Mar 29, 2024 at 7:00 AM Battlefield 2042 - Review | [Xe] Tactical Gaming Community

Battlefield 2042 - Review

Discussion in 'Open Board' started by FeartheKitten, Nov 13, 2021.

  1. FeartheKitten

    FeartheKitten Administrator Staff Member Council Council

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    Hey all, I managed to get wrestle up about 20 hours of playtime since Thursday. I played briefly on console (I guess it was fine, not my cup of tea) but I got a ton of a time on the PC.

    TLDR; BF2042 is good but it has some shortcomings, Portals fixes most of it - Battlefield 3 was the last actual Battlefield game. If you like BF4 you will enjoy this. If you liked BF3/2, you will love Portals.

    Ill be streaming it tonight at 830pm (EST) over at twitch.tv/xfearthekitten

    Technical:

    Servers were completely over capacity which is par for every launch game so it was a mild inconvenience albeit one that is frankly expected. I didn't experience a lot of actual bugs or glitches with the exception of sometimes people will die and get clip into stuff which made it very hard to revive them. This would happen on the ground out in the open too. The second one was I couldn't figure out if E or F entered or exited a vehicle - Im assuming it was a bug because no matter what keybinds I use sometimes I just couldn't get out of vehicle and was forced to Ride N Die.

    Matches played out smoothly at 128 players, I average about 72 frames - I fiddled with video settings two ways and I will expand on that shortly. The destruction level in the world was well done, it is far more incremental than BF4 with a lot minor damages that open up new firing angles or paths. A noted time was while making a last stand on Renewal an enemy team blew down the wall with C4 and sent the some robodogs in. Sensing the shitstorm of flesh and metal - my good buddy put C4 on the backwall in which we were cornered. We blew it and escaped hand-in-hand to never fight in a war again.

    I have an RX580 so I didn't expect to play above medium but regardless of High or Low settings the game looks great. There is a huge leap in beautification at High but that comes with problems. I would be very wary about HDR and particle effects as you will be at a significant disadvantage in terms of spotting enemies and maintains accuracy. A lot of dust and debris kicks up combined with the smoke from the barrel things get obscured quickly. There is also this luster effect on vehicles, interactive items, and certain objects that kind of made it people blend in. I ended up going Low across the board and disabling all post effects - my kills per match drastically increased.

    Movement/Mobility:

    They definitely fine tuned and smoothed out some of the movement since beta - it's not quite as fast as CoD and the inertia is a little more weighty. Changing stances is very quick and smooth, they added a nice touch with different animations inbetween stances. Something to note is unlike prior BF games you can actually ADS and skip most of the fancy animations. The way I see it the animations were designed for immersion rather than actually affecting your gameplay Which is nice.

    While Battlefield has always had its mix of mil-sim and arcade-style gameplay I feel like the game is presented to look like a mil-sim, when taking a fire you can feel the suppression affect, debris kicking up and ect but it doesn't hinder your overall gameplay which is nice. Very visceral.

    They toned down the slide to a small little stunted slide that only engages when in tac sprint. No problems there. Running or sprinting and then going to prone feels great - especially for a medic. Vaulting/Mounting is solid except I think you can still vault too far over objects. Sometimes you will attempt to vault a railing and then slide over it, a box, and a jersey barrier and all of sudden you are on the wrong side of cover.

    Combat:

    Typical for BF, vehicles feel over-powered but mostly because 90% of the matches everyone is playing sniper because progression. Once folks value AT I don't think tanks are OP. Helicopters on the other hand are a pain in the ass but again, lack of value in AA. The Hovercraft has some problems - for something that is gliding and has a ton of mass these things will straight up bowl over your team. Literally hiding behind cover won't save you they will glide right over it. Light weapons should be able to damage these bad boys.

    Speaking of cover: Sprint-out speeds are on the slower end of the spectrum and the peekers advantage is very low in this game compared to CoD. This means he who is ADS behind a piece of cover has a massive advantage. Strangely most players seem to stand near or in front of cover. I noticed a lot of things you can crouch behind are lined up nicely that you can stay shooting while crouched.

    I am sad to announce so far the DMRs are 4 shot kills at 300rpm = .600 TTK where the starting assault rifle M5A3 is .404. DMR should be 3 shots for a .450. The TTK overall feels pretty good as long as you have a piece of armor. Without it its brisk. But something to keep in mind that a lot firefights are around the 50m - 75m mark so its nice to be able to actually down someone.

    Combat overall is a ton of fun, intricate blend of cover, open ground, interiors, and plenty of routes to pull off some nice flanking maneuvers. Due to the large size of the maps I believe there is a lot more power when squad plays in a defined role - example an AT squad designed to deal with vehicles as its primary strategy. This reduces the "holy crap pants on fire lets run over here, lets run over there, lets get in our underwear!"

    Game Modes:

    Conquest - Though DICE attempted to promote teamplay and made design choices to significantly impact that the result is even further from that. Obviously no comms in EA doesn't help but there are three major problems:

    1) Due to sheer scale of the Battlefield, people either think they can make a difference by themselves (they cannot) or they absolutely think they can't since they are just 1 of 64. A Team needs more indicators and directions to coordinate
    2) Since squads are generated randomly and there are no SL tools there are no way to kick Lone Wolves or idiots. Since you can spawn on any squad member there is even less incentive to stick with the SL. Even a simple objective or squad proxy could've been implemented that can force better teamplay
    3) Its very difficult to spot your own team mates and to identify one another since there are no classes.

    Breakthrough - Is the best mode right now using the 2042 mechanics. It compacts everything down so it forces the entire team to almost work together. It reminds me of Advance and Secure from BF2142 or Joint Ops. I played this most the most and other than the stupid CP on a roof it was amazing.

    Portals - I will have a separate post later going into details.... Portals is amazing

    Brief review for portals - there are many servers out there right now that fucking NAILED it. The best one was Classic BF3 - Legacy Rotation / Infantry Only. It consisted of only the BF3 weapons and classes but used the 1942, BFBC2, and BF3 maps. It rotated TDM and Rush and was such a blast. The second server I was on was Old School BF which consisted of BFBC2 and BF3 on all maps rotating Rush and TDM. Combination of nostalgia and better battlefield.

    If you started playing BF4 and newer I highly recommend you go on Portals and play BF3. Yea you probably hear all the series salty veterans bitching that BF4, BF5, and BF1 are just watered down participation-award trivial games.... And for good reason, the mechanics back in the day were just superior.
     

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