Battlefield 2042 launch feedback

Battlefield 2042 launch feedback

General

I’ve played Battlefield 2042 in the Technical Test, Beta, Early Access, and now at launch so I’ve had a significant amount of time in order to form an opinion on the core game design and systems of 2042. I’m having a lot of fun in 2042 particularly in Portal; it’s a 10/10 in my book with the only problem being that there are only a few maps and weapons from BF3 and BC2 and it makes me want to play those games more after a couple of rounds. Portal is currently the only place one can find a core Battlefield experience.

All out Warfare is a solid 5/10 in my book specifically because of the design decisions to use Specialists instead of classes, no faction specific looks and voice lines for those specialists, removing class based weapon restrictions, only 5 ribbons to earn, no dog tags, no server browser, can’t join a friend’s server when the squad is full, and the absence of many core Battlefield features that I will elaborate upon below.

Game play

Specialists - The largest issue in 2042 is the Specialists specifically that we cannot identify friend from foe because the same exact Specialists - voice lines, cosmetics and all - are on both sides. After the Technical Test and Beta we were told to withhold judgment because we haven’t seen all of the Specialists, but the fact is that no matter how many Specialists we have and no matter how much customization you throw at us if Specialists cannot be immediately identified as soon as you see them as a member of your team or the enemy team they simply do not work. Throw in the fact that along with this identification problem we have all of the visibility issues left over from BF5 so the ping system which was spotty in BF5 is now completely inadequate in 2042. The Ping System is another underlying weakness of 2042 exacerbating the Specialist visibility problem.

To fix this we need to either faction lock specialists, create faction specific versions of each specialist and their customization with unique faction looks (probably the best way to go given DICE’s doubling down on Specialists) and EN or RU dialog so we have audio queues again since players heavily rely on audio queues when they’re on an objective and cannot see the enemy. As it is now we have no idea if that Boris we hear on the objective will throw us ammo or shoot us in the back.

In addition to the aforementioned issues, Specialists also encourage lone wolf play styles globally reducing teamwork because nobody knows what gadgets anyone else to include your own squad mates are carrying. So instead of choosing the class to compliment your squad you’re forced to try to be a jack of all trades with a focus on killing and survival instead of PTFOing and supporting your team and squad.

One alternative is to bring Classes back for the core Battlefield modes like conquest, rush, etc and leave specialists to for specialty modes like Hazard Zone which many including myself would love, however I doubt that will happen. So in order to please both your core players that have supported Battlefield for 20 years, and the new players you are courting from Apex and Warzone we need official modes in All Out Warfare using the class system and 3D spotting to run concurrently with the Specialist version for with full progression enabled for those long time Battlefield players who just want to play a core Battlefield experience outside of Portal’s custom servers.

You can take the BF3 classes and add a new 2042 Class skin (maybe variants of the well done All Out Warfare AI’s skins), then assign the 2042 weapons to classes and gadgets to classes and you’re done. Since there are only 22 weapons in the base game bring in some Portal weapons and gadgets to fill in the gaps since its common for militaries and especially mercenaries to use older weapons and especially during times of scarcity like we see in 2042’s lore.

Some Specialist skins are simply bizarre and wholly unsuitable for a military operations while only a few look military. Many Specialists skins look like they were ripped from Apex using color combinations you’d never see on the Battlefield since it makes you stand out. This decidedly unmilitary look is immersion breaking to say the least and both core Battlefield players and the skin buying crowd can be pleased with a client customization kill switch where we can either have granular control to not see the worst offenders or a total kill switch where everyone looks like the faction AI bots.

Specific Specialist Commentary

• Rao – Rao needs his hacking time greatly reduced. His skill set is valuable on the Battlefield but is so unwieldy to use you’re better off using any other Specialist. There are many times I’m trying to hack something and I’m killed since the hack takes so long.

• Falck – Falck needs the ability to replace the Syrette pistol with the BF3 defibs in her loadout slot so she has a much shorter revive than non-medics doing squad revive. It would also allow us to create a true medic class carrying fast defibs and a medic crate. Falk’s Syrette pistol also needs its ranged revive back, just limit the range to be shorter than it was in the Technical Test.

• Boris – Boris’ turret immediately disappears as soon as you’re downed. His turret should only disappear after he dies so his turret can offer covering fire while he’s being revived.

End of round Specialist voice lines – I rarely use this word but the best way to describe the end of round voice lines is “cringey”. These voice lines feel as if they were ripped directly from Apex Legends and are wholly out of place in a game like Battlefield, especially given the lore that we’ve seen in the world building. We need to be able to disable these voice lines, and I recommend hiring someone to re-record them as they are totally out of place and immersion breaking.

No weapon restrictions – The Community voiced concerns about lack of class based weapon restrictions resulting in weapon metas like in Warzone resulting in less weapon diversity on the Battlefield and now we’re seeing this happen with the PP-29, the .50 cal sniper and the M5 Assault Rifle. Not only do we have weapons that are objectively better than others now, but everybody can run the meta weapon regardless of class and we only have 22 weapons in All Out Warfare.

3^rd person melee – This simply isn’t Battlefield and breaks the flow of Battle. Please allow us to opt into a traditional first person melee and decouple the knifing animation from the weapon. I want to choose to use a specific melee weapon not a specific melee action based on the weapon that I want to use like in Battlefield 4. What if I like a weapon but hate the melee? Make both of these items – the knife and the action separately slottable.

Insertion cinematic – allow us to opt out of this and stay in the customization menu until we’re able to spawn like in previous Battlefield titles.

Ping system – the ping system just isn’t getting the job done in All Out Warfare. We have all of the issues from the Specialists Clone Wars on both sides of the conflict and now we can’t even spot anyone to help out our teammates and help mitigate the lack of in game VOIP. You should run servers with both ping and 3D Spotting concurrently and we should choose which version to quick match into in AOW.

Medic kits and ammo crates – the crate throw needs to be a smooth one button action like in BF3/4 not this inefficient two part system - get rid of click taxes. For those who want to use the two part throw currently they cannot carry ammo boxes and resupply players while they move around like in BF4/1/5. Please make it so they can resupply people while holding the crate.

Squad Size – Battlefield 2042 desperately needs a squad size increase. We have 128 players and it’s never been more difficult to play with your friends. In Battlefield 2 we had 6 man squads, in Battlefield 4/1 we had 5 man squads and they played objectively better than any Battlefield game with 4 man squads. In a game with 128 players we need 6-8 man squads due to the size of the map, the fact that you can’t kick AFKers and people sitting on the side of the map not contributing to your squad, and the fact that you can’t switch squads or switch teams. Having 6-8 man squads would help compensate for those bad teammates as well as allow you to keep the squad together since you’re kept the spawning under fire prohibition. The spawn under fire prohibition splits up squads, especially 4 man squads, 1-2 people are normally dead, then the rest are under fire so you have to spawn on the nearest flag which can be 400-500 meters away. In a 128 player match we can have 16x 8 man squads. If you eventually patch in a Commander we can have 21 x 6 man squads with one Commander on each side.

Dog tags/kill card – We need real dog tags back in the game that display on the screen when we kills an enemy. I say this as someone who has been hunted as a DICE Friend in every Battlefield game since BF3 - it’s an integral part of the battlefield experience and Battlefield Community Culture just like the Battlefield Friends. We’ve been earning dog tags via medals and actions since Battlefield 3 and taking dog tags for far longer. The current Title on the player card is not a dog tag no matter how one tries to frame it. Have the player card display where it is currently and then have both dog tags (we need two dog tags back again) display in the center of the screen.

Spawn under fire prohibition– this needs to go if you’re keeping 4 man squads. We also need the UI to tell the player that you’re trying to spawn on someone trying to spawn on them so they can get into cover in order to allow your to spawn. Danger Close had this very mechanic back in Medal of Honor Warfighter and it worked very well. Look at that as an example on how to execute it.

Commander – we need a commander with 128 players or it’s chaos. Currently there is no coordination between squads it’s simply feral cats running in every direction and a Commander would help solve that problem. A commander could also call in UAV assets to help with the visibility issues and we could reinstate the Battlefield 2 radar stations as a mini-game and to keep Commanders from being OP.

Sound – the soundscape is currently muffled like BF5 no matter which audio settings I use on my PC. 2042 needs to be clear and crisp with good directional audio like Battlefield titles through BF1. Currently someone can be on my left and sound like they’re on my right.

Forced match making after each round kills team and community play. Stop this if we’re in a server we want to stay in a server. If I dislike the server I’ll voluntarily leave do not take that decision from me or the people I’m playing with.

Spawn weapon load animation - When you spawn why do you immediately load your weapon? It should be full and ready to fire when you spawn like in earlier games. This reloading animation stops me from immediately engaging when I spawn and interrupts the flow of battle and has gotten me killed several times. Please remove this unneeded action.

Mode size selection both in Portal and All Out Warfare – We need to be able to select smaller versions of game modes such as Conquest Small (BF3 24 player, Conquest Large 64 man BF3 type, and 2042 Super Conquest 128 players for all game modes in AOW and in Portal. This isn’t just a player count difference BF3 CQS and CQL had different amount of flags.

Revive request – I shouldn’t have to request a revive when downed it should be automatic. If we want to respawn we use skip button.

Weapon switching and reloading is exceedingly slow – this needs to be much faster like in previous Battlefield games.

UI/UX – The UI in general has way too many clicks to do anything. The UI needs to be streamlined to minimize clicks.

Loadout Customization – We need a straight forward loadout customization in the spawn screen. Currently what we have has so many clicks, is inefficient, frustrating and unintuitive. We should have one click from the spawn screen to get into the global loadout screen like we see below. If we click on the cog it opens the weapon customization for that weapon in our loadout, we can change our soldier skin, all of our gadgets as well.

We must be able to customize our weapons in a screen like this in between spawns because the entire plus system is frustrating and in Portal most servers don’t even use the plus system so it’s very difficult to spawn with your weapon attachments. In fact I’ve had to begrudgingly turn on the plus system in my Portal Battlefield 3 experience due to this lack of a basic load out screen.

Plus system customization – customizing the plus system should be one click. You should click on a square to select or unselect and attachment. You should not have to keep going through several menu tabs to customize the plus system. Also you should be able to set a default attachment from the plus system to spawn with regardless of where it is in the plus. Currently we need to ensure that setup is in the box nearest the center of the plus which is not only unintuitive but inefficient. Most players I’ve played with don’t even know this information.

Social Functions – Players need to be able to see which servers our friends are playing in both in Portal via the server browser and in All Out Warfare before quick matching and join their server even if their squad is full. If their squad is full but not full of friends we should be able to get into a “squad queue” to play with our friends and drop into their squad once an opening appears. Friends should always be match made into the same server if in the same region. As it is currently it’s never been more difficult to play with your friends in a team based game with 128 players.

Commo Rose – The commo rose is just as broken in the final release as it was in the technical test. At best the commo rose is spotty but normally just doesn’t work. When I open the Commo rose frequently it just flashes opens and immediately closes.

• Objective colors - The color of friendly and enemy objectives in commo rose not correct. Red should always be the enemy’s objectives however frequently red is my team’s objective. Please correct for blue to always be friendly and red always to be enemy in the UI.

• Squad orders – Issuing squad orders should be easy, fast and efficient like BF4 where I look at an objective as squad leader and Press “Q” to issue the attack/defend order. You’ll see in the screenshot below that I’m on the Russian team, I just took objective A2 and it’s Red instead of Blue like it should be.

Medic Communication – we need the ability to tell a downed player that you’re coming to revive him like we had in BF1/5.

UI while in downed state – we need to be able to see the UI, minimap, squad UI while we’re in the downed state. I need to be able to see my squad mates to see if they’re alive, if they’re near me, and if there are any medics or enemy near me as it will dictate if I need to skip the revive or wait for a revive. We should be able to spot things while downed as well like in previous games as we’re not dead we’re still very much alive and able to give a report. I also shouldn’t have to request a revive while downed – it should be automatic and if we want to respawn we choose to skip.

HUD – we need to be able to resize, change opacity, and recolor HUD so we can make it useful like in BF3/4

Friendly names are currently not displayed when we look at people. Sometimes friendlies are listed as enemy.

Default 3^rd person vehicles – this is backwards Battlefield has always used a default first person vehicle spawn making one opt into third Person vehicle view. Revert this to primary first person view or allow us to change it back via a toggle option.

All Server Chat – this has been a staple of Battlefield for 20 years. It is necessary to coordinate with friends on the other team to get into Discord, Changes teams, etc. as well as to admin a sever by talking to both sides when you own and run the server. If toxicity is a fear players can already turn off the chat box if they don’t like what they see. This is a vital missing piece of 2042 and yet another unnecessary change that is negatively impacting Communities and friends.

All Server Post Round chat – yet another casualty of 2042. Post Round chat is necessary for many of the same reasons as all server chat for coordination, choosing new maps, and team balancing.

Can’t chat while downed or dead – chatting while downed or dead is necessary to ask for a medic, to talk to your squad/team/etc on where a sniper or camper is hiding. Bring this feature back.

Plus system UI – the current plus system customization UI is horribly convoluted. We just need to be able to click on an attachment slot and choose the part and choose any slot to be our default slot without clicking back and forth on so many tabs.

Team and Squad management – this is a big one. There are many reasons to want to change squads, leave squads, kick someone from squad or team switch. Currently none of those are available in any mode in Battlefield 2042. Sometimes my friend joined my servers and is even on my team but I cannot leave my squad and join his. Sometimes we’ve got an AFKer in my squad or someone who is not sticking with the squad and PTFOing but now I can’t remove him from the squad when I’m squad leader – not even to make a slot for my friends who may be in the same server.

All Out Warfare Server Broswer - desperately needs a Server browser so we can join our friends, choose which map that we want to play, and just have more control over our experience in AOW overall. The current Portal Sever Browser also needs to be refined to be as easy to use as these examples below and possibly exclude server descriptions such as “XP Farm” from showing:

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