Everything In Battlefield 2042’s First Massive Patch

With the deployment of a massive patch today, EA revealed everything it’s tweaking in Battlefield 2042 immediately following its rough launch. Hundreds of tiny fixes won’t magically transform the shooter into what longtime fans want it to be, but they’ll definitely make it a less frustrating experience for everyone still hanging around.

Today’s big update is the game’s third, with another smaller one to follow before the end of the month. While none of these are bringing features as basic as team voice chat, they are addressing a plethora of bugs, improving matchmaking, and adding new weekly challenges to boost players’ earned XP and unlocks progression.

Here is a small assortment of some of the changes that caught my eye:

• improvements to address an issue where players killed in vehicles would fall beneath level geometry
• Addressed a variety of visual flickering and stuttering issues
• Improvements to streaming assets in deploy screen presentation
• Added additional flares to Extraction Zone, offering players better visibility of extraction area, as well as providing additional cover
• Fixed an issue where bullet spread would be too high when trying to fire while zoomed right after sprinting for some Portal weapons
• Added health bars on enemy vehicles (up to 200m) and enemy soldiers when looked at (up to 50m)
• Fixed issue where Bots sometimes didn’t revive players
• Fixed issue where missile countermeasures sometimes didn’t work, causing missiles to not blow up and instead reacquire the same target
• Fixed some wheeled vehicles continuing to roll backwards when reverse is released
• Fixed some issues that prevented visual hits from registering when firing on an enemy target. Note: further improvements are still being investigated
• Reduced effectiveness of the NTW-50 against vehicles
• Added a UI element that shows nearby players that can revive you within 50m when downed
• Added a UI element that shows incoming revivers when downed and pinged by a player that intends to revive you

You can find the full list over on EA’s website. Most are bug fixes, but some changes appear to be genuine improvements to mode and gameplay balance. Hazard, for example, has gotten a bit more generous in its rewards and forgiving in its extraction phase. Weapons like the NTW-50, which were blowing up vehicles way faster than rocket launchers, are getting dialed back. And the new UI features for reviving will hopefully convince more people to 1) play support roles and 2) not opt to immediately bleed out and re-deploy when they’ve been downed.

It’s a great first step toward stabilizing the game. But a lot of Battlefield 2042’s issues run much deeper than glitching under the map and bullets failing to register hits. Conquest, the marquee mode, remains an underwhelming and chaotic mess. The new maps in general aren’t great at funelling opposing players into interesting showdowns. And Portal, the big redeemer, still has XP turned off because players were abusing it to level up really quickly. It doesn’t sound like it will be back until this weekend at the earliest.