As much as I’ve enjoyed Battlefield 2042, I’m also aware that most long-time fans of the series have not been enjoying the game’s launch, equipped with a long list of complaints that range from the game’s lack of polish to its overall feel. And while DICE have slowly been chipping away at some of those smaller issues (like the addition of a scoreboard), the game’s first actual, substantial changes are on the way.
In a blog post on the game’s site, EA’s Adam Freeman has written about a number of alterations that are being made (or being considered) for 2042’s maps. Now that the team have a few months of solid player time spent in the game to look at, they’ve been able to see what has worked and what hasn’t, and will be doing stuff like adding more cover for infantry and creating more obvious pathways between objectives.
Some of that will involve small changes, like simply elevating terrain in places, while others will be fairly extensive, like removing entire building areas (like the Distribution Centre on Renewal, above) or changing a gazebo into a military installation (on Kaleidoscope).
Alongside the map tweaks, DICE will also be making changes to the way vehicles are organised and distributed:
We’re reducing the number of attack vehicles and helicopters that can be active at any time in 128 player modes per category from 3, to 2. This means you’ll only be able to encounter 2 tanks, and 2 attack helicopters available at any time, instead of 3 each.
We’re increasing the cooldown for attack vehicles and helicopters from 60, to 120 seconds.
As discussed earlier, the MD540 Nightbird will be moved from transport into the attack helicopter category, and the MC5 Bolte will also be moved from transport into the attack vehicle category.
As someone who loves driving a tank/Wildcat, this reduction in the number of attack vehicles on the map at any one time kinda sucks, especially since the infantry were already getting more protection from admittedly overpowered vehicles. But hey, I’ll also wait and see if it improves matters for infantry players before getting too critical.
So when can we expect this stuff to hit? Cryptically, some of it is coming soon, while other parts are going to be months away, since Season 1 doesn’t launch until the Summer, let alone Season 2:
We’ve discussed several changes today that we’ll not only make to maps, but also to gameplay such as how often or how many vehicles you’ll see on the Battlefield.
The first changes we’ll make are to vehicle play and availability, and those will be ready in the next Update. Following that you’ll start to see the first updates to Flag, Base Spawn locations, and Cover and Line of Sight on Kaleidoscope and Renewal. These changes will arrive during Season 1, and as we get closer to deploying those updates we’ll be able to share all of the specifics.
We’re now getting started on bringing these same standards of updates to our other launch maps alongside needed visual changes to make all maps feel ready for battle. There’s a lot of work involved in doing that, so you can expect us to start discussing more about those updates during Season 1, and for the changes themselves during Season 2.
If you want to see some images of the tweaks being planned for the maps, you can see them here.
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