Battlefield Fans Point Out 2042's Biggest Missed Opportunity

Fans of Battlefield 2042 are expressing their disappointment with the multiplayer first-person shooter’s lack of a campaign mode nearly four years after the game’s release. Battlefield 2042 has seen a big spike in popularity as fans wait for the official release of its successor, Battlefield 6, but all that extra attention seems to be causing players to revisit one of the game’s biggest criticisms.

After the two-weekend Battlefield 6 open beta earlier in August shattered franchise records, drawing in hundreds of thousands of players, a void was left in the FPS market that won’t be filled until that game’s launch on October 10. As a result, Battlefield 2042‘s player count has skyrocketed. Prior to the end of the second Battlefield 6 open beta, Battlefield 2042‘s monthly concurrent player peak on Steam was around 13,000 players, but it quickly rose after the beta ended, reaching an apex of more than 72,000 on August 26, and it has still reached above 56,000 in the last 24 hours.

Battlefield 2042 Players Are Still Missing a Campaign Mode

However, amid the game’s resurgence in popularity, some fans are seeing its lack of a campaign as a missed opportunity for expanding on its near-futuristic story. Reddit user ObeseMorese is one of the players calling attention to this issue, praising the game for its artistic direction and narrative framework, but lamenting that the story was largely pushed to the side in favor of more focus on multiplayer aspects. Battlefield 2042‘s lack of a single-player campaign is unusual for the franchise, and story elements like Florida being mostly underwater and much of Europe being ravaged by wildfires are things that fans wish they could have experienced from a more narrative-heavy perspective.

Instead of a single-player story, the lore of the futuristic world is unveiled to the player through Battlefield 2042‘s specialists, a handful of fully voiced characters who provide their own narrative perspective of the climate change crisis and its effect on the political instability that calls them into action. Multiple players have commented that they would likely have built up a bigger attachment to the specialists if they had an actual story to work through. Others are still upset about the specialist system’s implementation, including complaints that its replacement of a class system resulted in a feeling of fighting a lot of clones.

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Fortunately for players who are feeling put out, Battlefield 6 will have a full single-player campaign set in 2027, as a fragmented NATO goes to war with private military company Pax Armata. Set much closer to the real-world timeline, it will also likely be much more grounded in modern current events, but many fans still can’t get over the missed opportunity of Battlefield 2042‘s missing campaign.