Battlefield 2042 will host 128-player combat on PC, next-gen consoles Oct. 22
Planes, guns, explosions: Welcome to Battlefield 2042. (EA has made very clear that these are "cinematic" pictures, not captures from real-time gameplay.)
As part of this week's E3-like dump of game news and reveals, EA has announced one of its most unsurprising games of the year: Battlefield 2042. But don't get too excited. The word "reveal" should be taken with a grain of salt, as we don't know much about how the game will work-and we expect that EA will tease fans with a slow news trickle until the game's launch on October 22 on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.
For now, the game's developers at DICE have confirmed that the game is indeed a recognizable Battlefield title, complete with massive team combat, the return of popular objective-based modes, and aspirations to deliver the series' biggest battle arenas yet. I've been at Ars long enough to hear that very promise three times, and to its credit, DICE tends to deliver on an increased battling scope with every major installment.
The most significant change? The developer is finally-fiiiiinally-raising the maximum player count to 128 combatants on a single, super-sized map in the game's PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5 versions. The series has famously maxed out at 64 players since its very first entry, and over the years, DICE reps have explained away the limitation by saying that more players doesn't always mean more fun. But those statements largely came before a certain 100-player genre changed everything, and last week, DICE showed high-level pans of a few upcoming maps to showcase its design philosophy: providing discrete zones that teams can divide and conquer throughout, instead of lumping that many players into hallways of death.
Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments