Battlefield 2042’s beta was not met with the most positive of receptions due to the amount of bugs it featured. While it showcased the essence of what we can expect from 2042, it was certainly in need of a lot of work – and it appears DICE has been busy.
Today, the studio has released a massive blog post, outlining the main changes it is making ahead of the Battlefield 2042 release date next month. These range from all-new features that were completely absent from the beta, to improvements based off of player feedback. There are a lot of changes included in the blog, but here are some of the major ones.
DICE says that both during the beta players were having some serious server problems, which ranged from being sent to servers in different regions to their own, or being placed in bot-heavy lobbies. The developer says it worked through the beta to improve this, and is continuing to work up until launch to get servers and bot allocation working as intended.
Another big thing is the Plus weapon attachment system, which lets you customise your gun’s attachments on the fly. Players were frustrated that between games their preferred attachment combination would be reset to default and that they couldn’t change the order of the attachments on the menu itself. That looks set to change, though.
“There are multiple slots per attachment type that you can assign different items into, drawn from an extensive pool of weapon specific attachments that unlock as you play more with the weapons,” DICE says. “Anything assigned into Slot 1, those closest to the centre [of the Plus menu], is your effective spawned setup. When you deploy with the weapon in hand, you’ll always be set up with your preferred [Slot 1] attachments.”
In more UI-based changes, a number of tweaks are being made to the heads-up display for better clarity. It also sounds like more information points will be added to the UI – including a full-size map that you can pull up to view the entire Battlefield.
“Our User Interface in the Open Beta wasn’t fully representative of the final experience,” DICE says. “It was missing some essential components, some of which we disabled to remove debilitating (and now resolved) bugs, and some of which we chose to continue to focus work on for launch.”
While Big Map will be a welcomed addition, DICE can’t guarantee it will be ready to use at launch, but will update players on when they can expect to see it.
As well as this, some general improvements include a grenade indicator, movement changes (including strafe sliding and a nerf to bunny hopping), improvements to ping effectiveness, full button mapping for controller players, and the ability to send cross-platform invites to friends using different hardware to your own thanks to Battlefield 2042 cross-play.
Those are the headline changes, but in a nutshell, expect the full version of the game to be a far different experience to the one you had during the beta.