Thanks to free weekends and the start of Season 6, Battlefield 2042 is celebrating historic success. But it’s also setting the wrong tone
Battlefield 2042 has just broken a record. More than 100,000 players were simultaneously prowling the battlefields, five times as many as normal – and we’re only talking about Steam. Battlefield 2042 was played more than ever before, even the release at the end of 2021 didn’t reach that many people.
No one has to look far for the reasons. The game was playable for free over the weekend, has gained a decent reputation in the meantime and with the start of Season 6 there’s also some brand new content: fresh map, new weapons, skins and so on.
Of course, these high numbers will collapse again once the free weekend is over, but the success of Battlefield 2042 is nevertheless anything but coincidental: here, developers have slaved hard over two years and against all odds to rehabilitate a gameplay shambles that hardly anyone out there still believed in. Nor did I.
But this is where the robo-dog lies buried The times for repairs are over, Battlefield 2042 should now actually take care of the future – and after diligently playing the new content with my buddy and ex-colleague Johannes Rohe, I’m worried about exactly that future
Is this the future?
Over five seasons and nearly 24 months, Battlefield 2042 has reinvented itself. All of the meagre release maps have been reworked, the controversial Specialists have been buried, instead we have classes (almost) like before again, plus lots of weapons from older Battlefields and, and, and. This restoration process has been going on since last season,
The current Season 6 is the first, which really has to look forwardbecause there is simply nothing left to restore. And it does so with relatively meagre scope and – even worse – with relatively meagre quality.
Season 6 features a single new map called Redacted, a visually actually very cool secret research facility in Scotland. At least I think so. The story
of Battlefield 2042 is still so muddled and intangible that my brain slips whenever I try to focus on it. You can see the map here:
But as eerily beautiful as Redacted may look, the map is, in my eyes, the worst thing DICE has made since the launch of Battlefield 2042 in terms of game design, because it completely ignores what makes Battlefield unique.
The map is a pure infantry map without helicopters, vehicles and co., it takes place in the tightest of spaces and actually just lines up one meat grinder after the other. 2042 still only offers two major game modes. In Breakthrough, the map is unplayable in my eyes, because one front simply clashes against the other without any chance of tactical flanking manoeuvres.
And in Conquest there are two or three additional flanking options open to me, but they don’t make Redacted an exciting multiplayer sandbox. Either I throw myself into the meat grinder with the others or try the same drumbeat options over and over again. Here is the layout for illustration:
You see: My team on the right in the big Conquest mode actually only has the option of conquering all sectors in turn or just flanking north and south. That’s all. And so Battlefield falls into the same trap that Call of Duty, with its skill-based matchmaking, falls into: All matches on Redacted feel the same. And that’s in Battlefield. In the multiplayer sandbox.
Now, of course, you can interject: Then you just don’t like one map, take it easy, kid, and play one of the others. And that’s true, of course, because Battlefield 2042 has some very cool other maps. But Redacted just points to a bigger problem.
What is Battlefield anyway?
Service games often find their own identity long after release, sometimes much to the chagrin of their playerbase. Even billion-dollar success Fortnite originally started as a PvE co-op brawler before Epic just wanted to try out that Battle Royale concept the cool kids were talking about back then. And Modern Warfare (2019) would probably have blended unimpressively into the grey mass of CoDs had its second season not featured this small but mighty Warzone.
Just Activision and DICE barely conceal the fact that they just throw ideas at the wall and then see if any of them stick. Modern Warfare 2 had its regular multiplayer at release, plus Battlefield killer Ground War, later came Warzone, a separate Tarkov killer called DMZ, and then what felt like 400 more modes that I won’t list for space reasons.
Battlefield 2042 had Portal, the normal multiplayer, its own Tarkov-killer Hazard Zone and according to all rumours the game was originally even supposed to be a Battle Royale. Almost none of it worked out. The problem with this is that unlike its competitors, Battlefield 2042 still hasn’t found a clear identity two years after release.
The Battlefield of tomorrow
The new map Redacted is a lure for all fans of past Battlefield meat grinders like Operation Metro, but just not more than that: a finger pointing to the past to satisfy the few loud players in the short term who like to throw themselves into tube levels to level up their own guns.
Without vehicles, tactical depth or an exciting layout, Redacted is the opposite of what I actually want to see from Battlefield: the multiplayer sandbox of tomorrow! Yes, the sensational Battlebit may have lost 90 per cent of its player base by now, but it gave DICE some dangerous competition just a few months ago – and Battlebit was developed by three people. Three.
Instead of putting real horsepower into the race after years of repairs, Battlefield 2042 is mostly rehashing old ideas in Season 6 that we’ve now had to make do with for 16 weeks. And this after the shooter has just revived old event modes from the last 24 months in its so-called Redux mid-season.
Battlefield 2042 is a really great shooter by now, but still not a forward-looking Battlefield. After Season 6, I expect maybe one more season in Spring 2024 before DICE sets sail for new shores. At some point, there will be a new Battlefield with new promises of a better future – and it would be nice if Battlefield 2042 gradually gave us evidence to believe in that better future.
