the_Scarlet_one
Here we are 13 months later. Who still plays 2042, and is it in a better state than it was at release?
It is. But now there's one good map in the entire base game, and minimal functional weapons. DICE just keeps nerfing and buffing guns ad nauseum and they're in a constant state of broken. I had stopped playing entirely for months because it just wasn't fun. I put a few more shifts in after season 1 launched as the new map was actually pretty good. Not on the level of some older maps, but miles ahead of any other 2042 maps. I haven't played in weeks again. They launched one new gun with season 1 and apparently it was fantastic because that was all I got killed with, but I didn't even unlock the thing. I got one season 1 sparkle-party-hat-currency level away from it, but I haven't been back to the game in a while. I agree with what enewt said above, but on top of that is the constant incentive from management to make everything a grind with constant little charm-esque winnable and buyable assets that hopefully just keep hitting those dopamine receptors and keep players playing. I miss when you'd just get the main content from buying the game, but you spent time upgrading the guns. If people want to spend money and/or a thousand hours unlocking a gnome keychain for their gun, I don't really care, but I don't want to unlock 10 of those before I can use the only 2 guns in the game that work.
The launch maps are still horrible. Specialists are garbage and don't belong in Battlefield. There are no dedicated servers. There are no persistent lobbies outside Portal, which I have had a lot of problems with. There's no community behind the game at all because of all the other issues (but with no dedicated servers, rental servers, moddable servers, etc. why would there be communities?). DICE just makes one decision after another that screams "we don't care about the players, we just want to make quick cash grabs". I miss the DICE of yesteryear. They had some fantastic direction, art, creative designers, and an engine team that seemed unstoppable for a long time. Now...they don't even know how to put destruction in their own engine anymore or optimize the game for PC hardware. It runs like junk. The graphics are worse than BF:V and yet you get less FPS.
I was a massive Battlefield fan for most of my adult life. Now...I can't recommend anything DICE has touched in recent years.