Beleaguered multiplayer shooter Battlefield 2042, which hasn’t exactly been the success EA was hoping for, will take another step towards becoming a real video game this week with the release of its next update.
While fans (and non-fans) have justifiably criticized the game, I’ve always had a soft spot for it, partly because the things I love about a Battlefield game have been there since launch, but also because this game: developed in part during the worst months of the pandemic; it clearly didn’t get very far when EA publishers rushed it out the door.
So the DICE developers have basically had to spend the months since release… finishing the game, adding things like scoreboards and extra UI that, under less hellish circumstances, would have just been part of the development process usual and would have been with Battlefield 2042 at launch.
The game’s first season update made many players happy because it simply dragged the game much closer than they would have expected to October 2021, and update 1.2, which will be released tomorrow, August 2 , to inches even more.
Introduces some fixes for the weakest map in the game (Kaleidoscope), finally gives players a lifetime stats page (allowing you to track things like your K:D ratio, games played, etc.) and perhaps most notoriously, it makes it the first of a series of planned ones. “Style and Tone” changes for game specialists.
Battlefield 2042’s Specialists, characters similar to those you choose in other shooters like Apex Legends for example, are new to the series and have been pretty poorly received, not just because of the changes they’ve made to the structure of the game ( replacing traditional classes like Medic), but because of the way their arrogance and falsehoods were at odds with the game’s climactic apocalypse atmosphere.
Dice’s first step in fixing this was to simply silence them so that characters no longer shouted slogans during endgame recaps, but the next step here will be to make them all look a little more appropriate for the environment This means making them look generally more tired, dirty and emaciated, and in the case of male specialists, giving them beards. And if they already had beards, giving them more beards, and some extra wrinkles to boot. Here’s a look at the changes:
The two guys on the left used to be clean shaven, now they have beards. The boy on the right, Pyotr, already had a beard, but now he has more. (Image: DICE)
I like it, everyone seems a little more suited to the setting. However, I will say that as someone who drives Mackay, for gameplay reasons, not aesthetics, I was hoping for a bit more improvement given how it originally looked (Guy Who Stans Elon Musk Under Tesla Car Reviews On YouTube) now s ‘has become A guy who thinks the fight is too awake now.
The update will also introduce other smaller nerfs and gameplay changes, and you can read all about them here.