New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Rain falls up, helicopters tumble around end over end, even the user interface - home to a map and your weapon details - begins to fail you, appearing and disappearing in bursts of crimson static. In the heart of Battlefield 2042's tornado, all sense of direction is lost.
The rolling mayhem of the waterspout and its deadly debris was easily the standout change witnessed in a recent press preview for Battlefield 2042. That isn't to say that the latest iteration of DICE's first-person shooter masterpiece isn't replete with changes, it's just that a funnel that can literally sweep you off your feet in the middle of a gun battle also tends to figuratively sweep you off your feet in a match.
Designed, I suspect, to be the sort of dangerous, unstoppable force meant to repel ground forces and air units, instead, the pure magnitude and design splendor of the natural disaster had the opposite effect.
Players rushed to the tornado, diving headlong in helicopters, whipping their tanks at top speed into its base, parachuting, and free-falling into its vortex. Approached correctly, one could be yanked off their feet, whipped round and round, higher and higher, and then gently descend at a safe distance via parachute. That is, if they were lucky enough not to be tagged by the tumbling debris that whipped around the wall of the storm.
Death by tornado, at least in Battlefield 2042, is really death by massive steel containers, tumbling choppers, building debris, or a lucky shot by another wild-eyed tornado chaser.
Over time, lots of time, and lots of play sessions, the storm will become another built-in game-changer, working as it was designed: To be avoided or used tactically. But it may take a while.
The press preview is the same as the beta release: a single map and single-mode and four specialists, each with their own backstory and, most importantly, gadget and playstyle.
Webster MacKay is an assault-type specialist designed to play a frontline position. This is underscored with his grapple gun specialty, which allows him to zip up buildings and onto vehicles. He also moves faster while aiming.
Maria Falck is a support class, who carries an S21 Syrette pistol which can be used to heal teammates from a distance or hear herself. Her specialty allows her to revive downed teammates to complete health with a set of paddles. (You can revive other players if you don't play as Marie, but it's limited to squadmates and takes much longer.)
Pyotr "Boris" Guskovsty is an engineer who comes equipped with an SG-36 sentry system that can lock on to enemy infantry and vehicles. If he's nearby, his sentry gets a boost as well.
Finally, Wikus "Casper" Van Daele is the resident sniper. He comes with a recon drone that can disrupt communications and spot enemies. He also has a motion sensor that tips him off to nearby enemies.
The mode we checked out was Conquest, which had 128 players (you only get 64 if you're playing on PS4 or Xbox One) fighting to grab and hold key parts of a massive map. Kalle Nystrom, level designer on the game, said that conquest is designed to deliver varied pacing to its players.
"This means that there are moments when lots of players collide and everything turns into absolute chaos," he said. "But there are also moments when it's less chaotic and more personal. When maybe only two squads are engaged in a tactical battle for a flag. You choose where to go, and how to fight. But to accommodate this new player count, we needed to change how we design our maps. We still offer a variety of sizes. Some maps are larger than others. But as you've probably guessed, the size has increased across the board, turning them into truly epic battlefields."
The map we played on was Orbital, which consisted of eight sectors, each with one or two objectives that need to be captured and held to capture the sector. This is done in part to get all of those players to cluster together around flashpoints on what could otherwise feel like a map too big for its own good. The map is considered a medium-sized map for Battlefield 2042 and is set in Kourou, French Guiana, where players are fighting for control over a rocket launch site.
The map has some other interesting features, like lightning towers rigged with ziplines, a transport tunnel that cuts through the rolling hills, radar stations, and a cryogenic plant. These features break up the map and give players a variety of different ways to hide and hunt one another.
The massive rocket takes center stage, and it actually does take off, but only after it goes through an automated sequence. First, it has to be fueled up (which takes a random amount of time), then it prepares for launch with the arms holding it place dropping away. It's during this six-minute segment that the rocket can be destroyed, but I never saw it happen in the matches I played. If it isn't damaged enough, it takes off with glorious graphics in play. If you do manage to destroy it, I'm told the debris falling down can really transform the match.
While all of this is going on, though, the weather is slowing turning from a beautiful day with powder blue skies, to dark, gloomy, and ominous. It rolls in regularly, transforming not just the on-the-ground graphics with hard pouring rain and wind, but it dramatically changes the lighting of the map, with lightning flashes lighting up the dark clouds, lights coming on in some builders, and tension growing. If you're in a plane or helicopter, you can actually fly above the storm and resume the dogfighting.
All of that bad weather tends to lead to a tornado on the
Orbital map. The tornado crawls its way across the map randomly, sucking up debris, players, vehicles, and flinging them around, into each other, and, far, far away. The tornado can destroy the rocket as well if it gets close enough.
While the oversized map and the weather effects are certainly the most eye-catching and noticeable changes that come with Battlefield 2042, they're not the only ones packed into this latest take on the game.
DICE also incorporated a slew of smaller, but still impactful tweaks to the feel of the title. The one I tended to use most was the plus menu, which you bring up by holding the T button on a keyboard or the left bumper on a controller. This brings up a sort of holographic menu that lets you quickly customize your weapon with different scopes, stocks, barrels, and underbarrel items. You can do this while hiding away or running across the map, though you need to be a bit careful, because once you let go of the button, your character swaps out the weapon in your hand with the newly revised one, leaving you momentarily weaponless.
By holding the B button on a keyboard (or both bumpers on a controller) you can call in a limited assortment of vehicles, including the game's striking robot dog, which comes equipped with a mounted gun, a fine sense of direction, and -- it seems -- a parachute. So while I'm not sure if you can pet this particular game's headless, gun-toting dog, I do know you can get him to jump from buildings and parachute down alongside you into combat.
In action, Battlefield 2042 is a cohesive shooter that deftly walks the fine line between all-out chaos and tactical warfare. There are moments when you can feel the strategy of a plan coming together, only to have a tornado whip your plans into the air.
Cresting a hilltop can reveal vistas of stunning gunplay, air-to-air combat, galloping robo dogs, and a distant deadly storm churning up the sea.
There is so much space in which to get lost, but you never feel more than a few feet from danger and likely death.
Perhaps most importantly, you get a sense as you play through this massive stage setting for a rocket launch, that there is more at stake here than the rolling ground and air battles. That a larger threat looms.
Hopefully, the game's focus on multiplayer, won't prevent it from digging a bit more into the story of these settings, and the curiously specific soldier non-pats who fight in them.
Battlefield 2042 doesn't just push the boundaries of what it means to be a Battlefield game, it also strives to straddle two generations of consoles without letting any player down.
To that end, Electronic Arts said that the standard digital edition for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S will include dual entitlement, meaning that it will play on both the last generation and current generation versions of the console. And all of your progress will carry over between generations.
The press play session took place on Windows PC, but the folks at DICE also updated everyone on what players can expect during the open beta for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
"The same dynamic world featuring an epic scale warfare will be found by all players on all versions of the game," said Battlefield 2042 producer Marie Granlund. "It's important for our players to experience the all-out war that the Battlefield faithful have loved for nearly two decades, regardless of platform.
"So let me stress this, whatever platform you play Battlefield 2042 on, you'll get the same features and immersive sandbox multiplayer experience stuff we've talked about since reveal, including all our announced live service updates."
That said, Granlund said this latest Battlefield pushes the limits of what the studio thought was possible in a Battlefield game.
"So to put it simply, there will be differences," she said.
In action, that means the player count on those two consoles will be 64, not 128, and will play at a "different visual fidelity and frame rate than its current generation counterparts."
"All of that said, we feel strongly that all versions of Battlefield 2042 will look and play great."
