Battlefield 2042 - Can Make A Comeback
That question seems to come up more and more frequently. Levelcap here, and today we're going to take a look at a realistic feature for Battlefield 2042. As many of you are aware, the game had a terrible launch, which came as a bit of a surprise, or at least as a contrast to the marketing material for the game.
The initial hype seems to have secured a decent number of sales, meaning that if the core gameplay experience improves, it could bring a lot of players back and even encourage further sales. However, it's nine months past the launch of the game and it appears that most of the dev time was spent fixing bugs, ironing out performance issues, and finishing features that should have been in the game at launch.
This combined with ea rebuilding their management structure of the entire dice The studio's led to a trickle of new content, and the player base has responded in kind, with only a trickle of active players. So for Battlefield 2042, there are fewer people playing the game than previous games in its own franchise, so for Battlefield 2042.
To make what I would consider to be a comeback, the playerbase would have to outperform the previous titles at the very least, which would mean basically quadrupling its current player count. Of course, that's if we're quantifying the comeback from just this purely population metric. Let's take a look at the game as it is right now just from a gameplay and enjoyment standpoint.
I think Dice has been successfully narrowing down the fun maps and modes of this game and putting them front and center more frequently. This means that when you click on one of those front-screen modes, the chance of you queuing up for a fun experience is much higher than it was before. There's also a bit more integration of the portal maps into the base game modes to try and fill in for the problematic maps that came with the game.
The new exposure map is by far the best that the game has seen, and the rework of the kaleidoscope map makes it much more playable. In fact, these maps have shown that Battlefield 2042 is actually pretty enjoyable when played on a well-designed map. That's not to say that other areas of the game aren't still problematic.
But it seems that the core problem of 2042's spammy, annoying lack of cover gameplay is just the map design, and when given a good map, it's actually pretty fun. There are even times while playing that are just downright awesome and feel like any epic moment from the past 10 years of battlefield gaming.
At least the guns feel more refined, the classes are more balanced than at launch, and at least when playing the right modes and maps. I feel like your skill and strategy will pay off more than once when faced with the weaker elements of 2042. Like vehicle balance, joy can fall away pretty quickly.
2042 still hasn't figured out the vehicle versus infantry balance, which is further exacerbated by the majority of its maps, where vehicles have free reign and infantry have little cover. There are still many ways to sort of cheat your way up that scoreboard using vehicles. The large vitals and Heinz have a ridiculous amount of health, making it feel impossible to kill without tons of coordination.
At least from an infantry perspective. The vehicle balance is kind of a mess really and should be a bigger focus of their map redesign to try and get vehicles in line so it's actually fun to fight against them as infantry. I'm comparing it to playing Battlefield. 4 the number of times I would hit a helicopter with a rocket on a regular basis was extremely high, but the rockets in 2042 have slower speeds and can't one-shot or disable transport, so it's kind of robbing the game of a lot of that skill-based anti-vehicle.
However, when 2042 works, which means the right maps and rate modes, it is fun, so beyond the game's lingering balance issues, currently 2042's biggest problem is still an issue of quantity. Dice knows that their maps suck, and they're giving map rotations that go between the new exposure map and the newish kaleidoscope, Rework.
To try and keep players on the good content, but obviously, playing the same two masks back-to-back endlessly gets old real quick, making it even more clear that Dice just needs to inject good map content as quickly as possible. The latest devtalk article confirmed that season 2 is only bringing a single new map, though it does look like we may be getting two map reworks.
In addition, this will give players many more playable maps, assuming that those reworks and the new map are good, but it's also coming at the same old snail's pace. The quantity of content isn't anywhere near enough to keep a dedicated playerbase entertained for long. So looking at the steam charts, which again don't represent the global player base, just the ones trackable on steam when the next update launches.
I think we can expect a similar surge of players, which will then settle down to a higher low of concurrent players. If each subsequent season boosts the player base and then resettles at a new, higher level, then it's possible to consider 2042's player base to have a potential comeback at some point.
And again, these projected metrics do not account for diminishing returns here or any outliers that can improve or detract from the growth chart. I would say that this is a fairly optimistic outlook, and the only thing I could see that would boost this player's growth beyond the simple projection would be massive content or feature additions.
three to four new maps being dropped in a single season; big new weapon bundles; server browser and even server rentals. Those types of things could accelerate the growth beyond what we have here. And again, it's really coming down to the content that Dice can deliver and the money that it's generating.
For them, the other factor, and this is a major one, is whether or not Dice is going to support the game after a single year of content. Players want to be part of a game that is fun but also lasts and is playable for years to come. It's interesting to look at Battlefield 5's player-based resurgence, as so many players stopped playing that game while it was poorly optimized and lacked content, but leading up to 2042's release, many players were looking to come back to play some battlefield, and of course they landed on Battlefield 5.
And now they're enjoying all that extra content and optimizations that were made over the year plus of support that the game got, which is, of course, nice to see now, but it's disappointing that people weren't around enjoying that content while it was actually being released and the game was being more supported.
