Kotaku’s Battlefield 2042 Season 2 DLC Update Impressions

Image: DICE

Battlefield 2042 ate a lot of crap at launch, and rightly so. For a game claiming to launch as a premium shooter at a premium price, it certainly came out undercooked.

Most people just said the game was “bad”, which I’ve always argued wasn’t strictly true. Much of what was there was actually fine, it was just released in a sparse and not ready state. With a little work – the kind of work DICE could have afforded with an extra year, and without the pressure of having to release an unfinished game in the middle of a pandemic to satisfy EA executives and investors – I I definitely held out hope that the game might one day turn out better than good. Good, even.

Now that we’re two major seasonal updates into the game’s lifespan, I don’t think it’s quite there yet, but you can definitely see “Good” on the horizon. The game’s major additions, like new maps, weapons, and specialists, have of course helped flesh out the experience, but the seemingly endless quality-of-life improvements to every other corner of the game, from menus to icons, do just as much work.

Much of the game’s early reviews focused on how raw the game was, how it seemed to lack so much of what made previous games better. Stuff like dashboards and lifetime statistics. Stuff that’s now in the game. It was also a bit empty and vague, like how some maps were held together by a handful of broken menu screens. It’s fixed now too. Battlefield 2042 finally feels more like a cohesive, functional video game, instead of a series of maps held together with tape.

Everything feels more complete, more at home in the world built by DICE for this iteration of the series. After a few tweaks and tweaks, Specialists now look as serious as the weather-ravaged maps they fight forand the maps begin to take on enough size and consistency to also flesh out the world itself.

Basically, there’s enough polish and content here that you got this in October 2021, instead of what was actually rushed, you might have just thought, OK, it’s the new Battlefield game, let’s check it out -the. It’s a low bar to jump I know – meeting basic functionality standards for a AAA game release isn’t something we should be actively celebrating – but the 2042 launch was low so any progress is a progress.

Indeed, things are falling into place so well – albeit slowly – that I think once we get one or two more new maps, maybe the same number of specialists, some more weapons (the sniper rifles have been largely ignored since launch), and the process of reworking the launch maps is complete (DICE is going back and tweaking a lot of them, adding more terrain and detail), I think “Good” is definitely at the scope of this game.

Battlefield 2042 | Season 2: Master of Arms gameplay trailer

Of course, we didn’t get to this point out of thin air, as most of the game’s updates come in the form of its first two seasons. I already covered season 01 which was surprisingly fun, and Season 02 dropped last week. Luckily (?) I was on Covid leave last week so had the chance to play hard, and came away impressed with how everything is so much more interesting and enjoyable than what was available during the launch.

The new armored vehicle, somewhere between the LATV4 and the Wildcat in terms of speed, protection and firepower, was a pleasure to drive. Between its passenger capacity and its ability to drop spawn points, it’s already a favorite of recon players. Crawford, the new specialist, has a mobile minigun turret, as silly and fun to use as it sounds. The best part of season 02 however is the new map, which I was on at first sight, but which is actually in practice only three long “lanes” (a desert area for vehicles, the interior of a vessel for close-quarters infantry bloodbaths, and a sniper’s paradise among palm trees), offering three completely different styles of play that are all only a short jog away.

So yes, both seasons of Battlefield 2042 have been great, bringing to life a game that many would have thought landed Dead On Arrival. Remember though: AAA games, especially persistent online ones like this, are usually too big to fail, for better or worse.and 2042’s slow improvement after such a disastrous release is the latest example.