When a six-shooter turns into a five-shooter.

One of the (several) bugs included in Battlefield 2042 was an issue involving the M44 sidearm. Prior to today's release of Update #3, the gun had a very odd issue with how reloading was handled.

At release, a reload of the gun when empty would only reload five rounds. The problem is, there are six rounds in the chamber. You can see it during the reload animation. The gun is supposed to have six rounds and you have 18 rounds in reserve ammo, making for three full reloads. Or so you'd think. You can even see that it should hold six rounds in the loadout screen for the M44.


Prior to Update #3 an issue with the gun resulted in the game giving you five rounds when reloading from empty. To get the sixth round, you would then have to reload again, which apparently would "chamber" a round. It is then and only then when you would have the proper six rounds that the M44 should have. You, uh, don't really do that on a revolver. While this chambering is fine for guns that actually have that ability and use magazines, the M44 isn't one of those guns.

In the Update #3 changelog, DICE included this item:

Everyone assumed that this was merely a typo. The gun should always have six rounds after any reload, not five. Surely, everything would actually be fine and DICE couldn't have possibly messed that up, right?

Well, it wasn't a typo, as Reddit quickly discovered. DICE turned what is very clearly a six-shooter into a five-shooter when reloading from empty. In fact, the old and broken behavior where reloading again right after the initial reload again "chambers" a sixth round. Nothing was fixed.

I just tested this myself moments ago to see it for myself. You can see my results in the series of images below.

When spawning, the gun has the appropriate six rounds loaded. I shot all six of those rounds and the gun started to reload. The first image is a reload starting after I exhausted the loaded ammo. The second image is the resulting five rounds that were reloaded. The final shot is reloading a second time with five rounds still loaded from the previous reload.

DICE also apparently did not actually fix an issue where you are unable to get more ammunition for the 40mm underbarrel launchers. They said that you would be able to get new ammo for it in the Update #3 patch notes, but that too was not fixed.

It's not clear just yet what all wasn't fixed in Update #3 that was supposed to be fixed.