Battlefield 2042 - DICE Goes Back to the Future, Just Not the 2142 Future

Heh. You’d think they would teach things like that in the Doha training area. They didn’t teach a damn thing. Luckily it’s a shooter, so I knew how to aim down the sights and shoot things and switch weapons. I eventually figured out how to get in the gunner’s seat of a tank too, even though they hid the “Press X” prompt by having it be white.

Can you still spot enemies for your teammates? I loved doing that in Bad Company 2. I couldn’t figure if I could do that in this one.

I think b on the keyboard brings up menu for calling in vehicles, Fido, and load out crate

Sure, if you’re playing specifically to spot. But it’s not a part of gameplay the way it used to be. Spotting is an entirely different animal now. It’s a much more discrete and self-contained system rather than something crowd-sourced to the entire team. I feel it’s changed for the better, but I imagine there are lots of folks who prefer the way it used to work.

-Tom

Standard spotting works as you’d expect in Bad Company 2 in Portal. In fact, all the games work the way they did in there. 2042 spotting is not the same.

I still don’t understand how Portal is supposed to work. I clicked on one of the panels and was dropped into the El Alemain map. Okay, cool, let’s do this.

Except I was alone.

Obviously, the server would take a bit to fill up, right? So I ran around a bit, flew a Spitfire, shot at an unoccupied tank with my bazooka, ran around some more, and no one else ever showed up. Not a single person. Portal mode! Thanks, Electronic Arts!

I guess you’re supposed to use the server browser? I just don’t see the point of heaping all these “total conversion mods”, or whatever they’re supposed to be, into one screen as if you’re somehow curating and presenting them. Because once you’ve dropped me alone into a server where no one else shows up, I’m pretty much done with this mode. Portal mode!

-Tom

You must have gotten pretty unlucky. Usually clicking any of the panels will put you in a game with players. 1942, Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 panels are just straight up similar to the originals but only on two maps per game. You can also pick Snipers & Knives right now or the Rush 2042 mode.

There are lots of great player created servers running in the Server Browser, and it allows for custom game designs to be shared. Just sort by number of players and read the descriptions for the type of game you’d like to play. For example, DICE posted this today…

You could start a server with that code and let players filter in, or just search for Friday Night Battlefield in the Server Browser to play the mode.

If the main All-Out Warfare is a sandbox of objective gameplay, Portal is the sandbox to create sandboxes.

Glad to hear it, because I’ve watched McMaster jump into Portal matches and I never saw that happen to him. I wondered if maybe he’d been using the server browser and I hadn’t noticed? But, yeah, it’s absurd that any one of those big “featured mode” buttons would drop someone into an empty server.

It’s sandboxes all the way down!

So what good is progression in Portal? Just general xp? I guess none of your weapon progression counts for anything since the Portal modes have their own vehicles and weapons?

-Tom

Yeah, that’s odd. Were you playing with Cross-Play off? Might have affected it… @Chappers is a big fan of the 1942 setting and him, myself and @mono played that for about an hour earlier tonight. We just queued and were fighting the Battle of the Bulge!

Portal is so configurable that you can have various modes with the 2042 gear and maps as well. In any of those games, you level the guns that are active. For example, in the current Snipers & Knives game type, you will earn levels for the SWS-10, which everyone uses in that mode. If you played, say, on a Team Deathmatch custom game, you could level whatever 2042 weapons that game allows, presumably any of them! Gun XP comes whether you are in Hazard Zone, AOW, or Portal unless you’re playing the 1942/BC2/BF3 games with those specific weapons.

Overall XP gain is gimped, as they don’t want folk creating easy farming servers. It’s capped in some way that slows level progression, I am not clear on how, since the game isn’t either.

Weapon attachements are unlocked universally, but yeah, that’s only good for the weapons that exist in other main 2042 modes.

I see the same thing playing solo/co-op against bots. At a certain point, it just cuts you off and you get a cryptic message about “xp cap reached”. You’re still progressing weapons with kills, so I have no idea why they let you grind kills against bots, but not xp. So stupid.

-Tom

My xp bar still progresses when I have that cryptic message, so who the heck knows what it means! But I am sure it’s slower and I don’t think I ever see ribbon rewards in portal, but maybe that’s a server game mode setting. Clear as gravy.

You can actually tell in-game when it happens because it stops showing XP sums alongside the messages. For instance, normally when you do stuff, you get a little message in the center of the screen telling you what you did and how much XP you got for it. But when you reach the cap where Electronic Arts decides you’re somehow exploiting botmatches, the messages are suddenly missing their XP sums:

no xp

It’s stupidly arbitrary. Either we can advance by playing against bots or we can’t. Make up your damn mind, Electronic Arts. I have no idea why they stick some under-the-hood daily limit on the amount of xp you can earn.

-Tom

Bad Company 3 please

I played the snipers & knives Only portal mod w/ @Chappers for 30 minutes this afternoon. I’m terrible w/ a sniper rifle, but it’s an exciting, tense diversion if you don’t have time for an epic conquest match.

Snipers & Knives is a really good time. BF 2042 Rush is also something people should play in the Portal. Small infantry assaults like the classic mode from Bad Company but with the Specialists and loadouts. It’s slick.

I just won a Breakthrough on Breakaway. That’s just not easy to do, but super satisfying when you can pull it off.

We played a lot of Hazard Zone tonight and one thing in that mode that’s frustrating is just the sheer lack of capability that you have. It really ought to let you run CoD Overkill-style loadouts so you can switch from a long range to a short range weapon to give you the ability to engage at different ranges. As it stands, everything seems to devolve into mostly the same kind of fight. It’s rare to have the engagements come at any kind of range. I suppose a bunch of players running snipers might work?

More experimentation is needed maybe…

One thing is for sure, you should focus on a gun and get the better attachments for it. Few of them feel all that good until you unlock some things for them. If you don’t do this, you will get chewed up by people who did take the time to grind attachments.

@DaveLong you play on pc but use a controller, correct? If I break down and get this it will be on my series S and during the trial the controller worked remarkably well for an old m/kp dude with shit reflexes. Is the crossplay working yet (I know I had to disable it to stop crashes when the game first came out)? I was gonna try it myself, but even though I have a few hours of trial left I couldn’t find where to reinstall it from the xbox store.

Hey man, I was away all day yesterday at the Philadelphia Union game.

I do play on PC with a controller. Battlefield has good options for adjusting the controller to your liking. It feels different to me than Warzone/CoD, but it’s not bad, just different.

Crossplay is working as long as you keep it on. You can’t communicate with other players in game (yet) but you can create parties on Xbox Live or say, Discord on your phone, to connect with PC or other players.

Longtime vet of Battlefield games finally posted his review. Mostly in-line with my assessment.

  • Launch was rough, which is similar to past BF games’ launches, but still shouldn’t happen.
  • Specialist system allows for some cool gameplay, but some abilities are way more useful than others.
  • DICE underestimated how much fans would hate the Specialist quips and the loss of discrete classes. Remains to be seen how that will fare with more Specialists being added later.
  • Performance and balance issues getting better, but still not where it should be.
  • 128 players and large “flat” maps makes matches a sniper and vehicle paradise. Great if you’re a sniper or in a vehicle. Not so great if you’re playing a regular assault grunt.
  • XP and unlocks are refreshingly straightforward, at least for the base game. Waiting to see what kind of BS challenges DICE drops on the game with the upcoming time-limited stuff.
  • Lack of basic stuff like scoreboard, a stats page, a way to deselect maps you don’t want to play on, have a way to keep groups larger than 4 together, etc., hurt the experience.
  • Basic transports like quad bikes, unarmed trucks, etc needs to be on the call-in menu and you should be able to call them in more frequently.
  • Base game seriously lacks gun options with only 22 standard rifles and handguns.
  • Weather effects suck compared to past games’ “levelution” events.
  • Portal is cool, but DICE nixing XP hurts the player count. Apprehensive about how much DICE seems to be relying on Portal to fill out the base game.
  • Hazard Zone is a cut-rate version of better royale extraction games. Decent, but not enough to recommend on its own.
  • Worldcrafting is a wasted effort. There’s little to no connection between the backstory presented in card snippets, Specialist bios, and marketing and the actual game. Only Hourglass seems to reflect the dystopian story.
  • Breakthrough end objectives on skyscrapers is dumb and DICE should’ve known better
  • Map design overall is pretty disappointing due to DICE opening the environments up for 128 player count, but not building enough compartmentalized areas to accommodate engagements in discrete chunks. Even the good maps don’t offer enough cover and opportunities for assault tactics.

A lot going on this week including MOAR updates to BF2042…

Update #3.1 arrives on December 9. Here is a short summary of key changes to expect:

  • Improvements to bullets hit registration consistency.
  • Balance changes for bullet dispersion and recoil
  • Further balance changes to Ground Vehicle 30mm, 40mm, and 57mm Cannons to reduce their effectiveness against infantry
  • A fix for a rare bug where a player could appear invisible to enemies
  • Fixes for several bugs related to Grenades and Launchers
  • Improvements to the menu flow for Xbox players to make it easier to opt-out of Cross-Play
  • Multiple audio improvements to enhance your overall sound experience, focused on clarity, distance and directional perception

Update #3.1 is our last game update before the start of the holidays. That means our teams will take a break towards the end of this month and return in the new year with fresh eyes ready to go on the road to Season One. We’ll see you again in the new year where we’ll talk more on further changes and improvements you can expect for Battlefield 2042.

Rooftop capture points are removed/moved. Big change there, and seemingly a quick one just to stop the B&Ming of players.

Thank god, the rooftop points were a horrible idea.