Battlefield 2042 gives away a lot of potential in its story, it only exploits crises in a gimmicky way and gives players nothing worth fighting for.
Hardly anyone plays Battlefield for its story – especially not when there isn’t even a campaign like in Battlefield 2042. So as a story fan I already expected little – and was still disappointed. Because the shooter manages to blow the currently biggest crises of our earth completely into insignificance.
Europe is burning, Russia and the USA are plunging into World War III, rising sea levels due to the climate crisis are devouring entire countries, resources and food are scarce, communications are failing across the board, people are fleeing, starving, dying or becoming stateless soldiers who continue to fight in the ruins of their civilisation without a home or a purpose.
It all feels painfully close and real when you turn on the news or cross-read current affairs. But Battlefield 2042 doesn’t care. Short intro videos bubble down targeting instructions on the maps with the charm of a sat nav, and the homeless mercenaries of the No-Pats bang out cool remarks about the most casual kills of the last round. This clashes with the tone of the trailers and introductory video, which sell me a bitter end time in which I am desperately fighting for my place.
The only thing that remains really bitter is the missed chance of an adult, courageous vision behind the spectacular battles, which for me quickly run out of steam without them. And on top of that, there are the technical problems.
Where Battlefield 2042 wastes a lot of potential
Of course a shooter is allowed to be a fluffy baller. I don’t object to that at all. But the problem with Battlefield 2042 is that it feeds me something different. It promises me a depth that it can’t deliver on later, instead of not taking itself so seriously.
The trailers and the short film Exodus boast in advance not only of nerve-wracking battles on huge battlefields, but also show soldiers being crushed in the merciless war machine or one of the Specialists begging for his son’s life. For a moment it seems as if there is a big but, the question of whether victory is worth it is unspoken.
Just after Exodus, I actually want to know more about Irish. As a no-pat, he’s caught between two stools, he has to hear his morals are for sale and worthless. I see this unscrupulous mercenary, but also a desperate family man and someone who is willing to selflessly throw himself between two great powers to prevent a world war.
But I never get to know him beyond that – unless you count the info and letters coyly hidden in player cards that suddenly present me with a bit of humanity in a completely incoherent way – like a thirteen-year-old who wants to be a hero, be rich and famous, and later has to convince his family he didn’t massacre civilians. BF 2042 constantly hints in subordinate clauses at how bad the war is and how desperate the situation is, but never takes the thought to its conclusion.
A great contradiction
Or worse, turns it into the opposite: even in Battlefield 5, the soldiers didn’t have much to say in multiplayer. But their screams and moans underlined the dark and brutal atmosphere of war. In front of the screen, I know exactly what it’s all about and what’s at stake. But the energetic, casual shouting of “I don’t need a medic!” in BF 2042 seems just as out of place as the terribly wannabe-cool victory slogans of the specialists after the match, which just made the entire Battlefield Reddit’s toenails curl up.
Yeeaaaah, Angel did it again! or was that already? I’m ready for round 2!, doesn’t sound like real soldiers but rather the players behind them. This completely breaks with the gloomy end-time mood that Dice itself painstakingly builds up beforehand. After all, the first thing I see in the game is a meaningful introductory video about a world on the brink that man has ruined.
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And even the no-frills, matter-of-fact map intros make it clear what it’s all about: on the Renewal desert map, for example, you’re supposed to help the Egyptians protect their agricultural research from the greedy Americans – or conquer it on the US side for the starving West.
All this has so much relevance, so much potential and raises exciting questions. What values does a homeless person without a place in the world represent? What is still worth fighting for? What are we protecting and from whom? But none of that matters. Battlefield 2042 cares as little about these questions as it does about the answers to them; the shooter only wants to present itself as grown-up and up-to-date as possible because it creates a cool gameplay backdrop.
This motivates me enormously in terms of gameplay and provides for many dramatic moments. But emotionally I feel more like I’m at a basketball match or a football game than in a battle for the fate of a country or even the whole of humanity. Nothing that happens is really rooted in or has any meaning in the world of the shooter.
How to rethink story
To be fair: Of course EA and Dice don’t want to send a message with BF 2042, they want to excite a lot of players and make money. They even forgo their single player campaign to focus on what they’re really good at – big, fun sandbox battles, not deep stories. But it would have been so easy to make a more mature, adult Battlefield.
After all, fantastic role models are everywhere: for example, the fantastic anime Gundam 00, which transforms a similar starting situation into a gripping war drama. In the form of the Celestial Being organisation, a few soldiers break away from the rest of the world and fight the major powers in order to create a lasting peace. It is not long before they have to question how many sacrifices this goal can demand.
The same path would be conceivable for the No-Pats – even without an elaborate narrative. Dice could work with (optional) conversations between Specialists as radio messages during battles, let me find documents like letters or let the maps themselves tell me about what was, about their inhabitants and what happened to them. This would also make the environments look less like clinical war theme parks.
In the long term, story events could even be added in the style of Warzone or Fortnite, with new info snippets and background videos that further flesh out the story. However, Dice still has a lot of work to do outside of the storyline.
You could even make something out of the unpleasant sayings of the unsympathetic Specialists if you consciously present the player with a cynical future in which war has become a sport. At the moment, however, Dice itself doesn’t seem to know what they want to say.
