New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Battlefield 2042 rolls out to everyone starting November 19, delivering not just three modes, but the potential to revisit some of the best Battlefield experiences plucked from Battlefield 3, Battlefield
Bad Company 2, and Battlefield 1942.
There's quite a bit to figure out when you drop into the game, so we're going to walk you through a few important highlights and, perhaps most importantly, dig into the meaty Battlefield Portal's custom mode creations.
Progress: First off, it's important to know that no matter what you play in Battlefield 2042, you're earning progress and unlocking cosmetics. All experience earned in any of the modes is universal. So if your main goal is to unlock everything, don't worry about which mode you're doing in, just drop in and have fun.
The Modes: The most typical Battlefield experience is Battlefield 2042's All-Out Warfare. It's here that you can play Conquest and Breakthrough with up to 128 players. (Keep in mind, the upper limit on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 is 64). The maps are glorious, and the addition of massive weather events reshape the landscape and experience.
Battlefield 2042's Hazard Zone is a sort of mix between the hardcore extraction found in Escape from Tarkov with the last-team-standing appeal of a battle royale. The time-limited extraction mode has teams of four battling it out against AI-controlled enemies and other players for valuable data drives.
The mode with the most potential in Battlefield 2042 is Portal. Hopping onto a website, specifically, this website, allows you to click your way through creating a custom mode for the game that pulls from 33 maps and then layers on a number of modifiers and restrictions. Finally, you can weave together some rather complex rules to totally overhaul your custom experience.
There's a lot to dig into with Battlefield 2042's Portal, both on the customization side and the playing side. We'll start with the latter first. When you drop into Portal the first thing you'll see are the mode's Featured Experiences, which are creations made and promoted by the developers and publisher. While so far these are relatively vanilla experiences, they will still allow you to quickly drop into matches that perfectly capture Battlefield 3, Battlefield
Bad Company 2, and Battlefield 1942.
If you're looking for something a bit more custom and creative, check out the server browser where you can search and scroll through the modes created by other players and populated in the Battlefield Portal server. A word of caution, currently these player-created experiences tend to be designed for experience point farming—something EA is working to crack down on. What that means is that you're likely to drop into a match that is really just you shooting an endless stream of low-powered, weaponless AI soldiers. Or, if you're unlucky, you'll find yourself in a server where you're the low-powered, weaponless soldier up against a handful of other players in the know and gunning for you.
Creating your own modes using Battlefield 2042's Portal actually happens on the website here. You don't even need to own the game to do it. Most of what you're doing initially is simply clicking through the website and making choices. So you'll choose the game mode you want to create, the maps you want in rotation, the weapons, gadgets, and vehicles you'll allow. There are also a number of modifiers you can tweak by simply clicking away on the options. This does things like turns friendly fire, extreme weather, and aim assist on and off. You can also control what the user interface looks like. Essentially, everything you see and do is customizable in the game with these options. But it's the final step in creation that really gives Portal its power.
As easy as clicking your way through a mode creation is, the Rules Editor is sort of the opposite. It's here that you can use a toolbar to build out scripting that modifies the conditions and behavior of the mode. There is a LOT here and fortunately, the Rules Editor is packed with help. There are also experience templates that you can load and modify if you want to ease yourself into the creation tools. You can also just skip this step if you don't want to dig into scripting. Hopefully, though, we'll start to see some truly creative modes popping out of this powerful tool soon.
Of course, if you haven't yet, make sure you pick up Battlefield 2042, so you're ready to hop in and play the day things go live for everyone.
