This week's new Cloud Monday video is part 1 of playing Battlefield 2042 on PS4, via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.
It turned out i knew nothing of this game. i thought it was a traditional Battlefield game in that it would have a single player mode and a multiplayer mode. but from this video it looks like there's only online mulitplayer.
Apart from a cool opening cinematic, the rest of my experience with Battlefield 2042 wasn't great. there was no tutorial, it placed us into a game mode that resembled some sort of Dynasty Warriors Muso game. but with no context, i set of walking to the objective not understanding how large the map was. there was no tutorial on the controls. there were tiny icons with controls on them but when selected they had even tinnier text.
What was frustrating about this first mission we did was how un prepared for it i was. if i new there were going to be tanks, i wouldn't have picked a class that can't deal with them. i never found a weapon to deal with tanks either. it was weird that the game made us choose a class without really telling us what the class does or even how suited it would be for the map we're forced to play. it's an immediate example, and one that's repeated over and over in this video, of the game simply not giving us the information we need.
I have tried on 3 separate occasions 3 different Call of Duty games, Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 https://youtu.be/-F5LygJiO2U, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War https://youtu.be/Iudl4sz5Kd8, and Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile https://youtu.be/4PhpBH6yceQ, and all 3 games have the same problem with poor UI and a poor user experience. i don't know why Battlefield 2042 has copied this. what's weird is that there are great accessibility options presented to us before the game starts and then we're presented with some copy of the Call of Duty messy home screen and interface. it really made me think that the game isn't designed for new players, rather they set out to poach Call of Duty players by offering them a familiar experience.
Once i worked out that this was a multiplayer only game i set about to trying it. i picked a mode and after some waiting the game would connect me to a match. But it didn't. It says "Game Searching" so i understand what that means. then it changed to "Game Starting" but what happened next was not what i expected. instead of joining a game or lobby, it actually created a lobby for me and we have to wait for people to join. in this video, no one ever did. i don't know what region the servers are connecting to as that was never revealed to me. all i can say from this first video, or two, is that no one is playing Battlefield 2042 online. even with cross platform play enabled.
The stream held up fine and i noticed no issues with the video or audio. but this PS4 version was suffering from long load times, pop-in, and the image quality didn't feel 1080p, rather it felt a little soft and under textured.
