This week, DICE updated everyone on what was changing in Battlefield 2042. If you haven’t played it yet, the game is basically a hollow multiplayer experience. It’s multiplayer-only, so that’s really not fantastic. The only progression system is experience, and all the characters you play as feel pretty hollow, so there’s really not a lot to talk about when it comes to the game’s longevity. This is a major issue that most players had with the title at launch, but now it looks like we’re getting some sort of fix. However, I’m not sure the fix is going to be enough to pull the game back on track to being the Call of Duty killer it really should have been.
The big new addition to the game is Weekly Missions. There will be three each week, and by completing them all, you get a nice new cosmetic reward. It’s a small way to give back to players for the monumental effort they have to put in to actually enjoy the game, so I think it’s a step in the right direction. Other updates are all focused on Battlefield Portal, where players build their own matches and game modes, so there’s not much else going on in terms of the actual meat of the gameplay experience.
So here we are, we’ve got a multiplayer-only Battlefield game with a match builder and some missions to incentivise us into playing at least once per week. Is that enough? I’m always a bit perplexed by these sorts of additions because they’re so limited. The weekly missions are finite. They run out within the week, and then they’re gone. That’s great for a single player game where you need more ways to push the player to do things they’ve done millions of times already, but multiplayer games should add missions over the course of time, creating a bulk of them for players to work through as and when they want to play. This is how it works in Fortnite and Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier, so I think most multiplayer games should follow it. I wonder if this will see the player numbers in Battlefield 2042 pick up at all for the rest of the month while we wait for the next update.
