Battlefield 2042 Disappointing Fans

When it comes to video games, players usually want to experience what has been shown in the trailers of the featured game. Battlefield 2042, released on November 12, 2021, has been one of the largest failures in the entirety of the video game industry. Almost inconceivably, the game has gone from bad to worse. The game was released as a buggy mess with the game lacking basic and beloved features such as a scoreboard, hitmarkers indicating that players have hit another player, online server browsing, and perhaps worst of all, the four character class system and giving players generic “special” characters instead of making them look like soldiers. Overall these aren’t even half of the features that are missing from the game yet the list just continues.

EA (Electronic Arts) and DICE, manufacturers of games, are both at fault for being out of touch and blaming other companies for their game not doing well. EA and DICE both blamed COVID-19 and Halo Infinite for a terrible reception of Battlefield 2042. But that is not all; older games produced by DICE are doing even better. Currently, Battlefield 2042 has merely 2,208 players, while Battlefield 4 has 1,903 players, and Battlefield 5 has over 22,801 players. Every day Battlefield 2042 loses at least 55 players while Battlefield 5 sees continued usage and growth, a game that was, “Wildly accused of being oversaturated and historically inaccurate even though they wanted it to be as accurate to WWII as much as possible,” according to PCGAMER.

After my “playthrough” of Battlefield 2042, there was so much to unpack. Full disclosure: I am playing on a PC with specs including GTX 1070 ti Founders Edition, Ryzen 7 5700x, 16GB of RAM, 4TB of storage, and a 500GB SSD. From these decent specs, the game barely functions with a staggering 60 frames per second, and extreme lag spikes when playing solo. This gets even worse when playing multiplayer. The game is filled with try-hards, and there is a vast majority of people ranging from rank 1 to 1075 due to XP glitches in the past. The maps that I have played on were Breakaway (an ice cold antarctic mining operation), Kaleidoscope (a North Korean frontline assault but at a very miniscule size), Orbital (a last effort drone launch in the state of a flooded almost gone Florida), Hourglass (a very sandy state of Saudi Arabian city), Discarded (an abandoned beached shipyard with a tornado that goes through the map), and the final map Renwall (a food planting center for the so called “food crisis” in game). My favorite maps, if they could be called as such, were Kaleidoscope, Renwall, and Hourglass. They were very fun to play on, but to be honest, it felt very empty overall.

Core mechanics in the game, such as the basics of shooting a gun or even driving a tank, were very lackluster with options of using a radio that doesn’t even work. Other things like movement were even changed. The creation of “sprint” and “infantry sprint” changed how players run ingame. For the first hour and a half, I played on Kaleidoscope and conquest mode, which was the basic hit-and-run to capture the zones for the most points. Some of the more memorable moments were when I managed to glitch an entire tank onto the top of the main building–one of the more humorous bugs. I pretty much stared at the elevator door so that no one from the enemy team would make it up there. As I got out to try and fix it with a repair tool, I was shot and gunned down by an enemy AI, and I was left in a staggering position without the ability to respond, therefore making me end the game right then and there.

During the second half hour, I switched to Battlefield 4 which had major differences; the game actually worked. During my playthrough of Battlefield 4, I played on a private server which used the map Siege of Shanghai. While I was playing there was a major building collapse which reminded me that Battlefield 2042 Power over armor is not a good dynamic. It should be more of focus than power to make it work properly. When shooting against AI’s or other players, the bullets act as if they don’t exist. The second issue is movement being janky and almost non-existent. The movement in the game is poor and doesn’t feel correct because it makes everything slide right and left even when the player has not made those movements. The third issue is reviving buttons not working. I was stuck in the revive position for so long that I had to end my playthrough and begin again. The reason being was, I was stuck in the revive position while the timer wasn’t even working. At one point it got to 23 seconds, and it just stopped so that I could not even respawn.

The fourth issue is graphics and bug fixes. Even though my PC’s parts are good, the game doesn’t run that well on there with staggering frame drops. Sometimes the screen would be so fuzzy that I would think it’s a stuffed animal. Even in the loading screen the textures and quality are so poor it’s almost sad. The fifth and final issue is on EA and DICE’S shoulders. They brought themselves into this mess. Now they either need to abandon the game entirely and give everyone refunds or actually do their job and fix the game instead of saying it’s too much work to add a scoreboard. After all of the bugs and mishaps that have happened throughout the game of 2042, it is nowhere nearly as good as Battlefield 4. I am not biased, but it’s just the cold hard truth. Either way, no matter how much gaslighting and begging EA and DICE does to make customers continue playing their horrible game don’t give in. Play something like Battlefield 4 or 5 but not 2042!