Battlefield 2042

Yeah, there's definitely something funky going on in terms of performance on the PC. Literally no difference between Ultra and Low settings for me: terrible texture load in, tons of stuttering, and very low FPS with constant dips, some times down into the 20s. CPU usage hovering around 70-80%, GPU usage appears not even to be registering with my monitoring software. Meh.

In terms of the game itself, feeling very underwhelmed to be honest. The UI is utter dog shit. I presume these specialists are simply a means of facilitating MTX with different skins etc.? Not helped by the poor performance I'm having, but I found enemy visibility and reading the terrain oddly difficult. Some weird hit registering as well, delays on the killfeed updating, and irritating lag when trying to respawn (because obviously no one is ressing). Also, am I being a bit stupid or has both the crouch run and the head-height vaulting been entirely removed?

Just had a glance on the subreddit. Oh dear. Bit of a dumpster fire over there. Seems to be some suggestion this is an older build?

Had some fun with it on PS5, but as mentioned it's sooo very janky. Plus I suck at it.
I really hope that it is indeed an old build!


Was tempted to buy it pre-beta but will defo wait for it to be in a sale now. BF5 was deal of the week in the first month or two IIRC

Also if it's Battlefield 4 part two - again, how the fuck can DICE have regressed so much after taking a good 12 months getting BF4 into anything resembling a stable state and releasing another two full BF titles since.

It's like they lost all their staff, UI and design developments and code base and started from scratch.

Ultimately I feel with a lot of these franchises they have run out of places to go design and gameplay wise after so many releases. They are also cash cows for the publisher so I think Devs find themselves having to needlessly reinvent the wheel and shoehorn new features just to give marketing departments scope to extract more money from our pockets.

Movement is way better than any previous battlefield game, it almost feels like warzone in terms of map traversal now which might not be what some want but the vast majority do. Having quick movement like that creates a skill gap where good players can absolutely run rings around less skilled players.

Gunplay is also really quite good, not so sure on the dmr but the assault rifle is nice to use.

People say this every new BF game 😁

The more I play 2042, especially with a squad of friends that can plan things, the more I like it.

There are definitely issues though, airpower is far too powerful or rather the counters are absolute dogshit, the personal AA either completely misses far too often (I've fired far too many missiles at hovering helicopters that hadn't deployed flares and the missile has gone towards them and suddenly decided they couldn't be arsed to explode) or they do hit and basically tickle them. The same applies to the currently available AT weapons that are like hitting it with a stick rather than a shaped explosive.

DICE have a history of fucking up balance at the start of a game of course so hopefully things will be tweaked before it comes out. My go to example will continue to be the US Heavy Assault in Battlefield Vietnam, it had an M60 that was incredibly accurate, bugger all recoil, tons of ammo and really damaging and also carried a LAW. Virtually everyone on the US played as that because you were like a Terminator.

I had a better squad tonight and got a tank or two.

That was more fun. Decent squad helps so much.

Never got to see the hurricane myself, but it did look pretty cool in the clips I've seen. Managed to pull off a double sprint into a sprint slide, A/D strafe spam, then grapple up onto a roof to get a melee execution on one guy. That was pretty cool. I mean it's not remotely Battlefield, but hey ho.

Beta obviously had the comms disabled, as well as the in-game emotes for requesting Medi Kit/Ammo Crates, which I don't think has been particularly helped in terms of promoting team work. I've been revived a grand total of three times over this weekend, though I did soon default to forcing the respawn as the indicator for nearby medics isn't currently in-game.

I love most Battlefield's, except for Hardline and 5,and this is no exception. Aside from the odd glitch like ending up under the map, or not being able to get out of the big chopper, it ran surprisingly smoother as the beta went on. Pretty consistent 80-90 fps with all settings on high at 1440p, which I didn't expect since my processor is the minimum recommended (Ryzen 5 3600), but my card is a 2080 super so that no doubt helped.

They seem to have taken inspiration from Titanfall when it comes to player movement - faster sprinting and long slides with acceleration. Level of destruction is probably on par with 4, although I'm not sure if I actually saw any buildings come down. Aircraft feel easier than ever to control with a mouse and keyboard, as is taking them down on foot with AA missiles - 2 hits and they're dead except for the big transport one. It's definitely easier to dodge incoming missiles though. I had a good few 20+ kill streaks in them.

I actually liked 5 a bit more, this is closer to the old ones even if it s *much* bigger in scale. The beta was not enough for me to warm to it, but I didn't play it all that much either.

Well ... I don't want to be too much of a debbie downer and buzzkill everyone so I'll just say this and bow out: I was very disappointed. Right now, I wont be picking it up, especially until there is some sort of clarity over the weird performance issues on PC (seemingly related to certain CPU/GPU configurations, even if they are waaaaaay over the recommended specifications).

The concessions made in order to facilitate monetization are, of course, to be expected in this day and age -- depressing as that may be. Ditching the franchise's core squad roles in favour of heroes in order to boost skin sales seems way too egregious for me personally, particularly with the knock-on effect this has had with load-outs and general teamplay/support. I mean why play anything other than Falck when you can have a full self-heal and an ammo crate, not to mention whatever weapon you want? Third-person executions also felt a bit naff, but I'm sure they'll sell tons of different animation sets.

Similarly, though I thought the Plus system (T menu) looked pretty cool (the only part of the UI that did, to my mind), being able to augment your load-out on the fly for different types of combat ranges, or just change magazines to cheese the reload, really feels like it promotes lone wolf play, the sort more suited to a BR than typical squad-based stuff.

And the movement changes are just not what I want to see in a Battlefield game. I'm sure they've done their research and have their data, so presumably I'm in the minority, but the vast increase in pace, double sprint, sprint slide, slide cancelling, and bunny hopping is the sort of stuff I expect in games like Apex, or Quake: Champions, and a few years back in Titanfall 2 (amazing game, btw). It feels weird to me here, especially as it seemed like, despite all the issues with BFV, where they had gotten to with movement was one of the few areas the community was positive about. Crouch sprinting is gone, high-vaulting removed, contextual leaning taken out, and not that I really used it all that much but supine (reverse prone) has also been dropped apparently due to potential camping issues. So here we have:

youtu.be/ovWLqIBgPNA

I also felt the scale of destruction had been rolled back yet again, but that may just have been my anecdotal experience in the beta. Did certainly feel like all the roofs stayed in place to make the hero grappling still a thing in late game, though.

Plenty of people will enjoy this though, no doubt. I'm sure it'll sell a shit ton, especially as CoD looks to be in a rather sticky place this year. Meh.

I appreciate that a lot of work has probably gone into it since release, but I picked up V (couldn’t decide what to play between 4/5) and been really enjoying what I have played so far. Shooters have got unnecessarily complicated in recent years and it’s nice to play a, well stripped back shooter that just focuses on it core mechanics. I can see why people may not like it - mainly that there’s very few buildings (so no/little destruction) and the open areas are a snipers wet dream paradise (but it isn’t a battlefield game without that) but it’s a solid game. Looks great. Gunplay is really satisfying. And it’s battlefield.

How does it look on PC, unfortunately it looks like I've got vaseline on my TV playing on the series X console although it's still fun it's so sluggish in comparison to today's games imo. Shame as it's probably my favourite FPS ever.

Some further information for those interested.

The Hazard Zone game mode has now been revealed, it's a cross between Hunt: Showdown and Escape from Tarkov, 4-player squad-based (limited one hero type per team), with some BR mechanics thrown in. The meta game appears to be simply earning a specific currency that can then be spent before your next round on upgrades: youtu.be/nkMiPwL8G1w

Interestingly, they've opted not to release this mode as Free-to-Play, which was widely expected. You'll still need to own the full title to access it.

The final 5 heroes and their supers have also now been confirmed, bringing the total at launch to ten: https://www.reddit.com/r/battlefield2042/comments/q8rfdx/traits_and_specialties_of_the_remaining_5/

Nothing much addressing PC performance issues yet, unfortunately. Also, not entirely clear when we will get more detail on the Portal mode. It's meant to be their custom game designer, which will hopefully enable the community to set up maps using previous game modes and adjust the current mechanics to something akin to the older games in the series. Lot of hopes being pinned on it, so going to be interesting to see how it pans out.