Battlefield 2042 officially launched last week, and thus far, fan response has not been less than positive, with complaints about bugs, balance issues, and a general lack of polish being widespread. Thankfully, updates are on the way, with Battlefield developer DICE laying out what they plan to focus their efforts on over the coming months.
According to DICE, they’re planning to focus on general server stability and performance on PC, which many have found to be CPU bound. They also aim to address weapon sensitivity and spread, which were causing certain weapons, particularly assault rifles, to miss their targets far too often. Finally, they aim to remix progression and XP rewards, so as to shut down Custom Portal farming servers without unduly punishing players looking to progress in other modes.
The plan is to deliver three more updates (in addition to the one already released) for Battlefield 2042 before the end of the year – Update #2 will arrive on November 25, Update #3 will arrive in early December, and a fourth update will drop “in advance of the holidays.” Here’s a rundown of what you can expect from Update #2 later this week.
- Improved Soldier Revives, addressing ‘unable to revive when a Soldier dies close to an object, or wall’.
- A respawn protection system that will help to prevent any extraneous issues that can leave a player in a downed state for too long, and force a manual respawn when required.
- Re-enabling our UAV-1 Interaction in Battlefield Portal, available on our Battlefield Bad Company 2 maps. It was overpowered, and we’ve made adjustments to account for that.
- Vehicle Balancing for the LCAA Hovercraft and MD540 Nightbird mentioned above.
- Dispersion has been reduced for all weapons except Shotguns, which results in more consistent bullet spread during gameplay.
Meanwhile, here’s what you can expect from the much-larger Update #3…
User Interface:
- Improved the collection screens making them easier to use and clear as to what you’re interacting with
- Improved the ways in which you’re able to manage your attachments via the collection screen to reduce the number of interactions you need to have when building your loadouts
- Enhancements to our Player Card screen and End of Round (EOR) to provide additional polish
- Added new markers to make your newly unlocked items easier to find
- Improved screen transitions when entering and returning to the Main Menu
- Improved Report a Player flows, specifically around toxicity and cheating reports
Matchmaking & Friends:
- Improved the experience between EOR and the Main Menu
- Improved Matchmaking reliability and reduced instances of Matchmaking failed
- Improved Crossplay invite flows
- Fixed Rich presence updates, ensuring that your friends are better able to track where you are in Game
- Addressed servers getting stuck in unresponsive game states, where rounds fail to properly start
- Fixes to Friend Invitations for players on PC
Progression and Unlocks:
- Introduction of weekly missions, providing set challenges that reward cosmetic unlocks.
- Added 1st match bonus of 1000 HZC for HZ
- Fixed an issue that was not properly awarding XP for Angel resupplies
- Improved overall XP/Rank tracking and reliability
- Improved Mastery rank tracking
- Improved reliability of Player card tracking
Rendering:
- Addressed a variety of visual flickering and stuttering issues
- Improvements to water rendering when Aiming Down Sight (ADS)
- Addressed multiple graphical issues affecting water reflections
- Fixed reflections in Kaleidoscope for late-joining players
- Addressed issue with character rendering for late joiners
- Improvements to artifacts affecting DLSS implementation
Maps:
- Over 150 individual fixes, small changes, and improvements across all of our Maps
- Improved level geometry issues across all levels addressing issues such players getting snagged or trapped
- Resolved multiple spawning issues
- Visual glitches such as lens flare, visible seams in skydome
- Resolved a large number of collision and placement issues
- Addressed issues affecting local audio placement in multiple Maps
Battlefield Portal:
Battlefield Builder additions
- Rush game mode layouts for all 2042 All-Out Warfare maps (through Portal)
- New official Vehicle Team Deathmatch template
- New official Team & FFA Gun Master templates
- New official Infection template
- Rules Editor – Added the ability to detect what players were killed with in order to apply additional logic
UX Improvements
- Added Server Info for the Pause screen
- Added support for server admins to write periodic server messages
- Added support for reporting a server from the pause menu
- A series of visual, audio, and gameplay improvements to weapons, vehicles, and gadgets
Battlefield Hazard Zone:
- Improvements to visual presentation of Hazard Zone currency system in Front End
- Added an animation and audio cue when the player’s Remaining Balance changes in the Hazard Zone lobby
- Modified Squad and Player Screen in Hazard Zone to only show your squad
- Modified Scoreboard to no longer show players connected in Hazard Zone to elevate tension experienced
- Improved extraction zone smoke visibility
- Added additional flares to extraction point offering players better visibility of extraction area, as well as providing additional cover
- Added variation in Hazard Zone to preplaced intel locations. Initial Data Capsules now have a chance to contain several data drives
- Resolved an issue with persistent scoring in Hazard Zone
- Improvements to the Intel Scanner’s accuracy and enemy identification
- Resolved an issue where two teams could extract simultaneously in Hazard Zone
- Resolved inconsistency in warning to alert players that they’re being scanned in Hazard Zone
- Resolved capacity issues with intel collection in Hazard Zone
- Made it easier to interact with intel pick-ups
- Added distance read-out for next extraction point in Hazard Zone
- Improved Hazard Zone end-of-round camera placement
Conquest:
- Tuned information spamming in Conquest, reducing the amount of messages that appear in the world log. In particular we reduced messages about flag state changes so that they’re not as distracting
Breakthrough:
- Tuned capture times for Breakthrough
- Improved out of bounds defender spawning in Breakthrough to ensure that you’re able to more consistently spawn in safety
- Improvements to Breakthrough’s UI to enable you to better track round progress in the form of a Game Mode Widget.
- The Game Mode Widget is also visible inside the Scoreboard (displaying only when playing Breakthrough, and also on Rush) to put emphasis on sectors and attackers reinforcements
- Elapsed time is now added and trackable in both the Scoreboard & Deploy Screen.
- Added a pulsating effect on the Team 1 (attacker) score and progress bar when their tickets are =< 25% of their initial tickets. This is also present in the GMW in the HUD, Scoreboard and Deploy Screen for both Rush and Breakthrough
General:
- A fix for missing loadouts, sometimes seen when first loading into a server and seeing blank boxes on the deploy screen
- Modified Recent Players screen to include everyone from previous match to allow for easier user reporting
- Improved interaction point system. Switched the default “INTERACT” text on multiple interactions to reflect the action you are about to do, i.e. “OPEN CONTAINER”, “CALL ELEVATOR” etc.
- Kaleidoscope server room lighting issue resolved
- Resolved an issue related to the velocity / trajectory while spawning in jets
- Improved helicopter animation in level fly-bys during insertion
- Improvements to address an issue where players killed in vehicles would fall beneath level geometry
- Improvements to streaming assets in deploy screen presentation
Dynamic World Improvements:
- Addressed issues for VFX affecting late-joiners
- Made improvements to correctly align the bridge behavior on Kaleidoscope for late joiners to the match
- Made improvements to correctly align the destructive silos state for late joiners in Renewal and Orbital
- Improved interaction of SG-36 Sentry Gun and elevators
- Quality of Life fixes and improvements to interact prompts
- Tornado and smoke visual effect improvements
- Resolved a large number of collision issues with large scale animation events
- Improved location-based sandstorm audio experience
- Improvements to destruction audio
- Adjusted the timing for automatic doors
Vehicles:
- Fixed issue where missile countermeasures sometimes didn’t work, causing missiles to not blow up and instead reacquire the same target
- Made exit position from vehicles more consistent
- Made improvements to controller vibration for vehicles
- Fixed an issue where the Nightbird’s rockets hitting the ground can appear frozen
- Fixed an issue where a player driving the Hovercraft can not be shot through the front window
- Added an option to have vehicle boost as toggle or hold
- Fixed an issue where vehicles took double damage when getting hit through glass
- Improved TOW Missile Projectiles flying behavior
- Balanced Nightbird minigun spread buildup and convergence
- Removed blast impulse on Attack Helicopters Anti Vehicle Rocket which caused nudging of vehicles on hit
- Fixed the F-35E Panther repair system ability missing from customisation
- Fixed instances where vehicles sometimes would become stuck on world geometry
- Gadgets no longer pause their cooldown when the player enters a vehicle
- Fixed an issue when a player dies in a vehicle which allowed for the camera to go underground
Weapons:
- Reduced spread globally when zoomed and moving
- Improved stationary zoomed accuracy for many weapons
- Spread now decreases faster and earlier when pacing shots. This means more success with single-fire or short bursts
- Increased PP-29 vertical recoil to ensure that the weapon does not overperform when engaging outside of its intended combat range
- Fixed an issue where spread would be too high when trying to fire while zoomed right after sprinting for some Portal weapons
- Reduced effectiveness of the NTW-50 against vehicles
- Fixed the 8X Scope having a faster ADS time than the others
- Fixed M44 revolver chambering an extra bullet
- Fixed an issue where soldier is unable to shoot after getting hacked while in a vehicle
- Reduced switch back to weapon delay after throwing grenade
HUD:
- Added a UI list that shows nearby players that can revive you within 50m when downed
- Added a UI list that shows revivers when downed and pinged by a player that intends to revive you
- When low on ammo or health, nearby friendly players within 50m will now show a resource icon above their head indicating that they can provide you with health or ammo
- Increased Big Map Resolution for improved navigation
- Added health bars on enemy vehicles and enemy soldiers when looked at
- All player world icons now scale over distance, making them smaller when far away in an effort to reduce icons cluttering the screen
- Time before revive completion is now visible for the downed player when being revived
- Fixed an issue where friendly player icons would sometimes not be hidden when behind walls causing a lot of icons to be constantly visible on screen.
- Fixed an issue where friendly soldiers are missing their blue UI icons when a player is in a downed state
- Fixed an issue where some player names don’t show when looking at multiple Soldiers/Vehicles that are next to each other
- Changed the visibility behavior of the fire mode icon in the HUD. By default, the fire mode icon is now visible if it is currently possible to change fire-mode. The behavior can be changed to allow the fire mode icon to always be visible (even if it’s not possible to change fire mode) or turned off. The option is called “Fire Mode Indicator” under “HUD” Options
- Added an option that allows for the disabling of the button prompts visible in the HUD
- Added message about which player healed you when getting healed by other players
- Added message about which player shared ammo when getting ammo from other players
- Fixed an issue where IFF markers on Squad Members do not change with colorblind option
- Improved visibility of IFF marks over distances
- Fixed an issue where IFF markers would not be visible when using low video settings
Bots:
- Fixed issue where Bots sometimes didn’t revive players
- Improved Bots helicopter handling
- Improved Bots combat behaviors
- Improved Bots game mode behaviors
Audio:
- Improved reliability of various ability sounds when offscreen, such as reviving, SOB-8 Ballistic Shield, flares, wingsuit, vehicle smoke discharges and system repairs
- Switched lock-on warning sound with incoming missile warning sound
- Improved weapon mix for enemies firing at the player
- Generally tweaked content and mix for distant weapons, improving audibility at range
- Preventing warning sounds and transmission sounds from continuing when a vehicle has low health
Battlefield 2042 Update #3 will also include a lengthy list of balance changes and tweaks for individual Specialists, weapons, and gadgets. If need to know about that, you can check out the full, unabridged notes, right here.
Battlefield 2042 is available now on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, and PS5. As mentioned the game’s next update arrives in on November 25, with two more arriving before Christmas.
