Battlefield 2042 Open Beta Preview Gameplay

Battlefield 2042 highlights and moments from the preview recording session I was invited to by EA.

Presented by Creator Network

I left the graphical settings set to HIGH and only turned off the camera effects like chromatic aberration, film grain, vignette, and lens distortion. Also turned off motion blur. I turned on the draw fps command so you could see what my framerate was with these settings.

Sorry about the fisheye FOV I was trying to set it to something closer to what I have in BF5 or BF4 however the settings menu is a bit incomplete or missing some tooltip text to explain the scale and setting's affect because the FOV ended up being way off. I didn't try spending more time trying to fix it because I didn't think I'd have a lot of time to setup and configure things and it turned out I was right about that. Had considerable matchmaking/connection issues for the recording session and it only affected some of us participating ( NA West ) so either I'd get an "unknown error" or get put into an empty lobby or with one other person and the rest auto-filled with bots. So I missed out on a lot of rounds and apparently all the rounds that had the tornado spawn and go through the map so you'll have to check out other people's footage of the event or just play the open beta yourself because it should be available now for anyone that pre-ordered for early access.

The clips I have that actually include players are short because of the issues I mentioned and the rest of the time I spent running around trying to find players and ignoring the bots.

Speaking of bots in this "beta" build. They are hit and miss, in that either you can completely ignore them and continue on your way or watch out because they'll insta frag you randomly. After playing a round with all bots except one other person I'm confident in saying that it's fine for offline stuff but backfilling online multiplayer servers is a bad idea. It's so unsatisfying to kill a bot especially in a game like this. Side note their behavior was sometimes interesting to document because it seemed like they had action trees and you could see when they would hit their set waypoints and continue on. They seemed to primary their grenade if they still had one ( hence the smoke and incinderary grenades ).

The whole character voice lines being shouted during actions like riding the quad are interesting but I'm concerned if they are also heard by surrounding players ( examples around 5:53 ).

At around 4:01 there is an example of really bad occlusion culling where the player exits the tank and you see his body ( player model ) fly in from the top right of the screen and then through the wall to be where he is after exiting the vehicle. Remember when I brought this up in previous video descriptions with my concern about occlusion culling and how players would be rendered considering they were upping the max player count? Well it looks like they didn't come up with anything new or some form of magic because they are still handling it the same way they did in BF5 as far as I can tell. There are a few other examples of this in the video and this was just from one to two hours of gameplay.

Some things to note about the robo-dog in this build. It can somehow get to the top of that tall building without being in the same elavator as you. Also it seems to count as a player or it looked like it did at some point because we cleared off the players from the capture radius and all that was left was the robo-dog and it still showed it contested until it despawned.

I had a few questions for them but still haven't received a response for any of them. The one I'm a little more curious about now is whether this would have been the same build we would have played in September if the game's release hadn't been pushed back. Because DICE developers explained that there are already changes between this build and the current/release build.

Regarding the rocket and rocket launch:

Kalle Nyström (DICE):
"It's vulnerable during the launch sequence (which is when the transport crawler arms releases the rocket) to player fire and rockets. This sequence lasts about 6 minutes, which is enough for one player to take it down if they want to. The other possible way is for the storm to make it's way past the rocket, which will also destroy it. Also to note: The rocket is invulnerable before the launch sequence during fueling (highlighted by the rocket and pipes leading up to the rocket fuming with cryo smoke) OR if it manages to launch, it will then always successfully launch into orbit"

They increased the tickets by 50% to give us longer rounds so that is a difference you'll notice when playing the open beta build.

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Outro tune "Rise and Fight" composed by Piotr Wojtowicz aka ThePianoMan007 :
   / fucer007  
https://open.spotify.com/artist/54yww...