One of the chief complaints about Battlefield 2042 so far has been the bullet spread of assault rifles, which kind of suck at range due to their erratic firing. I liked that assault rifles weren’t the dominant gun type in BF2042, but I knew this day would come: In Battlefield 2042’s second patch, releasing this Thursday, assault rifles and other guns will be made more accurate, and a bigger patch in December will make even more gun balance tweaks. DICE is also considering player complaints about the redesigned scoreboard, although it’s holding off on announcing specifics about its plan for “legacy features.”
In its big blog post today, the developer did reveal a number of specific fixes and changes coming in the next two patches, however, and bullet deviation is a small part of what’s changing. Starting with that issue, though, Thursday’s Update #2 will reduce all bullet spread while aiming down sights and moving, and reduce stationary ADS spread for “many weapons.” Bursts and single shots will also become more accurate, and the dominant PP-29 submachine gun will get more vertical recoil to make it less of a beast.
Thursday’s patch will also nerf the LCAA Hovercraft and MD540 Nightbird helicopter. I can’t deny that the hovercraft is overpowered, but I sure will miss the good times we’ve had with it so far. You have until Thursday to say goodbye to its nearly bulletproof rubber.
The other standout change coming this week is a fix for the bug that prevents revives when someone goes down near an object. That should please everyone, since it’s annoying as hell.
December’s Update #3 will be much bigger, with fixes and changes that touch every part of the game, including a few more gunplay-related tweaks. DICE says that an aiming inconsistency related to mouse sensitivity will be fixed by the patch, and we’ll see a nerf to the NTW-50 sniper rifle’s anti-armor capabilities and a fix for a bullet spread bug in Portal. The studio also acknowledged that aim assist on consoles is “not consistently behaving” according to the intended design, so that’s being investigated, although no specific fix has been announced yet.
That’s just a small portion of Update #3, which DICE says will include “over 150 individual fixes” to maps and will touch vehicles, guns, specialists, gadgets, Hazard Zone, Portal, PC performance, and the UI. Here are some highlights:
- Added a UI list that shows nearby players that can revive you within 50m when downed
- Added a UI list that shows incoming revivers when downed and pinged by a player that intends to revive you
- When low on ammo or health, nearby friendly players within 50m will now show a resource icon above their head indicating that they can provide you with health or ammo
- New official Vehicle Team Deathmatch template (Portal)
- New official Infection template (Portal)
- Rules Editor—Added the ability to detect what players were killed with in order to apply additional logic (Portal)
- Improvements to artifacts affecting DLSS implementation
DICE also acknowledged that some PC players are struggling to get the framerates they expect and are reporting a CPU bottleneck, although it doesn’t have a solution to announce right now.
“Identifying engine level optimisations and developing solutions will require a lengthier response time from us so that it gets done right,” said the developer. “Short term, we’ll be doing all we can to help offer performance improvements that reduce the load, and up your framerates where possible. We’ll keep you updated on our work through our Battlefield channels.”
Regarding complaints about the new scoreboard, which no longer compares the point totals of every player in a server, DICE says it’s got lots to say on the topic, but that it’s waiting until it can show us whatever it’s working on.
“End-of-match Scoreboard, Server Browser, and features like Voice Chat are big topics for us to cover all at once, and we have plenty we want to say around them,” wrote DICE. “We’ll come back to you when we have things that we can show to you, including details about our long-term vision for certain features and functions.”
DICE previously said that voice chat will be added after launch, but putting it aside with those other “long-term vision” topics, the specific changes coming before the end of 2022 address many of the complaints circulating among Battlefield fans who are disappointed by the new game. The patches won’t resolve fundamental disagreements over what Battlefield games ought to be, though. DICE isn’t changing its mind about replacing the old class system with specialist characters, for instance. I’m curious to find out whether the players who contributed to Battlefield 2042’s thousands of negative Steam reviews can be won over, or if the disconnect is too great. Personally, I’m enjoying the way Battlefield 2042 refocuses the series on scale, but it’s been an extremely contentious decision.
In the blog post announcing the patches, DICE includes a long but incomplete list of the changes coming in Patch #2 this Thursday and Patch #3 sometime in December—there’s a lot more than I’ve covered here. The developer also revealed that there’s another update which it’s “looking to deploy in advance of the Holidays,” but didn’t say anything more about it.