It's a whole lot of nothing.

Battlefield 2042 has been available for those that ponied up the big bucks for the Gold or Ultimate editions, priced at $89.99 (USD) and $109.99 respectively. The standard edition of the game is slated to be released in about a day from now on November 19. To say that the game needs a ton of work would be a gross understatement.

The only hope was the promised "Day 1" patch for the game that was said to arrive just prior to the standard edition being released. Despite the issues that carried over from the technical test and beta, players still held out some hope that a lot of the obvious outstanding issues may be resolved with that day 1 patch.

Alas, that just won't be the case. DICE and EA have provided the patch notes for that day 1 patch and it's, to put it nicely, really rather anemic. Let's just take a look at the whole changelog right now, because it really won't take all that long.

And, that's it. There are no fixes for the egregious weapon bloom, the hitbox/collision issues with the environment, the inability to revive teammates or squadmates (presumed to be an issue if any body part of the downed soldier intersects with a part of the world geometry), the totally out of place end of round quips, or the outright broken EoR quips in Portal, the performance issues, the lack of a scoreboard, the lack of a server browser, the lack of an actual map rotation, the inability to select your squad, the invincible soldiers, the physics glitches, the building scaling hovercrafts, the lack of several movement mechanics, inability to see nearby medics, inability to tag players to say you'll revive them, scopes that sometimes lose their magnification, the lack of all chat, the constant checking of your gun chamber when spawning preventing you from firing for a few seconds, the inability to zoom the minimap, the lack of feedback on vehicle damage, can't see the last place you died in respawn menu, the inability to dive under water, getting stuck in a downed state (forcing you to completely leave the game), jets just being able to bounce off buildings without suffering damage, muzzle breaks increasing vertical recoil on the AK, phasing through walls, broken spotting in vehicles, the lack of distinct vehicle icons on the map, inability to switch teams, the broken kill cam, the fact that player models become "gliding" 2D sprites at even modest distances, and the list goes on.

None of the above even touches upon the issues with the barren, openness of most of the maps. Nor does it touch upon the lack of actual urban warfare. I know more content is coming down the road and I'm keeping this limited to just bugs or removed features/content.

In fact, I literally just quit a round where I had several issues happen in quick succession. First, the server hitched so hard and rubberbanded multipled times, resulting in an immediate crash of the "Nightbird" helicopter I was flying. I spawned into the Nightbird two other times after that with it being near totally stalled out (the helicopters and jets spawn in the air when selected). I spawned in without a friendly indicator/tag. Nobody in my squad was able to target the enemy helicopters with AA rockets. I encountered a player who was crouch walking without a friendly or enemy designation. Shortly afterwards I was killed and stuck in a permanent downed state, forcing me to leave the game.

And in case you need video proof, here it is. I apologize for the 720p video. As Battlefield 2042 launches in a small 720p window first before going to full screen 1440p, the GeForce Experience recording only captures the game at the smaller resolution unless I force a workaround.


This release is going to get absolutely demolished in user scores on Steam. It has already been hit pretty hard on Metacritic across all platforms.

The changelog page does at least suggest that there will be further updates coming down the line. When those will actually happen is anybody's guess. All DICE and EA tell us is that they will have "more to share" about these patches "in the coming weeks."