Watching 128 players simultaneously running into Battlefield 2042’s crowded warzones is a great illustration of why bigger isn’t always better. While chaotic gunfights are undoubtedly part of Battlefield’s charm, massive lobbies with that many players eventually turned the series’ signature modes frustrating instead of fun. Thankfully, its tense new Hazard Zone mode provides an interesting strategic alternative, and its crazy-customizable Portal tools are an exciting glimpse at how its future could thrive with a little help from the creativity of the community.
After playing Battlefield 2042 on live servers with the other players who have the Gold Edition, Ultimate Edition, or a subscription to EA Play Pro, I’m not entirely impressed. As the name implies, this latest Battlefield shifts the series into a near future setting full of high-tech gadgets and freedom to play Battlefield the way you want. The goal was to bring back the feeling of Battlefield being a playground again. It also does away with even the meager campaign stories Battlefield V had, featuring no single-player options whatsoever. What it does have is the infantry and vehicle-based shootouts across those huge, beautiful maps Battlefield is generally known for, as well as a few fresh ideas of its own – but not all of the innovations it introduces are for the better.
For instance, at first glance it appears that Battlefield 2042’s roster of 10 playable Specialists are based off of the original four Battlefield classes: Assault, Support, Recon, and Engineer. However, unlike the previous Battlefield games where classes had very specific jobs and skills to define them, 2042’s Specialists’ skills don’t really change a team’s dynamic much. For example, I first decided to go with Support Specialist Maria Falck to act as the team medic. Her Specialty skill arms her with a Syrette Pistol that fires syringes which heal allies and herself, but damage enemies. I initially thought Falck would basically be the only option for someone who likes to play as a medic, but it turns out that anyone can go in as a healer if they equip the medical crate gadget, which lets them throw out the typical Battlefield area-of-effect healing box. And while Falck’s Specialist trait allows her to revive downed teammates to full health, anyone can revive their teammates or provide healing.
Similarly, anyone can now hold a repair tool, so that’s no longer specific to Engineers, and any Specialist can even equip any gun. There are Specialists who have more unique abilities, like Casper getting an OV-P Recon Drone to scout with or Sundance getting a wingsuit instead of a parachute to cover more distance while dropping into the map – but overall the Specialists’ loadouts don’t feel as distinct as the roles we played in previous Battlefield games. I eventually found myself primarily picking Webster Mackay, whose Specialty is a grappling hook, and equipping the medical crate to get maximum mobility while still being able to play support.
Not having the usual class items exclusive to specific Specialists makes selecting a class feel less restrictive, but it struck me as odd that there also isn’t really any reason for a team to diversify their classes anymore when anyone can repair, heal, use anti-aircraft and anti-artillery equipment, and deploy ammo crates. Specialists are basically just an extra skill that you can pick to augment your playstyle further – that’s a fun addition, but it’s also a big shift that diminishes the importance of individual classes as a result. Everyone is a Jack of all trades, which disappointingly lessens the need for coordinated squad building and teamwork.
There are three game types in 2042, and your leveling is shared across the board. The main event, All-Out Warfare, has within it the Breakthrough and Conquest modes, which both live up to that label with a whopping 64 players on each team. With that many people gunning for each other on one battlefield everything feels chaotic, even spread out across the impressively huge and detailed maps that have been made to better accommodate that player count.
Conquest is the traditional Battlefield mode where you compete to capture and hold multiple points at once spread around a massive map, only this time the map size and player count is turned up to 11. As much as I’ve enjoyed Conquest in past Battlefields and wanted to do the same here, this actually my least favorite mode in 2042 – it felt like every point I went to take had the entire enemy team defending it because there are just so many players, and only a few points that are easily reachable. It’s the kind of problem that takes a huge amount of teamwork to solve, and with the teams as big as they are that’s very difficult to pull off.
At the same time, the maps are big enough that you don’t always run into anybody else in the vast spaces between points, and that leads to a problem where you’re stuck running for excessive periods if you don’t have a vehicle drop-in available or if your team spawns are far from another point. It’s a bigger inconvenience than it was in Battlefield 5, where I didn’t feel as if I was running forever just to get to another point and the matches felt pretty evenly paced without so much dead air. In some matches, if you’re not fast enough to select a vehicle at spawn (which can easily happen if your load times are a bit too slow), you just have to leg it to the fight. It’s a bit amusing to see an entire army of around 20 people pitter-pattering to the nearest point that feels an eternity away, but probably not in the way it’s intended.
That space issue also impacts the visually stunning weather system somewhat, which was supposed to be even bigger and better this time around but didn’t seem to come into play very often in practice. More than anything I just encountered rainstorms that didn’t have any real impact on how I played. I’d occasionally see a tornado in the distance, but driving near one made it awkwardly clear how small they actually are up close. Also, they don’t really seem to do much to the map other than blow through it, which was a little disappointing compared to the amazing trailers that made this updated weather seem like it would be far more significant in a typical match.
The returning Breakthrough mode focuses the action a little bit better by putting each team on either attack or defense, but with the catch that each zone the attacking team captures can’t be recaptured. That means the defending team is pushed back to the next point, becoming increasingly desperate to hold onto the last one until the attackers’ respawn tickets run out. Again, it’s hard to execute any kind of real strategy this time around since your team is so big and there’s no clear leader – but when all of the action is focused on a single target, it can still be a lot of fun to run through the middle of this war with the utter chaos of explosions and rampaging vehicles all around you.
However, in my matches so far I’ve definitely noticed a problem with the balance favoring attackers. Because defenders can only spawn in the zone currently being attacked and can be easily surrounded by the attackers, I’ve already seen way too many hectic spawns where my teammates and I get obliterated by a tank immediately after coming back onto the map.
Hazard Zone is a brand-new game type that currently ranks as my second favorite of Battlefield 2042’s options. It’s basically Dice’s version of Escape from Tarkov: 32 players (unless you’re on last-gen consoles, in which case it’s 24) group up in teams of four to scour the map for data points, taking out both small swarms of AI soldiers and each other as they go, before extracting from the map. It’s not quite a battle royale, but it’s similar in that if you do get killed you won’t be able to respawn unless a teammate is able to secure a respawn uplink to get you back. And while the first opportunity to extract is toward the beginning of the match, the second has every team fighting over a single escape vehicle toward the end.
Throughout each match you’ll gather “data” that will increase the amount of credits you’ll receive afterwards, but you can also loot Uplinks that allow you to call in Rangers (the robot dogs that are totally not inspired by Boston Dynamics), a LATV4 Recon Vehicle, and Team Redeploys that allow you to bring back any dead teammates all at once. (I greatly prefer that to games where I have to revive them one at a time!) If you didn’t bring these in your loadout, finding Uplinks can instead be lifesavers that create heroic moments – if you’re the last one standing on your team, a nearby Team Redeploy will be pinged on the map for you to run to and loot for a dramatic save.
What makes Hazard Zone great is its progression: when loading into a match for the first time you can pick any Specialist, but your loadout of weapons, gadgets, and tactical equipment is limited since you won’t have enough credits to get anything other than the freebees. Play a few more matches, though, and maybe even successfully extract once or twice, and you’ll earn enough credits to buy some sweet items for your next drop, such as any weapon of your choice that you can customize with attachments and increased data storage in your tactical slot, allowing you to carry and extract with more data points. My favorite weapon in Hazard Zone is the M5A3 assault rifle with two scope attachment options for a 1x close-range option and 2x at slightly greater range.
The clever part about this is that the stakes keep rising higher as you go thanks to Extraction Streaks, where if you manage to extract two or more times in a row you’ll unlock an extra Tactical Equipment slot for the next match. If you lose that streak, however, you revert back to only one slot, and having something to lose ratchets up the tension a couple of notches when you’re wondering if you can take on that group of soldiers up ahead. Each streak is attached to the Specialist you used for the previous match as well, so if you switch from one Specialist to another you’ll lose that extra Tactical Equipment slot and essentially start over. This didn’t seem like a huge problem since the need to switch Specialists doesn’t really come up too often in Hazard Zone, but establishing the Specialist you want to use throughout the mode early is probably best. I found that Casper and his OV-P Recon drone was pretty handy to have on your team, especially since he could scope out areas with Data points and see how many hostiles are around.
Teamwork is crucial in order to survive long enough to go from one data point to another, and since there are “only” 32 players in a match it felt slightly better paced and deliberate than All-Out Warfare’s chaos. I found myself eager to queue in for another match of Hazard Zone even if I had been absolutely demolished at the beginning of a previous game because I wanted to rack up points to get my best loadout in the next round. The feeling of accomplishment when you steal the extraction helicopter or plane from enemy teams in the last extraction point is exhilarating, and it naturally pushed me to queue in for more matches to ride that high.
One thing that bugged me in both All-Out Warfare and Hazard Zone was that the time-to-kill feels incredibly inconsistent. I don’t know if it’s a bug or what, but no matter what weapon types and attachments I use, it often feels like I have to hit an enemy with a few bullets more than I should need to down them. That gets frustrating quickly, especially when some enemies seem to be able to down me just about instantly. By comparison, the custom Portal mode allows you to play with the settings of past Battlefield games, and the TTK felt just fine next to the likes of Battlefield 3 or Bad Company 2.
In All-Out Warfare, the long TTK didn’t bother me too much since you respawn pretty quickly and can get back in the action, but in Hazard Zone it felt especially punishing since it’s a squad-based game and you stay down until you can be revived. I want the TTK to feel justified and even in an FPS, but in 2042 I found myself switching from my assault rifle to a marksman rifle or even a sniper rifle just to get those faster kills since other weapons can be so unintuitively weak. Unlike Apex Legends or Call of Duty: Warzone where you can take on three enemies at once and potentially pull off an exciting outplay, it feels nearly impossible in Battlefield 2042 – being surrounded by even two enemies always felt like a death sentence.
Another problem was an ongoing bug where I’d occasionally run over to revive a downed teammate only to find that they’d already chosen to die and spawn back in, yet their bodies remained on the ground like bait in a medic trap. Being downed seems to be buggy in general, because other times I’d be waiting for a revive but my teammate wouldn’t be able to get a revive icon on me, so I’d just have to accept death and respawn. Also, finding out that the Hovercraft can scale entire buildings was a not so pleasant surprise since that vehicle can inch its way up places it shouldn’t and cause a lot of trouble. There were a handful of other bugs too: sometimes being unable to bring up the Uplink screen, getting stuck loading until you restart, and some server issues. I’d occasionally get hit with lag and desync away from where I was, and I’d also get some ping issues where my latency would drop and I wouldn’t be able to move very well due to connection stutters. In general, things went awry a bit more often than I’d expected, even from a newly launched game.
The real treasure of Battlefield 2042 is its Portal mode. More of a massive playground than a set mode, it lets anybody create their own experiences, game modes, or even just new game rules in general. It lets you tailor what kind of Battlefield you want to play, packing loads of the series’ long history into one great big developer toolset.
On top of Battlefield 2042’s maps and toys, Portal currently includes three full Battlefield games that you can customize: the original Battlefield 1942, Battlefield Bad Company 2, and Battlefield 3. There are maps, weapons, classes, and equipment available from all these. There are a few preset, dev team-curated modes that you can jump into, including Battlefield 1942 Classic Conquest, Battlefield Bad Company 2 Classic Rush, and Battlefield 3 Classic Conquest. Playing Battlefield Bad Company 2’s Classic Rush mode in a match with 64 players using that game’s actual ruleset and maps felt so, so good, and it was a stark difference from how I felt about playing All-Out Warfare in Battlefield 2042’s main game mode list. I’ve only dabbled in 1942’s Classic Conquest mode so far, but sniping there is fantastic. Playing these games in Portal reminded me of how much fun Battlefield can be, especially with the classic modes where classes actually matter to team balance.
But the real fun comes from tweaking things yourself. In Portal, you can change anything from if Friendly Fire is on for a team, to how much headshot damage multipliers are valued at, to if you take fall damage, and more. Basically anything you can think to change in a game, you can. Not only does it let you create entirely unique Battlefield experiences and game modes, but it also provides a more hands-on understanding of what goes into game balancing.
Portal can also be used to make incredibly silly stuff, like one dev-created mode I played where you have a single rocket in a launcher as your primary and a knife as your secondary; in order to reload you have to jump five times. Why? Because it’s goofy madness and there are no rules in Portal, that’s why. The tools that Portal gives you can be overwhelming to look at because it goes all the way down into the skeleton of game development – that’s an incredible level of freedom, but it also means it isn’t necessarily the most accessible custom mode maker an FPS has ever seen.
The good news is that you don’t need to learn any of it to enjoy the smartest and craziest stuff out there, because finding community-created modes has been made easy – there is a selection of fun featured custom modes from the community on the front page of Portal that will rotate over time. One of my favorite featured modes so far is CourageJD’s VIP Fiesta mode, where two teams face off against each other to eliminate each other’s VIP players. The VIP title swaps around between players on each team, and the twist is that every time you respawn you’re given a completely different loadout and class character from Battlefield 1942 vs Battlefield 3. Portal allows for so much fun and creativity that it might just be the saving grace of Battlefield 2042.