I have that downloaded as well, that was next on my list! Is there still an active player base on PC? I was worried there’d only be a server or two of the most hardcore. BF5 I was happy to see a lot of activity still.
There are plenty of players on all platforms.
I think I dislike every new 2042 map in some way. Which is most impressive a feat by DICE.
I don’t really have any angry reactions to the maps. I also use vehicles a lot to get around so distance and cover don’t bother me too much. Certainly the rooftop capture points are suspect. I was in a game where we won a match by knocking the other team off it though. It’s not completely impossible. It’s a meat grinder though to be sure.
I think one of the difficulties facing Battlefield is that the range of engagement in general in military terms has increased because guns are more accurate, more violent, and ammo is plentiful for them. When you build a game about All-Out Warfare using modern tech, you know people are going to die in droves and quickly. It makes survivability in general that much harder.
@Telefrog posted a video in the Vanguard thread with a weapons expert and I went and watched his video for BF2042 Beta and he notes in there that modern guns are now trying super hard to defeat body armor at range, which is obviously a thing in this game too. It’s just really hard to have people be this well-armed and find a proper videogame balance without tinkering more with the rules of engagement.
One reason I think BF1 is so brilliant is that the setting lends itself to the meat grinder and was fought over such small distances unless you’re talking about artillery, which DICE effectively removed from the equation altogether by depicting the fights as happening after that hail had stopped. That game is so obviously a labor of love by the entire team.
BF2042 needed that kind of care put into its design. Arguably, it might be found in Hazard Zone? The four man squads searching for electronic doodads is probably a better setting for a modern combat game, and more likely to be “reality” when it comes to future combat or we all will be mutually assured of our destruction if armies were ever unleashed on the 2042 AOW scale?
The little I played of Hazard zone, I didn’t like.
I should probably try Breakthrough mode and see if I like it more than Conquest.
I just came across this write up saying as much:
Stop mentioning Battlefield 1 , or I am gonna install it!
I have everything installed from BF3 to current BF2042. Some days I want to travel back 100 years. Other days WWII. With 2042 I’m kinda down with that right now, but I might want to play the maps in the older BF modern games. No harm having them installed.
Breakthrough, the successor to Operations in BF1, is absolutely more focused and IMO the best way to play Battlefield most of the time now. Conquest on certain maps is still very good, but it will always lead to a lot of getting shot in the back, trying to find that one dude sitting on a flag, and just general chaotic gameplay that seems like it has no focus. Back in the day, we loved the freedom that Conquest allowed compared to other games.
Now though, I think we’ve evolved and players understand that there needs to be focus on an objective or players won’t play it at all. That’s why Breakthrough stands out. It sets up the attack path and the focus and it also lets you know which side of cover should be safest. It also means those flanks feel even better than they do in CQ because the other team knows where you’re coming from.
It’s typically what I play now in 1, V and 2042.
Thanks for the write ups, I do want to find the fun in 2042, lets hope Breakthrough is it.
Agree. Conquest is too chaotic for me, constantly running back and forth to ptfo on the same locations. Breakthrough gives it more direction and a sense of progress. I’ll play Conquest and can have fun, but I greatly prefer Breakthrough.
Frontlines: Fuel of War was the place where the idea of Operations really took hold for me as the right way to play big team games like this. That game handled it with an even tighter grip on what needed to be conquered before the lines could move, but one thing it also did was allow players to get deeper behind those available objectives. You could still be forward on the last cap points, but they had no value and couldn’t be capped. What you could do though, was intercept players in vehicles and snipe or attack from all angles into a cap point.
It’s a shame they didn’t have success with Homefront. That team had the right idea. Kaos Studios were the Desert Combat mod guys. I think they had some really great ideas including a precursor to what BF has done now with Specialists. Yes, we were already debating the decoupling of soldier kits from their iconic roles way back in 2008. I had a heated discussion on GAF with a writer for 1UP/EGM about it. He hated it. I thought it was awesome because it allowed players the freedom to build their dude how they wanted to approach the fight.
Loved that game and Quake Wars.
What’s funny is that if you play any of the vs AI modes, you can get a sense of how DICE thought people would handle those skyscraper capture points. They figured people would fight in them solely as infantry, making them CQC battles, and players would capture them and immediately run to another point and cycle around. They didn’t anticipate people using hovercraft to scale the buildings or call in multiple vehicles onto the roofs and sit there entrenched in place with massive firepower.
Ha! Yeah, never count on players to play something “right”. That should be the motto of every game developer.
The hovercraft thing is crazy. How did they not know they could be driven up a building? How does no one try that in testing? And call ins are available anywhere. I think they even talked about calling in tanks on buildings in one of their talky shows. Oof on that whole thing.
By the way, some hardcore players are finding out what happens after level 100. Here’s what a prestige rank looks like:
I’ll never see it. Hahaha.
After level 100? Yikes!
What’s the deal with levellig in Portal mode? I ran some matches last night, but did not really change level. One match I leveled from 6 to 8, then the next match I levelled to 8 again? A couple of times it also had a note on the XP bar saying ‘level cap reached’, even though one time the bar progressed and another it didn’t.
Did I read somewhere progression in Portal mode is different? The above also sounds like it may have been a little buggy to me…
It is different. There’s a daily XP level cap in single player/coop vs bot or Portal matches.
But you can unlock any attachments with kills in bot matches.
@Jason_McMaster said he jumped into Battlefield 1 shortly after the soft launch of 2042 last week. He claimed “no one was playing”, but maybe he can clarify what he meant. I had been online with BF1 just a few days prior to the 2042 launch and I had no problem finding full servers. I would be surprised if that’s not the case now that 2042 is out, but who knows how Battlefield players think?
McMaster, what did you mean when you said “no one was playing”? Could you not find any active servers? If that’s the case, I wonder how BF4 and 5 are faring? Because if there’s one thing I get from trying to play 2042, it’s a desire to go back to a mature and relatively stable Battlefield. I don’t care if it’s 1, 4, or 5, but if any of those earlier releases is dead, I’d like to know.
-Tom
I tried a match of BF5 yesterday and there were multiple full servers.