the configuration of your own weapon with the help of a new cross menu, the inability to shoot, spawn into the game, or start it at all, which happened to me several times in a row, and then you simply do not feel like staying at the computer and playing on. Bizarre was also a mistake in Breakthrough, when the last sector got stuck, both teams suddenly had an inexhaustible number of respawns and for a long 50 minutes they fought for only a small forest on the border of the final part of the map. However, the developed XP did not leave the collected XP to the players, when after less than an hour they interrupted the game from their position and sent all the players to the menu. Then add poor PC optimization, game crashes and consoles, or inconsistent sounds that used to be the domain of the series, and you have a hard-to-believe result that fans probably won’t forget for a long time. Without the Portal, I would not find any argument that could make you buy Battlefield 2042 right now, on the other hand, the game has a trial available through EA Play, or for a more expensive subscription you can play the full version on a PC. You basically don’t pay anything for the exam and you can get a picture of whether to dedicate more time to the game, or move to the free multiplayer Halo Infinite and give the people from DICE the opportunity to catch up with the experience where we would like it now.
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