Battlefield 2042 4.0 Update Made a Bunch of Secret Changes

The online community for any given game is filled with knowledgeable and invested players who are quick to notice even minor changes in-game. Accompanying the Battlefield 2042 4.0 update, a bevy of unlisted changes, tweaks, and fixes were implemented that the game's Reddit community is quickly uncovering. Many of these changes in Battlefield 2042 are significant enough that players are wondering why they weren't listed in the patch notes.

Battlefield 2042 suffered an extremely rocky launch, with a vast majority of players disappointed in this latest addition to DICE's long-running franchise of multiplayer first-person shooters. It carries an "overwhelmingly negative" rating on Steam, with players citing a multitude of bugs, performance issues, and balance problems. This is reflected in the Steam player count, where Battlefield 2042 has fallen below 1,000 players, a troubling number for a brand-new AAA game. To salvage the situation, DICE is focused on aggressively updating and fixing the game's many issues.

Users on Reddit have taken on the task of listing every "stealth" update in the massive Battlefield 2042 4.0 update, and there are at least seventy-five of them. Players have noticed that mouse and controller input has been adjusted to be more responsive, new ziplines were added to the Manifest map, and many animations were either added or adjusted. Minor balance changes have been included, such as a reduced area for smoke grenades and a reduced rate of fire for bolt-action sniper rifles. Visual fidelity has also been improved, with more realistic destruction physics and better-looking skyscrapers.

The official patch notes for the 4.0 update feature a very, very long list of important changes as well. Several hundred changes that affect every aspect of the game help prove that DICE is committed to fixing Battlefield 2042 and delivering a worthwhile experience. Battlefield 2042 Update 4.0 added voice chat and rebalanced the progression system, making ribbons easier to earn and increasing XP gained from support actions. Weapon attachments were also adjusted so that their effects would be more pronounced. General fixes have been implemented related to players getting stuck, floating items, and broken collision meshes.

Despite being a fairly comprehensive update with hundreds of changes both listed and unlisted, it may be too late to repair the damage. Three older Battlefield games are outperforming Battlefield 2042 on Steam, showing that the player base has already moved on to more polished entries in the franchise. The gaming community is understandably slow to forgive a poor launch since there are so many quality alternatives to choose from. With DICE already rumored to be working on the next Battlefield game, it seems unlikely that Battlefield 2042 will receive the necessary amount of post-launch attention that helped revive games such as No Man's Sky.

Battlefield 2042 is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.