Battlefield 2042 - what do you think?

[jimykx]

Everyone everywhere is a Battlefield vet nowadays, but we all know who are the one and only true TotalBf vets around here 😁

I know it's not released yet, but anyone got a chance to try the game during Beta?

To me it's really sad overall to see how games all slowly lose their identity in order to follow trends, everything , the controls (of the vehicles and the parachutes) are dumbed down to be super accessible, the pace of the game is this super fast non room to breathe michael bay thing, everything is clearly geared towards live service fortnite animations, pink glowing bacon anime skins etc.
No commo rose, a lot of stupid gameplay decisions overall and the least teamplay I have ever seen in a battlefied game. ( I played for 4h and never got revived, repaired or ammo once)
It's just so so many little things to enumerate that I get too tired to think of all of them. I don't want to make this post too long so I will enumerate my thoughts bellow.

I guess I must be getting old, but certainly this must be the reason why they came up with Battlefield Portal, a section of the game that can cater to both "vets" and still work alongside their so desired live service.

I quite enjoyed Battlefield V, slower paced, more tactical fun game that reverted quite a lot to more old school battlefields. Pity both the game marketing and community pretty much sentenced it to be DOA.


So what do you guys think?
Did you get to play the beta?
Are you going to buy the game?
What are your feelings towards the game?

[jimykx]

(btw sorry for making a double post, I just didn't want to make the initial post too large)
My dump of thoughts after playing the beta for a bit over 4 hours. In no particular order, I just wrote these thoughts as I got them, certainly there was a lot more but there were the ones I likely felt the most:


Weapon Physics and Gameplay is the most solid ever in BF and it's pretty good, it's satisfying to shoot, you feel the metallic and the explosiveness of weapons
While it's very satisfying to shoot, it's not that satisfing to get a kill, games like COD and Insurgency do this better, this has always been a problem with BF and it's still here.


The double sprint seems like a gimmick. Only because COD Has it? It might make sense if there was stamina, but it's infinite stamina so there's no reason to do a normal sprint and everyone just double sprints all the time, the penalty for double sprinting is nearly null, might as well just make it the default.

Bots are stupid, run in front of you / shoot at your vehicle saying "hey i'm here, kill me" they get in front of the tank. There are too many bots, at some points it's easy and it feels like you can really play a lot killing all the bots.

Well optimized graphics, especially compared to WW3 where you really feel like WW3 is poorly optimized,

Well-optimized and fast menus and loadings, compared to previous BFs where that slows down a lot.
Battlefield has never felt like COD so much in every aspect, super easy vehicle controls, absolutely ZERO Teamwork, everyone is playing 100% COD all the time, zero medics, everyone immediately skips revive in order to skip to the menu (this is stupid, why is it not like the old BF where you can go to the menu but your character can still receive revives). In over 4 hours I never got revived and only managed to revive 2 or 3 people, even though I was trying hard. no repairs, ammo, nothing, zero teamwork, it's everyone by themselves.

No commo rose or way to communicate? wtf?

Everyone on the map is literally the same, you don't know who's a friend or not.

Too many players, QUantity is NOT Quality. We already discovered that when Bad Company 2 had max 48 players servers. My personal favourite battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 experiences were always servers running 64 player maps limited to max 48 or even 32 players.

The map is so big that you can't have that much control over everything anymore, it has almost a planetside like feeling where you feel small and much more part of a larger scale, which isn't bad or good it just doesn't really feel like Battlefield.

At points as infantry you spend a ton of time in open fields without any cover.

I like that Vehicles have more transportation spots in them and shooting them is fun, like the Osprey with jets is supper fun to use.
Tank gunner guns suck, players run really fast and the top "50 cal" gun is super slow and shoots beans, you have to hit at least 5 shots to kill a guy except you miss all the time, it's faster to jump out of the tank and shoot them with your pistol. Directly opposite was the top gun (minigun) of jeeps, that melts through everything like butter and you can place a camped jeep in a flag and effectively defend it by yourself against a ton of players (or rather bots that just line up in front of you).

Parachute physics are stupid, really looks lie COD, it's more of a paraglider than a parachute.

Even with the large map and these great distances, every time you are in a battle if jut feels like a big clusterf* and you die from random places and everyone appears from all sides everywhere. This is the same problem I had with BF1 .
It's nearly impossible to have tactical encounters as you don't have time to think or teamwork, it's just run shoot die respawn run shoot die respawn run shoot die respawn.
Where there is o battle, nothing is happening at all and it's like a desert, as everything is so far apart it's hard to find anything in between. And you never get a "calm" or slower battle, it's always maximum meatgrind or zero nothing.

The revive is really really really stupid, seriously the entire mechanics, the wait time, the ability to immediately skip it, it's either like they didn't think about it or like they did it on purpose for a slow transition so that on the next battlefield they can remove the feature entirely.

Destruction is an authentic joke, it's zero, the map didn't have any destruction. Since Bad Company 2 that every battlefield game had progressively less map dynamic destruction (and more scripted events instead), aside from BFV that actually slightly increased on the destruction, however this map was pretty much almost Battlefield 2 levels of destruction.



As soon as I saw the reveal with the rendezook I instantly knew the target demografic that EA/DICE were aiming for and what likely was going to change with the game.
Oh well, after forcing myself to play the beta (I literally had to, because I really didn't feel like continuing to play it) I got a large urge to install Battlefield Bad Company 2 and go and play that, and oh how much fun I had, on a sunday night I played the same map with just 20 something other players for almost as long as I played the battlefield beta and I had a ton of fun.

I also recently participated on the WW3 vet closed alpha and I have to say i really really enjoyed it. It feels more like Battlefield than BF2042 did, and in a good way it reminds me of old school BFs like BF2. However once the game will go free to play with all the hackers and all the cosmetics/pay 2 win scenarios put into the equation I am not sure I will enjoy it that much



Aside form all of this, I hope all of you are well and healthy, Zips, Dunkin, K16, Sigma, CptainCrunch, StillaKilla, Stevo, and a bunch of others I miss seeing!

[Shawn Zipay]

I'll make this fairly short since it's late and I've been on the site all day.

I played the beta. I also played the technical test before it.

The beta was much improved on the technical test, as to be expected. There were still some issues. The removal of some gameplay features from previous games were pretty notable. But my friends and I still had fun.

A big issue I had was that everyone looked the same. DICE already said they're making improvements to friend/foe differentiation. But also I think once you actually get to customize your character with cosmetics, it won't be so terrible.

Prior to all of this, I already pre-"purchased" the mondo-mega-deluxe version through Steam.

I also figured that since the beta build was so old there was going to be a lot missing or broken, and that certainly seems to be the case.

Also thanks man. I hope you're doing well there too!

[jimykx]

Thanks! It's really nice to hear you share your experience.
Yeah some of those missing features were a no brainer. I generally really liked the movement from BFV, the combat rolling, the back prone, the leaning ads, the weapon mounting, how everything was slower paced and more tactical.
Still I did feel BF2042 was too fast paced for me but I'm really curious to see how Portal plays out.

I would love to see Battlefield Portal as something standalone though, as it had the potential to be a long lasting experience. But oh well, let's see what happens!

[Shawn Zipay]

I think I gave DICE too much credit.

[Shawn Zipay]

Apperently, the problem was the leadership. What worries me the most is not even the bugs, glitches and poor performance. It's the poor design decisions around specialists, lackluster maps and unbalanced vehicles/gadgets (among other things).

Yep. Screw-ups on this scale are almost always because the people at the top decided what would make a good game and not the people actually coding the game. People like to bring up how X percentage of the dev team are new or Y% joined after Battlefield 4, or how Z% of the original teams aren't there. But like... the design choices are not on them. The release date is not on them.

Without a doubt EA management should take a hefty portion of the blame here.

[WButler89]

A particularly annoying bug in the game for me is the inability to pick up a wounded comrade (the button just does not appear next to him). Yes, and sometimes no one can resurrect you yourself - your comrades-in-arms run up, stand for a couple of seconds and move on. Most of all, the game has problems with registering hits - you constantly find yourself in situations where you shoot accurately at the enemy, and half of the bullets go through him. Either this is a random scatter of bullets, or something is wrong with the servers. It comes to the ridiculous - submachine guns at long distances shoot more accurately than machine guns...

[Justin black]

I got valuable information. I hope that I will learn more and more.

[TheEn|gma]

Hey. I actually uninstalled 2042 today. I gave it the benefit of the doubt, probably defended it more than the game deserved in the first couple of week. To summarise its simply just not as fun as many of its previous Battlefields. I picked up BF:V like 9 months prior to 2042's launch when it was on Prime Gaming and whilst I know that didn't launch in great condition either - at least when I picked it up - it had the core gameplay loop that you expect from a Battlefield game. 2042 just doesn't. I fired 2042 up the other day on a day off from work and even with their match making system it struggled to fill a 128 player server. That's when I knew hope was basically lost!

[stilla-killa]

Any thoughts about the new class system?

[Shawn Zipay]

Any thoughts about the new class system?

I like it. From what I gather from my playing buddies, they like it as well.

Things like always having a medic pen as Assault, or a repair tool as an Engineer, or being able to revive people as Irish are super nice. I haven't actually played any Recon yet since the update.

I don't mind that weapons have no class restrictions, but I do wish DICE had gone a bit harder on the Weapon Proficiencies.

Unrelated: But the new version of Breakaway is GREAT. I'm super excited to see how they improve on Hourglass and especially Discarded. As it is, I feel like these two maps need overhauls on the level of Breakaway's overhaul. If they try to go the Manifest revamp route and make only minor adjustments, those maps are officially dead to me.

[stilla-killa]

I am starting to tire of the game, to be honest. Will just have to wait until S5 to see if they add anything good.

[Shawn Zipay]

Friends and I still play on Tuesday evenings, sometimes a couple of times per week depending. We still have fun and it's nice to look forward to playing each week.

I don't think any of us are big fans of the newest map for S4 though. It doesn't play well with 128 players. In the 64-player modes they sometimes put up it plays a lot better.

Curious to see how Leviathan Rising goes.