Battlefield 2042 is in a tricky spot. More than 225,000 players have signed a petition for a refund, and the long-awaited Season One was pushed back to this summer. Developer DICE isn’t taking this all sitting down — it vowed to fix the game’s empty, cover-free maps. Now we know how the team plans to go about doing that.
DICE’s newest Battlefield Core Feedback post is all about maps, and there are five key areas in which it’s looking to fix them. The first is traversal: the scale of the battles led to larger maps overall, so the distance between objectives will be reduced. The second area, intensity, largely revolves around Breakthrough mode, which recently received some important balance changes of its own. As part of that, DICE is considering dropping the player count from 128 to 64 in an effort to reduce the chaos around objectives.
Line of sight and cover are two more areas in need of improvement, and they are closely related. “There are presently too many open and flat spaces” in the game’s maps, according to the blog post. These leave massive gaps for players to take fire from enemies at a distance. DICE is still “trying to limit direct long-range combat between objectives,” but it will also look for ways to give players more cover as they travel between them. One goal of the team’s is to reduce the chances of taking fire in a full 360 degrees around the player.
Finally, the paths between objectives are in need of improvement. These aren’t very clear right now, often leading leading to the aforementioned 360-degree fire as attackers move to the next point. For the defenders, it means being unsure of what choke-points need defending. DICE suggests sending in clips of your experiences with things like this to help it make improvements. In fact, it invites your input on this entire five-pronged approach, declaring itself open to fan feedback while fixing these problems.
