Battlefield™ 2042 News

Today, we're excited to start outlining our future vision for the Class System in Battlefield.

The gameplay mechanics of classes and aspects that players have enjoyed most have evolved throughout the history of the Battlefield franchise. Our goal within Battlefield Labs is to test and refine the best aspects of the Class System from our history, and to evolve them into a cohesive vision for the future.

As we begin testing these class-defining systems, we invite you to either play, test or read along with what's to come for classes in Battlefield.

Let’s begin!

OUR DESIGN PHILOSOPHY FOR CLASSES

We envision the future of Battlefield classes to be a series of interconnected systems and fundamentals that shape your role on the field, while granting you the freedom to customize how you execute that role. Through Battlefield Labs play sessions, feedback, and data gathering, we aim to strike a balance between defined roles and player choice.



The Class System is defined by two main components: Customizable and class-defining.

The customizable components empower players to explore and push the boundaries of their roles within their chosen class while also still adhering to the expectations of the class.

The class-defining components are designed to enhance "pick-up-and-go" playability and reinforce the expectations of your class identity.

CUSTOMIZABLE:

• Weapon Loadouts: Fully customizable weapon loadouts allow you the freedom to play the way you want. Play to the strengths of your class by using your signature weapons, or easily switch to any other weapon to meet the needs of your squad.
  
  
• Class Gadgets: You'll have the option to carry two gadgets onto the battlefield, tailored to each class and its specific role. Recon aficionados specialize in intelligence and counterintelligence, with class gadgets including Deploy Beacons, Anti-Personnel Mines, and Laser Designators.
  
  
• Training: Our philosophy with Training is to offer a series of traits that can be unlocked during play to enhance your ability to perform your role. As you engage more in a match, you'll gradually earn flat-stat bonuses and more to support the effectiveness of your role further.
  
  
• Throwables: Our approach to throwables prioritizes enabling each class to effectively fulfill its role by providing tailored throwables.
  

CLASS-DEFINING

• Signature Weapon: Each class has a Signature Weapon category tied to their class identity, which, when used, enhances their role on the battlefield.
  
  For example, using our same ongoing test subject, the Recon class, if you select a weapon from the Sniper Rifle category, you will benefit from increased breath-holding duration. In contrast, an Assault player choosing from the same category will not receive this bonus.
  
  DMRs, Carbines, and Shotguns remain viable options, no matter your class, but don’t benefit from any Signature Weapon bonus.
  
  
• Signature Trait: Each class features a unique Signature Trait, providing passive bonuses tailored to optimize your role on the battlefield. For instance, a Recon player automatically spots enemies while aiming down sights, encouraging the use of weapons that complement this specialization.
  
  
• Signature Gadget: These gadgets are unique and singular to each class with an aim for you to always have access to a tool that fulfills the role of that class.Separate from what you may choose as gadgets within your loadout.
  
  
• Default Weapon Packages: The default weapon package is a pre-set combination of attachments and visual customization for each class to be combat ready, with the option for further progression and personalization.
  

What’s Next
The Class System and its individual components will be available for testing within Battlefield Labs in the coming weeks. Participants will be able to go hands-on with these features, discuss, and provide feedback.

Following further play sessions, we'll be back with another Community Update to unpack class components in more detail, and share learnings based on participant feedback.

Get Involved
Sign up for Battlefield Labs now if you’re interested in helping us validate the future of Battlefield. Read our FAQ if you’d like to learn more, and join the discussion on Battlefield Discord.

As a reminder, Battlefield Labs is a closed environment, and attendance is limited, but we’ll make sure to share to keep everyone updated!

Thank you for joining the discussion. We look forward to connecting again soon - see you on the battlefield!

This announcement is related to content in development through Battlefield Labs, and may change as we listen to community feedback and continue developing the next Battlefield title and beyond. We will always strive to keep our community as informed as possible.

Show you were born to survive as Dead Space comes to Battlefield 2042.

Hold the horde in Outbreak mode, where you'll fight off wave after wave of AI Geists and push through every sector to get to the extraction point. Your only goal: survive.

Look the part of a survivor and fully immerse yourself with a new Dead Space bundle, then tear through the battlefield with 2 new character skins.

Don't miss out on new rewards!

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In February, we announced Battlefield Labs as our most ambitious community collaboration in franchise history to validate the future of Battlefield. Today, we'll update you on our initial learnings and how we'll continue to scale testing into the future.

Across our four initial play sessions with a small group of core Battlefield players across Europe and North America, we’ve completed thousands of hours of gameplay, had hundreds of thousands of player spawns, and seen over a million environmental objects destroyed, including walls, windows, crates, and buildings your squad crashed the helicopter into. The players in these sessions have helped us successfully validate the following areas:

• Establishing a solid foundation for smooth, low-latency and high-performance gunplay.
  
• Finding the right balance in movement speed for functionality such as crouch sprint, combat rolling, and vaulting as part of our combat pacing initiatives.
  
• Using destruction to create fun and lasting tactical gameplay across rounds and experiences.
  

Exploring new ideas for the future and receiving direct player feedback continues to be a crucial aspect of the Battlefield Labs process. Even if some ideas never reach release, it helps us understand and refine elements that resonate most with players as we continue to build Battlefield together. It's been a valuable and exciting experience for our team and community so far, and we're looking forward to continuing that collaboration alongside you!

WHAT'S NEXT
Now that we’ve wrapped up initial server performance and stability concerns, we’ve validated a solid foundation for a core Battlefield experience. We’re now ready to continue scaling Battlefield Labs testing globally.

Throughout May, we’ll be inviting more players across Europe and North America, and will start to include select areas of Asia.

Alongside testing new content, we'll continue to iterate on our initial focus areas, such as balancing the different weapon archetypes and damage values, as well as movement and combat pacing mechanics.

Destruction also remains an ongoing topic across our play sessions. We’ll continue to test destructible objects across a variety of maps and fine-tune damage levels of surfaces.

Following Community Updates on gunplay and destruction, we'll be back in the future to talk more about classes and the all-out warfare experience.

GET INVOLVED
If you're excited to help us validate the future of Battlefield then you can still sign-up now. Read our FAQ if you’d like to learn more, and be sure to join the discussion on our Battlefield Discord.


Battlefield Labs continues to show us what is possible when our community comes together alongside us to collaborate, and we thank everyone who has joined us on this journey so far.

We’re looking forward to what’s next with you!

//The Battlefield Team

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Welcome to the 8.7.0 Update Notes for Battlefield 2042. Launching on Tuesday, May 6th, this update comes with various areas of improvement and fixes.

Our Dead Space will be underway May 6th and continue to run through May 20th!

//The Battlefield Team

Community Calendar
Discover various Community Events, Featured Experiences, and Double XP moments on Battlefield 2042 via our frequently updated Community Calendar.

Stay Informed
Follow us on Reddit and @Battlefield to stay informed on the latest news, and @BattlefieldComm for the rollout of updates and other live service changes. Join the official Battlefield Discord server over at discord.gg/Battlefield.



During this event, players will get to reexperience Outbreak. A 4-player squad PvE experience where you will fight waves of Augmented Targets. Starting on the western end of Redacted, players fight through eight sectors while completing objectives until they call an elevator to exfiltrate out on the far eastern end of the map.

[h2]Outbreak Areas of Improvement[/h2]
Dead Space skins were added to certain weapons when purchasing from the Armory Station; other weapons also have skins.
The starting weapons now have the Dead Space skin.
Enemies are now allowed to enter the extraction elevator while you're fighting over it. Players now also take reduced damage from melee and incendiary damage when inside the elevators.
Added a loading screen tutorial.

[h2]Outbreak Changelog[/h2]
Polished and improved the HUD.
Increased the time between Juggernaut batches.
Decreased the spawn rate for regular waves and added more time before Geists die at the end of the wave.
Updated Armorey Station arsenals by replacing the MCS-880 with the NVK.
Resolved an issue where players occasionally could not customize their character loadout before spawning in Outbreak.
Fixed a visual bug when closing the Armory Station.
Fixed a bug where both objectives in one of the sectors would have the same name.
Fixed a bug where the Armory Station icon would be visible randomly on the map even if no Armory Stations were active in the sector.
Fixed a bug where the extraction elevator doors occasionally did not close when the entire squad entered it.
Fixed a bug where Geists would show the wrong icon when pinged.
Rebalanced the Juggernaut-only waves to ensure the Juggernauts spawn first.
Tweaked the combat area to fix certain places incorrectly out of bounds.
Fixed a bug where players occasionally could not purchase new weapons after dying.
Polished and improved the HUD.
Fixed a bug where the "Push forward" HUD message would be visible on screen after respawning if the user died out of bounds in the previous sector.

[h2]Areas of Improvement[/h2]
[h3]Weapons:[/h3]
NVK-S22 Upgraded the pocket size on soldier outfits to accommodate more shells!
Buckshot: Pocket doubled in size to 20 → 40 shells
Flechette: Quiver stretched to 10 → 20 shells
Slug: Bucket tall enough to double to 10 → 20 shells
Developer Note: These changes are inventory-based only. No visual changes are present on magazine models.

[h3]AI:[/h3]
AI soldiers are now less effective at landing their shots with vehicle weapons when targeting fast-moving or direction-changing vehicles.

[h2]Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Modes:[/h3]
Stadium - Conquest Removed a small unintended out-of-bounds area between Sector B and the team HQs.

Exposure - Hazard Zone Some rubble was placed to block off a door that shouldn't be accessible.

Breakaway - Domination Reduced the vertical combat area in Breakaway Domination to prevent players from reaching unintended areas.

[h3]Maps:[/h3]
Removed invisible collisions above certain solar panels out in the farming fields on Renewal.

[h3]Vehicles:[/h3]
The vehicle deploy menu text was changed from “ALL DEPLOYED” to “UNAVAILABLE” to remove confusion about why vehicles can’t be spawned.
Fixed an issue with two C4 not destroying Bradley and BMP's weak side when using the active armor upgrade. This perk was not meant to protect against explosive damage.

[h3]Weapons:[/h3]
Assault Rifles
M16A3:
Fixed an issue where damage dropped by 1 point and rose again at a specific range. The M16A3 now maintains consistent damage across the full range interval (using the higher value).

AK5C & AN-94:
Fixed an issue where heavy barrel attachment didn't apply correct modifiers in hip fire.
Recoil penalty was slightly lower than intended; it should now climb ~15% more compared to the Vanilla barrel.

AN-94:
Realigned the rail for attaching scopes to the center for better alignment with the iron sight pin.
Fixed an issue where equipping a silencer to the AN-94 would affect how the GP-30 grenade launcher showed on the minimap when firing it. Now, the attachment should not behave as if it has a silencer on it, even if the primary gun has one.
Audio now correctly reflects the Hyperburst feature (faster first two shots in full-auto mode).

ACW-R:
Corrected the slightly misaligned laser on the LS-1 attachment, now gunfire does not start too far behind the lens and correctly shows where you’re meant to aim.

Shotguns
12M Auto:
Fixed an issue where the fire rate would be faster for semi-auto with a short barrel than in full auto. Now they are both set to the same fire rate.

Pistols
L9CZ:
Corrected the slightly misaligned laser on the LS-1 attachment, now gunfire does not start too far behind the lens and correctly shows where you’re meant to aim.

Melee
Taser Baton:
Fixed an issue where pressing the melee button once wouldn’t return you to your previous weapon, unlike other melee options.

And what’s a wrap for this Update Note, but as one final reminder - hold the objective, deplete the enemy score, and win!

This announcement may change as we listen to community feedback and continue developing and evolving our Live Service & Content. We will always strive to keep our community as informed as possible.