168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Battlefield 2042 is in the midst of an identity crisis. In an effort to stand out from its contemporaries, DICE has shifted the core sandbox to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:revolve around Specialists and chaotic encounters, inadvertently contorting the squad-based DNA that made Battlefield the franchise it is today. What’s strange is that 2042 also captures this very DNA with Battlefield Portal, a wealth of remastered content from past Battlefield titles that can be modified to yo෴ur heart’s content. Alienated fans have found solace with Portal, declaring it as “the mode that will save Battlefield.” As someone who’s spent many hours with Portal thus far, I disagree.
My initial impressions of 2042 were mixed. DICE’s changes to the core formula left me confused more often than excited. All-Out Warfare runs terribly as of writing, Breakthrough’s fun factor relies heavily on the map you’re on, and Hazard Zone just isn’t Battlefield to me. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:We compared🔥 it to Escape From Tarkov, only worse. Conversely, Portal was exactly what I wanted. I played on a ser💧ver that faithfully recreated Bad Company 2’s Rush mode. Arming MCOMs on Arica Harbor brought me right back to 2010. It plays just as well now as it did over a decade ago.
I thought, “Wow, Portal is fanꦚtastic, but I’ve played Bad Company 2 before. What other𒅌 experiences are on here?”
Let me show you what I saw:
XP farming servers, nothing but XP farming servers. People were using the powerful editing tools of Portal to make XP farms, not new experiences. It was a shock back to reality. Most of the community was going to use Portal as a playground to exploit 2042’s progression systems. DICE thankfully stopped this by disabling XP rewards from custom Portal servers, althou꧙gh that initial shock stuck with me.
I spent the next few days 16ꦅ8澳洲幸运5开奖网:toying with Portal’s creat𒀰ion tools. My first project was an attempt to recreate Air Superiority—effectively Conquest with jets only. That didn’t pan out. Booting up the Portal editor allowed me to select one of five game types to use as a base. Conquest was the obvious choice, but I quickly realized that Conquest does not support Portal’s logic editor, neither does Rush. Conquest only has a couple of jets for each ♔team, and Portal doesn’t feature any tools to modify vehicle caps—likely for performance reasons. Creatin🅷g a 64v64 server where only four players could use jets didn’t sit right with me, so I set my sights on alternative modes.
Team Deathmatch and Free-for-All are the only two modes that support Portal’s logic editor, akin to Unreal Engine 4’s Blueprint system or Google’s Blockly. It’s easily the most powerful aspect of Portal, allowing you to program a custom game type from scratch. But I quickly realized that not even the logic editor could salvage my dreams of playing Air Superiority with more than four players. Vehicles don’t have inherent support for TDM or FFA unless you force them to spawn on the map through a setting decoupled from the editor itself. Even with that option toggled, the logic editor offers no support for vehicles, absolutely none. For a franchise that prides itself on combined arms combat, this omission is just odd.
Air Superiority was a bust. Vehicle-only servers are a bust. OK, what about recreating Battlefield’s Capture the Flag mode? Unfortunately, that’s not easy either. Portal’s logic editor doesn’t feature any premade blocks for creating an objective, meaning you’ll need to make capture points yourself by manipulating vectors. Finding these vectors is a royal pain as well since Portal doesn’t have a proper map viewer. You’ll need to enter the map, find a good spot, record the value, enter Portal’s editor, add those values, then relaunch your server. Should you need to change an objective location, you n༒eed to do that all over again. And since vectors are map-specific, you can kiss map rotations goodbye. Objectives also can’t have UI elements associated with them—excluding message strings on the player’s HUD—so good luck locating a jury-ri🅰gged objective.
If that wasn’t enough, you can’t add any map geometry. Adding a physical flag to your map is impossible. The only physical thing 🧜you can add is AI. I don’t know about you, but creating multiple bots that act as surrogates for flags doesn’t provide the same experience. ‘Capture the Bot’ is not what I had in mind. Even if you rigged bots to act as statues, it wouldn’t work in practice since the AI ignores certain logic editor commands. Want to disable an AI’s ability to walk or adjust its view? It will just ignore your requests. These exceptions are on a case-by-case basis, so you’re ne🍰ver quite sure what changes will impact the bots on your server.
These issues are just the tip of the iceberg. Portal’s most powerful tool, the logic editor, doesn’t work with 2042’s staple game types. For the modes that you can edit with custom logic, critical features li💧ke vehicle tuning are missing. Features that do exist sometimes don’t work, such as disabling inputs for AI or triggering events while using a melee weapon (only under-barrel grenade launchers count as melee weapons for some reason). Custom PvP modes are all infantry-only due to the lack of vehicle support, and PvE modes are severely limited by 2042’s lackluster AI and inconsistent treatment of modifiers. Once 2042’s first Battle Pass releases, a surge of farming 🔜servers will likely appear unless DICE caps XP earnings—at which point, 2042’s progression and Portal’s offerings will be permanently decoupled.
Portal’s saving grace could🅷 have been merging the content of past games into one cohesive Battlefield experience. Yet even that’s limited since adding cross-era content to one faction requires the logic editor—something incapable of modifying Conquest or Rush. , DICE has no plans of changing this either. Battlefield 2042’s Senior Game Designer, Rob Donovan, had this to say 🐭when asked about logic editor support during a pre-release event for the game:
...stacking the rules editor on top of TDM and FFA is really the way to make those crazy game modes. As we said before there [are] no moving objectives, there’s no spatial component to it, so putting the rules editor on Conquest or Rush could create some really unexpected, and unpleasant experiences. So we do🅠n’t have any plans for that.
I hope DICE changes their mind on this soon because variants of Gun Game and gimmick modes aren’t going to keep 2042 alive for a year, let alone three months. Portal is going to need more tools and maps to reach its full potential. And when it does, if it does, Portal will give the community all the tools necessary to evolve this franchise in a way they see fit. Until that happens, Portal isn’t going to save 2042. It’ll merely keep it on life support.