Battlefield 2042 was a disaster when it launched in 2021. The Open Beta was fun enough that I committed the prime evil sin of pre-ordering the game (never making that mistake again) due to the hype and fun I had with my friends during the test period.
Then the game launched, it was a mess, and my friends and I never touched the game again. I basically threw $60 or so at EA for no reason.
DICE and EA, as it turns out, kept the game alive with updates and fixes that addressed many of the problems. But the game’s poor launch left such a lingering taste in my friend group’s mouth that we continued to turn a blind eye to the game for years.
Now, three years later, I’m driving over parked cars with my giant semi-futuristic battle tanks, exploding them like fiery walnuts in the nutcracker of my tank treads, while my friends chatter about an enemy helicopter that’s lurking outside the building they’re pinned in. One of my friends finds a window and the celebratory expletives I hear in my headset mirror the scoreboard lighting up to tell me he shot down the chopper with a rocket launcher. Over the roar of my tank engine, and my friends celebrating I hear the dull thud of a helicopter crashing in the distance.
Then a louder crash: My tank bashes through a concrete privacy fence and I find myself looking at two enemy squads who must have heard me coming because they were ready to great me with a barrage of heavy arms fire. I pop a smoke screen and slam down on the reverse button. My request for help is acknowledged by my friends. From behind me, solitary tracer rounds start zipping down on the enemy squads, as my sniper friend gets to work. The other two arrive, in some speedy vehicle that they bail out of at full speed, sending it vanishing into my deployed smoke screen. I pivot my tank, presenting my side to the enemy team and allowing my friends more cover to shelter behind on the other side. The engineer friend starts repairing my tank immediately, the other hops in my secondary gunner seat and the machine gun attached to the side of my tank chatters to life.
This is fun. This is the Battlefield my friends and I want. Battlefield 2 was the game that brought us all together back in high school, Battlefield 3 kept the friend group together while we saw countless other groups fizzle out in the transitory years between high school and early college. The Battlefield experience is what we’re all always chasing, finding elements of it in other games (War Thunder, Escape from Tarkov, Squad, Insurgency) but nothing ever matches a true Battlefield game.
When it’s done right.
At the very least, I’m hopeful for the franchise’s future. I hope DICE and EA learned a lot of hard lessons from the early days of Battlefield 2042. But let’s be real, it’s EA we’re talking about. When it comes to making quick money, quality gameplay is just a car caught under a tank tread.
