Battlefield 2042 to host 128-player battles on PC, next-gen consoles on October 22

As part of this week’s E3-type game news and reveals, EA announced one of its least surprising games of the year: Battlefield 2042. But don’t get too excited. The word “reveal” should be taken with care, as we don’t know much about how the game works and we expect EA to tease fans with a slow stream of news until the game launches on the 22nd. October on PC. , Xbox and PlayStation.

So far, the game developers at DICE have confirmed that the game is indeed a recognizable game. Battlefield title, with massive team fights, the return of popular goal-based modes and aspirations to provide the biggest fighting arenas in the series to date. I’ve been in Ars long enough to hear that promise three times, and to its credit, DICE tends to offer increased combat reach with each major installment.

The most significant change? The developer is finally—at the end of the day– bringing the maximum number of players to 128 fighters on a single full-size map in the PC, Xbox Series X / S and PlayStation 5 versions of the game. The series has peaked at 64 players since its very first entry, and at Over the years, representatives from DICE have explained the limitation by saying that more players doesn’t always mean more fun. But much of those statements came before a certain 100-player genre changed everything, and last week DICE showed high-level pans of a few upcoming maps to showcase their design philosophy: providing discrete areas. that teams can divide and conquer, instead of regrouping that many players on death row.

But EA isn’t ready to ditch the previous console generation, which means the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the new game will launch with a maximum of 64 players per game. EA and DICE have not confirmed how cross-platform play will work between last-gen and next-gen consoles or between platforms compatible with 128-player cards, but this technical limitation on the value of two generations of BF2042 will definitely divide its player base to some extent.

Join the nomadic armed crowd of the Garbage City

This deficiency will feel more serious with BF2042 than in the other games in the series, since the title will be delivered without any campaign content to speak of. Instead, EA and DICE recommend fans looking to take a break from online battles to play the game’s multiplayer modes against AI bots, either alone or with actual teammates.

In an attempt to play down the lack of a campaign, the developers at DICE have said that intrigue nuggets will appear in ongoing multiplayer modes. But those plot points fit into what is arguably the show’s most naughty story to date. In BF2042In its version of the near future, a climate crisis in the early 2030s forces millions of people to leave their homes in various parts of the world. For geopolitical reasons, no nation welcomes these swarming masses like refugees. They therefore become a crowd of armed nomads who end up enlisted fight as forces of existing nations when a massive world war breaks out in 2042 (yes, I’m serious).

The developers at DICE followed up on this revelation by showing off some of the game’s high-tech weapons and vehicles, which these war nomads presumably build on their post-climate collapse rafts and cities made of floating plastic waste.

But EA didn’t show off many specific weapons or vehicles beyond the unsurprisingly inclusion of tanks and helicopters, and we only saw four of the game’s ten new “specialist” classes, expanding the traditional division of the series into four classes. It looks like some major combat abilities, such as using ziplines, grappling hooks, and combinations to get around the game’s huge maps, will be limited to a few specialists each, but how those abilities will play out remains unclear. While the series will get its very first paid “battle pass” in BF2042, this will not apply to specialists or their abilities; EA insists that this additional paid content will be entirely “cosmetic”. In addition, as in 2019 BFV, BF2042Future card content will be part of the retail purchase price, no additional downloadable content purchase is required.

The rest of the event contained numerous announcements which led to unanswered follow-up questions. Dynamic weather events will appear on every map, and we’ve seen a tornado lift and carry players on at least one of the game’s seven launch maps, but what other natural disasters can happen to fighters? Players can use a special ability to phone when delivering a tank or fighter jet, but what other wacky, Call of Duty-like abilities and gadgets will players have access to? Destructible buildings will return, but what will they look like and could they be as massive as fully collapsible skyscrapers? Two all-new game modes were announced, but EA slapped them both with huge “stay tuned” stickers, along with seven versions of a warning: “These are not battle royales.”

For now, we have the above gallery of “cutscene” shots to at least hint at the size and scope of the game’s combat arenas. While we’ve seen what EA and DICE have called “des real-time gameplay footage “during last week’s presentation, these are reserved for public disclosure until a later date, and what we saw doesn’t appear almost as polished as the screens above. We’ll see more of that as EA releases songs from BF2042 information over the next four months.

Listing image by EA / DICE