YMMV / Battlefield 2042

• Cliché Storm: Near-future setting where the world is a broken, resource-starved mess and only the USA and Russia exist now. Resources are scarce and everyone's fighting a war over them with vaguely current weaponry and drones. Granted, the plot isn't a major focus in this installment, but that's the kind of Excuse Plot that free-to-play shooters use, though the Refractor Era (considered by many to be the best era) didn't really bother with expansive plots either.
• Critical Dissonance: On release, 2042 received lukewarm-to-positive scores from critics, a stark contrast to the downright incendiary reception it amassed from fans. Funnily enough, despite even the more critical scores generally being above the 5/10 mark, there's significant agreement regarding the conspicuous absence of major features, technical volatility, and questionable design decisions, but while critics were more inclined to give overall favorable reviews (a general trend being that 2042 has good potential but is in great need of further support from DICE), long-term audiences were much less forgiving and shot the game down on sight.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The penguins, seen for mere seconds in the reveal trailer, quickly became the subject of memes and fanart just for being present next to an ongoing battle.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Sensor grenades and the Paik's scanner would combine to give players perfect information on enemy positions, a very big advantage. An outcry over Paik saw her scanner nerfed before the beta even launched, and the sensor grenade was both nerfed in distance and uptime as well as removing the 2nd grenade from the player inventory.
  • The most overpowered thing in 2042 at launch is the simple transport vehicle the Hovercraft. Its fast speed makes it extremely hard to hit with unguided anti-tank weapons, the easy to unlock grenade launcher obliterates enemy infantry and is only slightly less armoured than the tank meaning that it can survive hits long enough to escape. A hovercraft with driver and gunner can zip around the map looking for infantry, kill them easily and the only simple counters that don't involve it driving in front of multiple heavy vehicles are anti-tank mines, the C5 explosive or a fully anti-vehicle kitted out Wildcat with a sharp gunner.
  • The "God Gun" for infantry combat during the launch timeframe is the PP Bizon. In addition to having the much better bullet spread of the SMG class, it retains it's power over as long a distance as the poorly balanced assault rifle weapons, and has a gigantic magazine which is incredibly useful in a game where you might have two dozen enemy soldiers in an area to fight.
  • Once players had levelled up enough the Bolte recon vehicle took over the role of the Hovercraft. It had more armour, and it's 30mm automatic cannon was even more of an infantry killer than the Hovercraft grenade launcher. The Wildcat's 40mm gun was also very effective against infantry and the 57mm could snipe infantry while retaining it's very good anti-vehicle damage. This lead DICE to push a blanket nerf to the 30mm, 40mm and 57mm cannons in the 3.1 patch.
  • Jets with the anti-tank guided missile are devastating against vehicles. They can launch the two missiles with a single lock on and bring any vehicle to the brink of destruction in one pass. And then reload the missiles extremely quickly, faster than any vehicle will auto repair, turn around and finish the job. It takes an engineer with a repair tool to simply keep up with the jet's damage output, leaving them very little time to actually drive and shoot anything. In Battlefield 4 these aerial lock on weapons were countered by the active protection system for ground vehicles, a system that is completely absent in 2042.
  • Irish's APS-36 Shootdown Sentinel in Hazard Zone (pre-season 5). Grenades are automatically shot down when your squad is in the extraction zone, makes it less annoying to deal with enemy squad's grenade spam during the extraction process (as the squads are fighting for it). However, DICE nerfed the sentinel to have cooldown for 2.5 seconds after the grenades shot down.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The Hovercraft being able to drive right up the side of the skyscrapers. It has limited utility in-game as you can call them in on the roofs anyway, but the community found it hilarious.
  • Less funny for the people on the receiving end, but in addition to being able to call in a jeep or hovercraft onto the building roofs, you can also call in a tank or a wildcat. And aim the gun right at the elevators to instantly blast anyone who comes up in them.
  • The recon drone can get explosives, ammo or healing packs thrown on it. The explosives is not really a bug but is something the developers have wavered on allowing for balance reasons, but the ability to place the bigger ammo & heal packs is a bug.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Two years prior to the game's release, SIG Sauer submitted the MCX Spear self-loading rifle and the MG338 machine gun into the US military's Next Generation Squad Weapon Program, a program meant to find replacements for the M4 carbine and the M249 SAW. 2042 features the MCX Spear as the "M5A3", predicting that not only would the MCX Spear be formally adopted by the US armed forces, but would undergo three revisions, hence the A3, by 2042, though the in-game weapon by default is chambered in 5.56x45mm NATO, with the actual rifle's chambering for the proprietary 6.8x51mm / .277 Fury cartridge^note .277 caliber was a stipulation for all participants for the NGSW program, and they were all free to meet this stipulation as they saw fit. SIG's .277 Fury has the same case diameter and total cartridge length as 7.62x51mm, making it compatible in AR-10-type magazines while also opening up the prospects of existing .308 rifles in use by some parts of the US armed forces, such as the FN SCAR-H, to be converted to fire .277 Fury with just a barrel change, as was submitted for the NGSW program, being available as a mod accessible via the Plus system. The first part of this prediction would come true on April 19 2022, when SIG Sauer's offerings were chosen as the winners of the NGSW program, with their new military designations being the XM5 and XM250 respectively. Unfortunately, the rifle's name was changed to the XM7 in January 2023 to avoid trademark infringement due to Colt producing a rifle named the M5 carbine, marking another instance of Battlefield making a prediction that didn't come to pass. Whether it's still funny or not remains to be seen.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Some fans bought the game just for Portal mode since it lets them play remastered maps from 1942, Bad Company 2 and 3.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Legacy Features", is what DICE described various removed features from the game, like VOIP, a scoreboard and classes, and became a meme in the community to describe anything missing from the game.
  • 2042 cemented the meme about how the Battlefield community will despise the most recently released game with all its vigour and energy, screaming at the developers to make it more like the last one, to say it "killed Battlefield" for them, and suddenly turn around when the next one comes out to call the previously hated instalment an "under-rated gem" that DICE needed to use more features from, to the point where even Battlefield Hardline, widely considered the worst of the main Battlefield games was being favourably compared to 2042. Of course, the scale of the failure of 2042 makes it likely that EA course correcting back to a less divisive set of mechanics will see it be far more liked by the community than 2042 ever will.
  • Various quips from the specialists in the post-game screens, the main one being Angel's "Don't be sad, this is just how it works out sometimes."
  • "Brutal Expectations" became one when a communications staff member at EA tweeted about checking Reddit & Twitter and seeing fans angry that there weren't updates over the Christmas 2021 period, with a tweet saying "Love you guys but these expectations are brutal". It was clearly intended as a general observation about how the developers needed time to rest after pre & post-launch crunch in November & December and that communicating about changes & features will take time. It was misinterpreted by many in the fandom as Complaining About Complaining regarding features the community wants that aren't in the game. One comment that uses the meme on Video Game Dunkey's review of the game has 16,000 likes.
  • The player count on Steam became a meme shortly after the launch. The backlash against the game saw the community begin to gleefully compare the player count of 2042 with previous titles. Reached its zenith when the Steam player count on the 16th of February 2022 managed to hit exactly 2,042 players.
  • The "Tactical Beanie", which was a reward for the Angel character in one of the free weekly grind missions became a meme. It's basically the same piece of headgear that the Sundance character has in one of her skins (and is a callback to Bad Company), which the community latched onto as another example of DICE being lazy.
  • "Way ahead of schedule" was a recurring line from EA executives in early marketing interviews, to defy worries of a Schedule Slip. When the game released and turned out to be missing expected elements (see "legacy features" above) and in need of bug-fixing, disappointed fans started parroting the line.
• Narm: The victory quips given by the operators have been widely viewed as this, as they clash quite hard with the Crapsack World setting that the game is takes place in. Angel's line "Don't be sad! This is just how it works out sometimes." in particular falls head first into this trope for many.
• Narm Charm: This helped to drive interest in the game from the initial trailers to the launch of the beta as the trailers embraced the Refuge in Audacity of Battlefield multiplayer.
• Obvious Beta: The game launched with a myriad of issues & bugs that multiple early patches haven't completely stamped out. The ongoing issues were so bad that EA had to delay the first major content patch until the middle of 2022, eight months after the launch. In the 8 months post-launch for Battlefield 4 it added 16 new maps, more guns, vehicles, three game modes & dozens of assignments.
• Porting Disaster: While not as bad as the beta or the launch versions of Battlefield 4 and V, the PC version at release was plagued by many broken features or issues that soured the experience for a lot of people.
  • The "Direct X Function" crash to desktop is a variety of errors that occur seemingly at random for all kinds of systems regardless of what brand of CPU or GPU is in the PC. It happens immediately upon the game starting to load the main menu and has no fix as yet.
  • "Error Code 15-7A Unable To Load Persistence Data" makes it impossible to even get into a game. You just get repeatedly dumped back out onto the main menu.
  • Poor optimisation causes multiple issues with the use of system resources. For some people it heavily bottlenecks on the CPU, and for others it has trouble properly using both the CPU & GPU, causing them to stay around 60% utilisation with corresponding low framerates.
  • If you choose the "Text To Speech" option when starting the game for the first time there's no way to turn it off again in-game. You have to delete your entire settings folder or the game itself to get rid of it.
  • EA is running the game's servers using Amazon cloud servers, and have not provided any way for players to host a dedicated server or to rent a persistent server. This has lead to a series of major problems with the game.
    • Portal mode was immediately flooded with XP Farm servers to the point where players trying to host their own Portal game would see "Global Game Quota Exceeded" and be unable to create one.
    • In smaller regions like Oceania (Australia & New Zealand) the game servers are run from a single Amazon server farm in Sydney with quite low limits on the amount of servers locals can host. So in addition to the "Global Game Quota" error, joining one of the four DICE provided server types OR creating their own Portal server will often have it created somewhere in North America, giving them a 180+ Ping which is unplayable.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: In Battlefield 4, Irish got quite a bite of hate for his constant complaining and insubordination. However, the Exodus short film does redeem him by toning down his abrasiveness, showing him as a good father and being a hero to No-Pats. Also, the sudden death of Irish's actor, Michael K. Williams, before the game's release caused many to avoid criticizing the character out of respect for the actor.
• Sequelitis: Despite strong pre-launch hype, the game experienced massive backlash on release, quickly becoming the least popular entry in the franchise due to its buggy launch, poor performance, Specialists system replacing traditional classes and a lack of content. Early patches improved the stability of the game but the player base drained away incredibly quickly to the point where old versions of the game had more players online. It ended up combining the worst elements of the past games: the player-alienating mechanics of Hardline, the incredibly buggy launch of Battlefield 4, the tone-deaf character of Battlefield V and the delayed rollout of post-launch content that plagued Battlefield 3.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: The level editor Portal quickly became a fan-favorite for allowing player to mix and match levels, weapons, faction and vehicles of past game. Older fans love how the mode allowed them to play classic gamemodes like Rush on past maps from 1942 and Bad Company 2. Casual fans love how it allows them to play in more noob-friendly matches or party modes like gun game and infection.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus on the game as of 2024. While players agree that the game has made huge strides since release like better performance and more content, they still don't see much reason to play it over the previous entries.
• Tear Jerker:
  • With the reveal that it is set in the same universe as Battlefield 3 and 4, it continues the trend of Bittersweet Ending Overrides that 4 set by showing that despite the protagonists' best efforts, things continued to just get worse.
  • By the end of the BF4 Campaign saw Irish and Pac reuniting after the latter was presumed dead. By "Exodus", their friendship has soured: Irish distances himself from Pac, addressing him by his surname Pakowski, and only giving him a respectful silence after his death. Pac, meanwhile, accuses Irish of selling the US out by becoming a No-Pat.
• That One Achievement:
  • The T1 Mastery Badges expect the massive grind and skill dependent to your selected Specialist, Vehicle, Weapon and Gadget/Throwable (at least one per type), with anything pass T3 requires PvP (not with bots) matchmaking to earn the highest of the Specialist, Vehicle, Gadget/Throwable and 1,200 weapon kills to your badge's status.
  • Anything with Hazard Zone. Even if the players fulfilled the requirements (none of the squamates died and they are successfully extracted), the achievements/trophies can sometime glitched into frustration (if it doesn't pop, it must be at least 12 hours to take the time processing the status before attempting again).
    • Clean Exit for skill (avoid engaging enemy squads, mainly fight back on the extraction point), teamwork (for getting the data drives or not) and RNG dependents (where the enemy spawns and the helicopter extractions). What matter worse is you have to redo them again for earning on one platform to another platform(s).
    • Pack Rat and Escape Artist are annoying to extract (the former is you and/or your squamate(s) alive while extracting the data drive(s) to the helicopter; the latter is you^note and your squamates; excluding if you downed/died once the extracting helicopter is about to take off. successfully extracted 25 times). Since the enemy AI and player squads can flank you and your squamates easily (including with data drives on you and your squamate(s)' hands for the enemy's Data Drive Scanners), you never know why players got shot until the downed state. This includes the second and final attempt helicopter extraction, after the enemy sent light and heavy vehicles from the first failed extraction as harder to get into the helicopter.^note Fortunately after players obtained the achievements/trophies at least once on their first respective platform, it is less stressful to redo as it semi-shared the status by getting the extraction (yourself and a data drive) once more per platform.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Some fans were less than pleased with the new class system in which faction-specific, generic soldiers were replaced with the Hero Shooter trend of "Specialists". Some saw it as a blatant monetization attempt via selling character skins without regard to game balance.
    • This change meant that every specialist can use all weapon types and can equip traditionally class-specific gadgets. This lead to fears of balancing problems with players gravitating towards specific setups, certain specialists being overpowered and teamplay potentially taking a backseat.
    • The specialist system also created an issue of identical specialists on different teams with little differentiation. A common issue in the beta test was that there is no way to visually determine between friend or foe other than a small dot above them. After launch this was solved and thus is no longer a major issue in the community.
  • As usual in FPS games, crossplay between Console and PC players is a divisive topic. The common refrains being that PC players don't want to have console gamers with auto-aim which is considered 'cheating', and console players don't like being annihilated by mouse & keyboard PC players because PC users have vastly superior ability to aim quickly in close combat and better sensitivity in longer range shootouts. On the next-gen consoles and PCs this ends up being a moot point because the game defaults to crossplay on, and turning it off makes it impossible to get into a game.
  • Another sticking point is the exclusion of certain features that are considered core functions of previous BF games and multiplayer shooters in general. The biggest ones are the lack of a built in VOIP system, a server browser, and an in-game scoreboard a launch. While DICE has promised to add these features into future updates, fans also didn't appreciate how DICE referred to them as "legacy features", inferring that DICE never actually wanted to add these features in the first place.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Several fans have criticized the Specialist system as a copy of contemporary Hero Shooter system of games like Apex Legends and Valorant. The biggest complaint is that it replaces the traditional class system, leading to less cooperation and roleplaying with most players using meta weapons instead of class-specific weapons.
• Unexpected Character: It came as a surprise to see Irish and Pac from the largely-forgotten Battlefield 4 campaign in the "Exodus" short film, nearly a decade since 4 came out. Irish himself will be a Specialist in the main game.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: The setting in a near-future devastated by climate change and climate refugees immediately sparked discussion about the possible social commentary presented, only for DICE to deny that they were trying to make any political statements. Given what happened last time, DICE may just be playing it safe.

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