State of Play: Battlefield 2042

By Tom West,

It's been over a year since DICE launched Battlefield 2042 to a less-than-favourable reception, and after numerous updates and a launch into EA Play and Game Pass Ultimate, we decided to return to see how it's faring.

Admittedly, I was one of the players that enjoyed DICE's latest shooter when it launched in 2021 — well I enjoyed many of the newest features on offer like dynamic weapon attachment switching. Ultimately, though, the game lacked the polish you'd expect to see from a AAA shooter of Battlefield's magnitude, and with many server-side issues and general bugs, I settled on a 6/10 score in my Battlefield 2042 review. Over the course of the best part of a year and a half, DICE has been listening to player feedback and implementing a ton of changes to the game that is said to be the foundation of the "connected Battlefield universe." We've also seen it arrive in the EA Play library, which in turn made it available to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members. The result is a game that reentered our Gameplay Chart's top 30 in November 2022 and has refused to leave since — it's even spent the last five weeks in the top 20. With that in mind, I decided now was a great time to jump back in and see how one of my favourite franchises is doing.

Battlefield 2042 Season 4: Eleventh Hour trailer

The last time I played Battlefield 2042, Season 1 was in full swing, and with players currently working through the Season 4: Eleventh Hour Battle Pass, it's certainly been a minute. Even from the main menu, it's clear DICE has been evaluating what it wants Battlefield 2042 to be. Where before, we had three sub-menus that separated the game's multiplayer, Portal, and Hazard Zone, making each feel like a small standalone experience, everything is now firmly shown together on one clean menu. Accessing multiplayer modes like Conquest and Breakthrough, new modes like Rush and Team Deathmatch, Portal, and Hazard Zone is a really quick affair now, and with the addition of new activities like Rampage and Friday Night Battlefield, which gives one game mode played on a single map for a chaotic night of fun, it really feels like DICE is working with the community to make Battlefield 2042 a worthy and fun first-person shooter.

Still from the main menu, pressing your controller's bumpers gives you quick access to the Battle Pass, your profile, the store, the class loadout screen, and your full collection of weapons, vehicles, and other items. Again, another way of enveloping the entirety of the game's content, your collection includes everything you've unlocked from Battlefield 2042 and Portal, so you can customise whatever you like from right there in the menu. A number of legacy weapons can be used in Battlefield 2042 as well, once you've completed the required challenges in Portal mode. Again, deferring to the previous layout, Portal felt a little like a mode that had been shoehorned into Battlefield 2042 when it launched, giving the game a feeling of being a mishmash of different modes instead of a hub of combined experiences. It's clear from the new layout and the cross-compatible nature of the menus alone, that the latter statement seems to be true now.

Continuing with the positive changes, the class system has finally made a return, which was dearly missed originally, and locks certain gadgets within each archetype. The battle royale-style Specialists are still there, but DICE has removed their silly quips and catchphrases, while also giving them more of a Battlefield vibe' and making them seem like veteran warriors and not celebrity characters as we see in Apex Legends. Each Specialist with their unique gadget is now part of the class system, and while each of them can use any weapon, they're proficient with a set weapon type. With the addition of Blasco in Season 4, DICE is no longer working on new Specialists, so we should hopefully continue to see further improvements to the actual gameplay.

state of play battlefield 2044

The new class system, while only making slight adjustments to how each character works, seems to have had a huge impact on the gameplay. Of course, a myriad of technical tweaks, bug fixes, server improvements, and balancing updates have also played an important role in getting the game to the state it's in now. Weapons handle much better, giving the attachment system a chance to shine, vehicles feel balanced, with tanks feeling much beefier than before and proving to be a menacing threat to infantry, and aircraft have been nerfed a fair bit, giving them a little less power than they had before. The maps themselves, especially the launch maps, now feature enough cover to ensure you can sustainably fight the enemy team for objectives. On both Conquest and Breakthrough, I experienced the pure Battlefield chaos of being dug in and holding off the onslaught of the entire enemy team on multiple occasions this week — an experience that just didn't seem to happen when Battlefield 2042 was originally released. Everything was too open, spread out, or plain unbalanced before, but now you can lock head-to-head with the enemy in bouts akin to the Metro clashes in Battlefield 3. Breakthrough is just as chaotic as I remember, but Conquest seems to shine once again now that DICE has had a chance to apply some much-needed changes. With slightly tighter objective placements, Conquest now feels like the action doesn't stop, as you're not legging it across the map so much. Of course, the larger maps generally have multiple groups on each team battling it out over select objectives, but the newer maps seem to offer obvious frontlines where it becomes a fight of attrition until a sneaky player manages to whip around to capture an objective or two behind you.

What was once before pretty unbalanced, but still fun, gameplay due to the 'be whatever the hell you want' nature of the Specialist system, now feels like a contemporary Battlefield experience. The unique Specialist gadgets don't seem like a rambunctious attempt to drag a 30-year-long series into a completely opposite direction, and instead feel like the natural progression of a developer testing new features to keep a franchise from going stale. When you look at Activision's Call of Duty franchise, while the style and setting might change from game to game, the general gameplay experience remains almost the same, so players know exactly what they're in for. EA, on the other hand, seems to make far too many changes to the core Battlefield experience with each release, which doesn't seem to pan out... like ever. Looking at what we've got now, though, and if DICE truly does intend on making Battlefield 2042 the baseline for an extended universe, we could be in for a very good time, indeed.

state of play battlefield 2042

After just a week of returning to the mayhem of DICE's shooter, I'm keener than ever before to lose countless hours to Battlefield 2042. With the Battle Pass looking like it'll be offering a range of new and legacy weapons, cosmetics, vehicles, and more, it could be a good reason for me to regularly return, even though I already have the completion, heresy I know! If I could now ask DICE for anything at all, it would be to drop whatever misguided ideas it's had since Battlefield V and give us more Battlefield 2042 achievements to unlock! My return has been met with an impressive array of improvements, and if this is the baseline of the series now, I'm very excited to see what's to come. A dodgy start for sure, but great job DICE; it certainly looks like you've taken the community's feedback onboard.

Have you been playing Battlefield 2042 recently? If so, I'd love to know how you feel about the shooter now. Drop into the comments below and let me know!
Tom West
Written by Tom West
Tom has been playing video games since he was old enough to hold a controller, experimenting with systems like the Nintendo 64 and Playstation until he eventually fell in love with the Xbox 360. With a passion for the platform, he decided to make a career out of it, and now happily spends his days writing about that which he loves. If he’s not achievement hunting, you’ll likely find him somewhere in The Elder Scrolls Online.
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