
That also means that the maps have returned to a cruder form than we were getting from the 64-player maps DICE has spent nearly 20 years designing. Some of the awe I felt when I first played Battlefield 1942 is recaptured here. Squad and vehicle spawning took a lot of the cardio out of the Battlefield series, and sometimes I want to take a break from shooting and spend a moment feeling surprised by the knowledge that the little dots running around on top of a distant skyscraper are other players. The new vehicle call-in system makes it hard to become truly stranded-on a cooldown, you can ask what I presume is an orbital parking garage to drop a ride-but long treks through uncontested territory can happen if you accidentally spawn on an AFK squadmate. In infantry warfare terms, though, the gorgeous vistas equate to large tracts of mud, grass, or sand filling the space between landmarks, sometimes without much cover. When I was first caught in a dust storm on Hourglass, set in Qatar, I felt sympathetically short of breath and worried I'd overlooked some kind of gas mask item. One map is half desert and half agriculture, split down the middle by a wall, another takes place around an Antarctic oil rig.Įven on medium settings, which I'm using to hover at 80 to 100 fps on my RTX 2070 Super, Battlefield's sunlight and atmospheric effects remain uncannily good.
BATTLEFIELD 5 HARDCORE SERIES
The gist is that we're "No-Pats," a made-up word for stateless mercenaries who are fighting for the US and Russia across a series of climate change flashpoints. Most of the time I've forgotten that there's a fictional war going on at all, and then a Russian voice will mention Western imperialism and it'll briefly drift into focus. Battlefield 2042 leans hard into its climate disaster mood.Īnd yet the world of 2042 has all the presence of an eye floater. The menu and microtransaction hygiene is largely a good thing, though it comes off a little icy, and the unsettling musical hits-no inspiring horns here, just ominous pings-aren't inviting. The only extra EA is selling right now is a year-long pass that promises four new specialists who'll bring exclusive gadgets and perks to the battle. There are fewer unlockable guns than usual (although I'll still never use some of them), simpler progression systems, and no battle pass. Outside of the granular accessibility and graphics settings, the menus feel sparse. There's a lot to experience in Battlefield 2042, but it feels like Swedish minimalism has won a victory here. This is a bolder Battlefield than we've had in a long time, and I'm having far more fun working through what's good and bad about its extensive changes and sloppy new ideas than I ever did arguing about what Battlefield 5's average time-to-kill should be.
BATTLEFIELD 5 HARDCORE PC
The increased acreage isn't an across-the-board improvement to the Battlefield experience, but if it's wrong to make a PC game bigger and more technically complicated without designing for all the possible consequences, then I don't want to be right. All the best Black Friday PC deals you can grab today.What was a 64-player game for 20 years is now a 128-player game, with proportionally bigger maps, putting Battlefield back in the category of games that push technical boundaries. With Battlefield 2042, DICE stands its ground as the king of large-scale military shenanigans much more convincingly than it did with Battlefield 5, ditching singleplayer campaigns to focus on the two original pillars of the series: objective-based multiplayer and scale. And even though the modern FPS scene is now stacked with big maps and whimsical vehicle physics (hi, Halo Infinite), Battlefield continues to feel distinct from the milsims and battle royale games that have encircled it. Even after two decades of streamlining, Battlefield still has great comedic timing.
