Why Battlefield 2042 Player Counts Are Lower In Hazard Zone

Why Battlefield 2042 Player Counts Are Lower In Hazard Zone

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Hazard Zone will only accommodate 24 or 32 players depending on platform, but seems designed for fewer players than Battlefield 2042’s lobbies of 128.

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Why Battlefield 2042 Player Counts Are Lower In Hazard Zone

Battlefield 2042 is gearing up for its release into early access on November 12, where players will get their first chance to experience all new game modes coming to the series. Early headlines following 2042’s reveal focused heavily on the increase of lobby sizes from 64 to 128 players total, but game modes outside of its All-Out Warfare offerings – Hazard Zone in particular – aren’t embracing the much-touted increased capacity. Hazard Zone is instead offering a different kind of Battlefield game mode, where only a maximum of 32 people will be in a single game.

For much of its history, Battlefield has maintained a game size supporting 64 players, at least on PC. Consoles finally had the chance to experience these full sized lobbies with the release of Battelfield 4 on the PS4 and Xbox One. In contrast, Bad Company 2 was designed to support 32 players per lobby, with its Rush game mode tailor made to take advantage of the smaller player pool. Though there are very few similarities between Rush and 2042’s Hazard Zone, they both operate on game mechanics designed to embrace a smaller player count than Battlefield’s traditional chaotic sandbox.

Battlefield 2042’s Hazard Zone will allow 32 players in a game on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, with PS4 and Xbox One players relegated to games with a maximum of 24 players. At a glance, Hazard Zone’s conservative scale seems an antithesis to Battlefield and what it’s known for. Especially with Hazard Zone being playable on every 2042 map, many might be concerned that the game mode won’t be as engaging as Conquest. Hazard Zone’s reduced player counts are a result of the game mode not really resembling any past Battlefield gameplay at all, and may have been designed to take advantage of 2042’s unique mechanics.

Hazard Zone Can’t Work With Normal Battlefield Lobbies

Why Battlefield 2042 Player Counts Are Lower In Hazard Zone

Hazard Zone will be very far afield of a normal Battlefield experience. Instead of dropping many players into a sandbox war zone, Battlefield 2042’s Hazard Zone acts like CTF for up to eight opposing squads that plays out in a set structure. Each squad is tasked with retrieving satellite data drives and making it to an extraction point while battling other squads and AI enemies along the way. There will certainly be freedom in how squads choose to approach the situations that Hazard Zone presents to them, but there is still a more concrete structure to the game mode than the wide open conflict that occurs in Conquest.

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Hazard Zone is intended to be a more tactical experience with higher stakes. When a player dies in 2042’s Conquest mode, their death is just one mark against the team’s 1,500 reinforcement tickets; dying in Hazard Zone means the end of the game unless a squad mate can issue a revive. The chaos of Conquest has an organic structure to it as teams move to capture the opponent’s objectives, but it’s not uncommon for players to be killed from somewhere unexpected. There’s simply too many Battlefield 2042 players when each team has 64 members to keep track of them all. Being unceremoniously killed by someone lost in the chaos of Battlefield is antithetical to Hazard Zone’s design.

Hazard Zone is essentially a retrieval mission with randomized encounters. The randomness comes from a variety of factors: spawn, objective, and extraction locations, emergent engagements with enemy squads, placement of AI enemies, and more. The intended gameplay loop for Hazard Zone would essentially fall apart if the game were filled with 128 players. Everyone only having one life to travel the map, survive, and complete objectives means each team will have to be careful to some degree and pay close attention to surroundings. Putting too many teams in one game would practically turn Hazard Zone into a battle royale mode, putting priority on killing to survive rather than surviving to fulfill the objective.

Battlefield 2042’s Hazard Zone Lobbies Emphasize Specialists

Battlefield 2042 has made the controversial decision to adopt unique Specialists in lieu of the series’ traditional class system. The Specialists are still loosely arranged into classes, but the openness of 2042’s load out system essentially makes the categorization nearly meaningless. Specialists could certainly be improved for the All-Out Warfare game modes, but they actually appear to be integral to how Hazard Zone is intended to operate. The limit of four squad members means team composition becomes a legitimate mode of strategy for Hazard Zone, rather than players more or less picking whichever Specialist gadget they find most fun.

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The need to coordinate Specialists will contribute to Hazard Zone’s emergent gameplay. Unless an overwhelmingly dominant meta becomes apparent, it’s unlikely that every enemy squad encountered in a Hazard Zone lobby will have be comprised of the same four Specialists. Following Battlefield 2042’s open beta, many have felt that Specialists detract from the series’ emphasis on teamwork, but Hazard Zone seems uniquely designed to take advantage of the Specialists by scaling back the number of players and increasing the number of opposing teams. In Conquest, one person with a grappling hook isn’t a big deal, but there can only be a maximum eight people with a grappling hook in Hazard Zone.

In a way, the Specialists seem to be implemented into Hazard Zone inversely to how they are in All-Out Warfare. For Conquest and Breakthrough, it seems as though Specialists were plugged into the Battlefield formula as an attempt to adopt some gameplay elements of hero shooters, or – even more pessimistically – as vehicles for monetized cosmetics. Hazard Zone, on the other hand, feels like a more concerted effort to include Specialists as just one aspect of the mode’s gameplay design. Hazard Zone is similar to Escape From Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown, but the Specialists help Hazard Zone form a unique identity. The smaller teams, and by extension the smaller lobbies, do more to accommodate the hero shooter elements inherent in the inclusion of character-specific abilities.

Hazard Zone may be smaller in scale when compared to 2042’s other game modes, but the change in lobby size is necessary to raise the stakes of the game and create Specialist-centric strategy. Hazard Zone likely went through rigorous internal testing before it settled on 32 and 24 player lobbies, with the developers deciding that the reduced player count helped the intended gameplay to excel. Though odd, the signature chaos of Battlefield seems antithetical to the type of game Hazard Zone is trying to be. Brand new objectives and restricted Specialist options in Hazard Zone might help it stand out as a unique offering in Battlefield 2042.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/battlefield-2042-player-counts-lower-hazard-zone/

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