I’ve always been a fan of the Battlefield series. All the way back to its beginnings with Battlefield 1942. It used to be that you were either a Call of Duty fan, or a Battlefield fan. You didn’t find many people that played both series. I was more drawn to Battlefield because of the vehicles. Battlefield 1942 was the first game that showed me the absolute hilarious mayhem that vehicles can bring to multiplayer gaming. My buddies and I would do crazy stuff like see how many of us would fit lying prone on the wing of a bomber. We would have death races in the jeeps that almost always ended in some insane crashes that tested the games physics. I can’t even count the number of times that I was laughing so hard that tears were streaming down my face.
Oh sure, the series has had its low points too. Battlefield 1 anybody? How about 2, or V? Uh, yeah anyway when I saw the announcement trailer for Battlefield 2042, I was thrilled. It highlighted vehicular mayhem, so I was sold. I played the open beta in October which gave us a look at Conquest on the Orbital map. It had its bugs and glitches, but overall, I enjoyed it. So, I decided to preorder the Ultimate Edition to get early access and play a week early.
I awaited November 12, early access launch day with great anticipation. I was excited to play different maps, Hazard Zone and Portal. The first few games I played during the day were fine, but when I played it on my live stream that night. I started experiencing the connection error that everyone was blowing up the web about. I had seen that the Battlefield Twitter account had tweeted about the error earlier in the day, and said they were working on it. They said the only solution at that point was to hit retry and keep trying to get into a game. It was taking me sometimes seven or even eight tries to get into a match of Conquest. Even more for Hazard Zone. While Portals seemed to work relatively well.
Error Code that most players experienced when trying to join a match during the first few days of Battlefield 2042 Early Access.
The Conquest matches I was able to get into were sometimes very laggy, and the server-side desync made lining up my shots impossible at times. I’d aim at an enemy player, fire, and then they would teleport away a few meters causing me to miss. Yet, I kept playing the game. A regular in my chat mentioned about four hours in that I must be having fun to keep playing through all the issues as long as I had been. I hadn’t really taken notice until the chatter mentioned it, but he was right. I was having fun despite all the bugs, lag, frame drops, rubber banding, and desync.
I was clear to me that Battlefield 2042 has good bones, and once these issues were fixed it would be everything that was promised. Besides, it is early access, and every Battlefield title has had issues at launch. Plus, true to their word the team at DICE was working on the connection errors, and they were much less frequent the next day. Now, four days since early access launched for Battlefield 2042 it’s running much smoother for me. It seems to be improving every day.
View of an oncoming tornado on the Kaleidoscope map in Conquest mode.
This isn’t a full review by any means. I will write that up after the official launch date of November 19th. In the meantime, I’ll see you on the Battlefield. I’ll either be on the ground begging for a defibrillator revive or trying to run you over with the hovercraft.
