As most gamers know Battlefield 2042 is having it's open beta this weekend. Those who pre-ordered the game has been able to test it out for a couple of days already and they let the rest of us sensible people in on the fun today. The Battlefield franchise has kinda lost me a long time ago but this one seemed innovating and different enough so I thought I would at least give it a chance.
I was kinda disappointed to see that the beta only included the one game mode called conquest. Oh well, it will still be able to show off what the game has in store I thought but the next disappointment wasn't far off when I found out it had only the one map called Orbital as well. Sadly not a very good one either.
DICE has really gone for the big scale with this one. This map is huge. To huge. I ran in a straight line for about five minutes before I came upon my first enemy and firefight. In hindsight I should probably have gotten in one of the many vehicles that was sitting in my sides headquarters. However even when you start using the vehicles this map feels way to big.
There's a lot of open landscapes that never get used for anything but running through. In the three games I played I only ever met one enemy soldier out in the fields and every other firefight happened close to the objectives. There's a lot of space between these objectives as well so when you manage to take over one and prohibit the enemy from spawning there you have a couple of minutes of running to get to the next one. This made me lose focus a lot.
The game looks amazing though which was to be expected when looking at the system requirements. This game recommends you to have a damn RTX 3060 in your machine. The minimum is a GTX 1050 Ti so I was expecting my 1070 to struggle a fair bit. I let the game choose the settings for me and I was able to run it fairly well at 50-60 FPS. If I were to play this game more I would probably have dropped the settings to push out some more FPS.
One thing that's pretty cool is that the map is quite dynamic. All three times I played the map it started out with sunny and nice weather. Given some time it usually started raining and one of my matches even had a tornado raging through the map. Cars, people and tanks got lifted up and started being thrown around. I even saw people flying around the outside of it with their parachutes just riding the tornado out. It was quite cool.
Apparently the large missile that's part of one of the objective sites can take off as well which is really cool. I wasn't lucky enough to witness this during any of my matches. I bet it's awesome looking.
Another thing that surprised me was that the game version they're using for the beta is a couple of months old. That definitely explains the bugs I was experiencing. Several times I saw people just flying through the air like they were sitting in a car but without the car. Really annoying being run over by something you can't see. Bodies were ragdolling to all hell when they died as well. That was more funny that annoying.
I don't really get what they're testing here though since they're using an old versions. You would think they would want to get help discovering bugs from their current code but apparently not. Is the beta more of a marketing thing? Seeing as people who pre-order the game get in earlier it sure feels that way. I'm sure a lot of people pre-ordered the game this week just to get in early.
The three matches I played will probably be it for this beta for me. It got more fun as I learned more of the map and the mechanics but at the same time the game just didn't feel good. To much running around only to die in a fire fight instantly. I wish the map was better as well but we'll surely get some better ones for release.
I wish I had got to test the other game modes which look really cool. I'll have to keep an eye on them to see if I end up getting the game once it releases. Based on what I've seen in this beta though it's a hard pass from me.