DICE has finally talked about the studio’s learnings based on the Battlefield 2042 beta feedback from players, and there’s a lot to take in. DICE talks about identifying an enemy among the sea of other Specialists, loadouts, and lots more. Check out the complete breakdown per section below.

• Related Reading: Battlefield 2042: DICE “Happy” With Player Movement, Abusable Movements to Be Toned Down

Battlefield 2042 Beta Feedback by DICE – What We Learned From the Beta:

Over the past few weeks since the Beta, we’ve shared some limited insight into some of the changes that are coming in time for launch, relative to the experience you had playing Conquest, on Orbital:

• Increased the number of Tanks that you’ll experience on Orbital. It’s up from 4, to 8 on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.
• Made changes to movement, adding strafe input to sliding, adding the ability to vault on moving objects, and toning down jump spamming.
• A nearby Grenade Indicator has been added.
• Entry and Exit animations are now shorter, with some being removed entirely.
• Elevators have been fixed so that you see less funky behaviours with doors.

But there’s much more beyond that, and we want to give you insight on the opportunities an Open Beta presents us when we invite the world to come and play an early look at our game.

• Firstly, we can test how our technical systems behave in the wild, bringing forward with us the learnings we had from the Technical Playtest in August, to ensure that the solutions we developed were successfully applied in the real world.
• Secondly, we get to compare the behaviors of how we see things behaving internally, with how they behave in the hands of you, the players.
• Finally, an Open Beta on this scale provides us with the opportunity to hear directly from you on how the game feels. There’s plenty of good discussion below covering some of our thoughts on the feedback that we’ve read, and seen shared and discussed across various Battlefield Communities. What we all appreciated seeing most was just how much joy you were having living your best sandbox life. We heard lots of positives about the gunplay, the fidelity, and the welcome return to our modern setting. We also heard plenty of constructive feedback around Performance, Team and Squad play, and the User Interface.

SERVERS:

• Bot heavy servers were too prevalent across those first few hours for many players. Too many of you were being dropped into games that weren’t being successfully backfilled, and left you fighting against Bots. Our Bots are designed as a good way for new players to learn how to play Battlefield, and to provide new options for veterans of the franchise to take new players under their wing and show them how to PTFO. Bots are not designed as a replacement for other players. Throughout the Open Beta, we were able to dedicate a great deal of time into looking at why the servers were sending certain groups of players into predominantly Bot populated matches. Our teams were then able to make real time changes to the behaviours of Matchmaking to ensure that servers were being stood up with heavy majority human players, and that appropriate backfilling was happening where we expected it too.
• We were also able to monitor the behaviour of Matchmaking and study why it is that players were sometimes being sent to servers outside of their region. With full appreciation that some players didn’t have the optimal experience, we want to thank them for persisting as it allowed our teams to breadcrumb trail the way back through our systems to understand why they were being sent out of their region, and experiencing higher pings than expected. We’ve ironed out a great deal of those creases in time for launch, and will be as agile as we were during the Open Beta in helping address anything new in real time during launch of the game.

USER INTERFACE (UI):

Our User Interface in the Open Beta wasn’t fully representative of the final experience. It was missing some essential components, some of which we disabled to remove debilitating (and now resolved) bugs, and some of which we chose to continue to focus work on for launch from when we branched in August.

Big Map as we refer to it internally, was disabled. Some of you spotted it in the Key Bindings, and many of you simply expected it based on past behaviours in Battlefield games. We have it in our builds today, and you can see it in action below.

You’ll be able to pull this up at any time during live gameplay, by pressing the View/Touchpad button on Console, or M on PC. It provides an immediate overview of where the battles are taking place, where your squad mates are fighting, and the live breakdown of how the flags are flying inside of each sector. We’ll keep you updated on when to expect this in the game, there’s a chance it makes it into the start of the Early Access start for 2042, and there’s an equal chance that we hold it back to make sure its inclusion isn’t disruptive to the performance of the game.

COMMOROSE:

The commorose was absent from the beta, but it’s in the final game. DICE has given everyone a look at how it works in the video below.

Outside of the commorose, the studio has made changes to how the compass works, as well as improvements to the ping system.

We want to ensure that you’re best equipped with the right tools to communicate with your Squad. As a further example with this, we’ve modified the default behaviour of the Compass that appeared whilst aiming down the sights. At launch, you’ll see that this is now always on, so that you have the ability to easily communicate with your squad on nearby dangers and opportunities.

We know that Battlefield plays best when you’re coordinated. In addition to our Ping System, the ability to quick tap an input to give contextual indicators, we have some great tools to hand over to you at launch. Ping wasn’t working as well as we would have liked during the Open Beta, but at launch, you can expect it function more responsively when you’re pinging locations, assets, and enemy soldiers.

HUD | Update UI (User Interface):

DIXE has moved the score events from the right side to the center beneath the crosshair, as it should be. Check it out in action:

DICE has also mentioned, “there were multiple scoring events related to Transport Assists, Spawn Support, Resupply, and Heal support that were absent in the Open Beta build. They’re in our full game, we’ll always reward strong teamplay in Battlefield.”

More info regarding colorblind settings and UI changes:

Over on the left side of the screen, the kill log is now more readable, with highlighted colors denoting friend or foe killed. There is also more appropriately sized messaging on the status of sectors and flag capture events. These changes help to prevent UI elements from diverting your attention away from the crosshairs, and the battlefield in front of you.

We’ve also performed significant performance passes on our colorblind settings to help support those with color deficiencies that were struggling to have the colors used across our UI properly distinguish themselves, and we’ll continue to take feedback on the application we have around this, and all of our final suite of accessibility options through live service.

A special note to close out this section on UI – let’s talk about the Critical Alert messaging which appears at key moments at the top of the screen. We hear you, it’s too big. We’ve reduced it in size, lowered the frequency of the alerts, and will continue to take feedback on it from you all once you get hands on with the full game.

LOADOUTS:

DICE has mentioned how players will have fewer gadgets to work with in the first 4-6 hours of the full game, which will make it feel more like a traditional Battlefield game.

For the first 4-6 hours in the full game, expect to be working with a reduced array of gadgets for your open gadget slot, with your journey through the ranks slowly introducing new ones for your loadouts. That traditional experience of a Battlefield game, where classes fulfill traditional roles is an experience that you graduate out of through the first ten levels. Your Specialists will have the options to choose from a Medical Crate, Ammo Crate, the Recoilless M5 Launcher, and our Repair tool as starting gadgets, and enable the experience of playing in ways that allow players to feel the benefit of playing in more supportive roles.

As you progress beyond those levels, you’ll gain access to more specialised hardware, and Specialists, that help to solve scenarios you can encounter, and we expect you to be regularly interacting with your loadouts on the deploy screen to react to the ever changing nature of Conquest and Breakthrough gameplay.

Loadouts are fully customizable. In the Open Beta, we set you up with four loadouts, that mirror that traditional class structure of Assault, Medic, Support, and Recon. They’ll be there at launch too, for all players as default, but there’s actually a much bigger suite of tools available to you to help speed up the act of switching to different setups, and let you get right back into the action.

From the Collections screen of the main menu, you’ll be able to define what your loadout is, and to provide your loadout with custom names that can allow you to quickly switch between your best setups.

PLUS SYSTEM:

Here’s an updated look at the Plus attachment system:

There are multiple slots per attachment type that you can assign different items into, drawn from an extensive pool of weapon specific attachments that unlock as you play more with the weapons. Anything assigned into slot 1, those closest to the centre, is your effective spawned setup. When you deploy with the weapon in hand, you’ll always be set up with your preferred attachments. This can be accessed from the Collections Screen on the main menu, and from within the deploy screen during gameplay.

SQUAD COMPOSITION:

DICE has confirmed that in the Hazard Zone mode, players will be locked to one Specialist type per squad, though the normal game modes like Conquest won’t have this restriction.

In Hazard Zone, we’re keeping things tight and deliberate on squad comp. Specialist selection will be unique, and we’re not running with duplicates inside the squad. In All-Out Warfare, we’re not using the same restrictions; we’ve been learning since Battlefield 1942 that our game just isn’t fun when you can’t play to your strengths, and there’s been lots of iteration done in this area in all of our games across the franchise’s history. In Battlefield 2042, you’ll enjoy the freedom of moving between the Specialists and loadouts that you need to support the Squad, and there are parts of the experience that we have in our builds today that help to reinforce that.

First, there’s our Insertion flow. Your squad mates will be shown your Player Cards, where you’ve got the chance to personalize, and flair it to show off your playstyles. There’s then additional time in pre-round, which was disabled during the Open Beta, to chat and make further changes to your squad comp so that you hit the ground running straight out of the gates.

END OF ROUND

Expect the best team players to be featured at the end of every match!

Better still, we’re celebrating our strongest team players at the end of the round in our full End of Round (EOR) flow. Again, this one didn’t make the cut for Open Beta, but expect that when the round wraps up, we’ll be paying tribute to the best squad players, and recognizing the contributions folks made to capturing objectives, reviving fallen teammates, and keeping ammo stocked up.