'Battlefield 2042' Halving 128-Player Lobbies And Making Maps Smaller

I don’t know about you, but I’m honestly quite surprised that after everything that’s happened, EA DICE are still persisting with Battlefield 2042. Stop trying to make Battlefield 2042 happen, EA, it’s not going to happen. 

Well, you have to commend the dedication anyway. In a statement posted on their website, the devs have laid out a big ol’ plan, based on community feedback, to improve the gameplay experience, which includes saying goodbye to what many players have described as the “walking simulator”.

While you're here, be sure to check out some of the best Battlefield 2042 wins and fails below.

In short, the maps are huge - it takes ages to get from base spawn to flag, meaning you spend a whole lot of time just slowly going places. Fun! One of the main plans is to reduce this travelling time on current maps, by moving the spawn and flags so they’re not so far apart. It’s something, I guess?

One big change that’s currently being weighed up is the potential of permanently halving the amount of players in 128-player modes to 64, in an effort to reduce the “intensity” of matches: “We are presently reviewing if it makes sense to keep Breakthrough as 128 players vs 64, or if we feel that a reduction of the total number of vehicles that can spawn ensures that their presence isn’t as overwhelming, and gives infantry players a more important role,” they wrote. “Right now, we feel that Breakthrough on 64 players provides the best experience of Breakthrough.”

Not only that, but it sounds like the team are planning on making all future maps with these changes in mind, and could potentially be taking inspiration from older games in the series, too: “You can expect future maps to be smaller in scale than most of our release maps. […] We’re also thinking about changing the shape of the maps to give them more sense of direction,” they said. “We feel that going from a common Battlefield standard of a square shaped playspace, to a rectangular shape most commonly used in some of our older entries in the franchise can better incentivise pushing forward versus circling out sideways.”

Well, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and I think we can all agree that 2042 is significantly more broken than any of the older Battlefield games, so going back to the series’ roots can hardly hurt. At the minute, there’s been no actual timeframe given for when we can expect these changes to roll out, but the devs have encouraged players to share their thoughts and feedback over on the Battlefield forums.