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Battlefield 2042 hasn't had what anybody would consider to be a "good" launch. Here we are, less than 4 months since release with a game that can't even get as many Steam players as Battlefield 4, a game that came out over eight years ago now. In terms of player count, Battlefield 2042's 24-hour peak Steam player count (2,090) sits behind Battlefield 4 (2,195), Battlefield 1 (7,498), and Battlefield V (21,709).
The game is, to put it simply: Dead.
Still, DICE is moving forward with their "feedback loop" idea that was first talked about when DICE announced a delay for the game's first season of content. The studio's first order of business to tackle the maps and the whole lot of everything that is wrong with them. The first map in their sights is Kaleidoscope.
A new DICE blog post by community lead PartWelsh talks a little bit about what is wrong with their maps in general and also what they may be doing with Kaleidoscope to begin fixing it. Areas discussed include issues with traversal, intensity, line of sight, objective paths, and cover.
The issue with traversal is that it just takes too long to get to major points on most every map, especially from spawn. Apparently, a big cause of this is the 128-player cap that was introduced for this latest Battlefield entry.
One of the core issues we have identified is Traversal. We both see, and have heard your frustrations on how long it takes on maps today to travel between Flags, or from Base Spawn to Flag. This comes as a result of the introduction of 128 players in combination with some of the biggest maps that we’ve ever created as playspaces. While the larger maps offer more playspace and freedom, a side effect is that gameplay is now spread out more, resulting in an overall increase in time to combat when related to playing the objective.
We’ve seen you use terms such as “Walking Simulator†to describe how this feels in-game. We understand that this isn’t a satisfying experience and agree that there’s too much overall travel time.
We’ve seen you use terms such as “Walking Simulator†to describe how this feels in-game. We understand that this isn’t a satisfying experience and agree that there’s too much overall travel time.
It seems as though the game's issue with "intensity" is also linked to the raised player cap. Go figure.
Another area that we’ve identified where we feel that we can improve your gameplay experience is in the overall Intensity of combat. Largely, we feel that this issue is mainly related to 128 player modes, and especially in Breakthrough. We know that during certain pushes for the objective, it can get too chaotic when fighting over Flags; either there are too many players, or vehicles, and sometimes the overall chaos can make it feel overwhelming when accurately trying to assess what’s happening around you.
DICE says that these changes to maps are going to take a while. In fact, don't expect to see changes any time soon. Kaleidoscope is the map that will see changes first and may be the only "old" map to be updated within Season One, whenever that may launch this Summer. The fact that there seems to be just one map being updated at present within DICE suggests that it will be a very, very long time before all of the current maps are updated with these sorts of improvements.
