Preparing for a large-scale battle wasn’t entirely difficult in the case of Battlefield 2042. During a closed media hands-on event, the latest entry of the long-running franchise from DICE fell unfortunately bland.
Playing the early open beta build of Battlefield 2042 on PC a few days prior to its official beta launch this October 6 across all platforms was probably one of the most painful experiences ever. I mean, gunning down other players on the battlefield still felt awesome and fun, but the highly marketed 128-player all-out war wasn’t impressive at all, and the numerous technical issues were just annoying.
Battlefield 2042 is still your typical Battlefield game but expanded. The gunplay still feels the same, responsive, still gets weighty sometimes, but overall smooth. So if you’re a big fan of Battlefield 4, then you’ll definitely feel right at home in Battlefield 2042.
DICE simply bumped the player count from 64 to 128 players on next-gen and PC. The game does not offer anything new aside from cool new mechanics such as changing weapon attachments on the run called the ‘Plus System’ and four specialists that offer different sets of special gears and the option to choose whichever weapon you want, unlike the traditional Battlefield classes.
Plus, the map has random weather changes switching from being sunny to a bad rainy season, which is pretty cool, but other than that? Nothing. Even the tornadoes in ‘Orbital’ aren’t threatening at all as players can simply distance themselves from getting sucked into a deadly cyclone.
But let’s talk about the ‘Plus System’ because this was probably the only great thing that happened during my time at the hands-on event.
Unlike other shooters, including Call of Duty and the Battlefield predecessors, players can now change scopes, muzzles, magazines, and other weapon attachments while in battle. There’s no need to go back to the loadout screen and force yourself to respawn anymore.
So at the moment that you feel the need to change your sniper’s scope from a 12x to something mid-range like an x4 scope, you can already do it without respawning again after death. This is pretty cool as it gives us better flexibility and being able to adapt to situations when we need to.
Battlefield 2042’s offering may seem to be really bland when you get to play it on October 7 (October 6 for those with early access), it’s still chaotic, yes, but the open beta is only just a fraction of what it has to offer and what I’m really looking forward to are the Hazard Zone and Portal modes on launch.