DICE Outlines Changes Coming To Maps In Battlefield 2042

DICE's push to fix Battlefield 2042 soldiers on, and at this rate it might take until 2042 to hammer out all the issues. Today's blog post focuses on map design, which has five key components that need to be addressed: traversal, intensity, line of sight, paths, and cover.

The primary culprit for many of these is the 128-player battles that were a key part of BF2042's design. To accommodate matches of that size, the maps have to be bigger, which means it takes longer to traverse them, and the paths to objectives aren't clear. On the other hand, when there is an objective to fight over, there can be so many players crammed into a tight space that battles become too chaotic and messy.

The key takeaway that the dev team has come up with is that having "bigger maps doesn’t necessarily mean more freedom and playstyles, or fun." As such, you can expect smaller maps in the future, and a reduction in other elements, like sectors and capture points in 128-player matches.

Fixing these issues will take "substantial development time," which makes sense, since they require substantial changes to maps, and that's the type of work that usually requires several weeks or months of development time pre-launch. The fact that it's all going on post-launch, while trying to operate a live service, probably isn't doing anyone at DICE any favors.