Battlefield 2042 is better with bots than humans

It’s a cartoon of war where one player and their occasional drop-in co-op buddies take down entire armies.

Malcolm Gladwell estimated in his 2008 book Outliers that it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert in a given field. 

I can promise you this: in 100,000 hours I’ll still be bad at Battlefield. 

Maybe it’s that I didn’t get in on the ground floor, when the players who now snipe me while somersaulting out of a helicopter and smoothly into a passing fighter jet were first honing their trade in Battlefield 1942. It could be that my time with Quake III, Unreal Tournament and CS:GO has created a kind of fundamental incompatibility with the pace, the spray patterns, the control points and scale that makes Battlefield what it is. Look, maybe I just suck. I haven’t ruled that out.

But in 2042, where tornadoes whip up at the slightest provocation, nations have fallen and unpatriated soldiers put their lives on the line to raise and lower little flags, I can catch at least a glimpse of what a brilliant Battlefield player feels like when they play. Because I play against bots.

This year’s installment is now generally accepted as one of the franchise’s weaker efforts, missing features its players have come to expect and the lacking stability required to make 128-player battles anything other than a messy ruck. In the eyes of some players, its quality on release is indefensible, and that’s reflected in a large-scale review-bombing which now sees the game among the worst-rated on Steam of all time.

I don’t entirely disagree, you understand. But I am having more fun with it than I did in Battlefield V, chiefly because of my new robot friends. 

In many online shooters, most of us aren’t the consumer but, instead, the product. We exist to make the highly skilled, leveled and geared-up players feel good. We schlub around waggling our heads obliviously in people’s crosshairs, trying to make sense of the morass of bullet trails and markers before us, hoping some map knowledge will sink in during each 45-second life spent sprinting from spawn to somewhere an enemy player has a bead on, feeling cosmically useless. But in fact, we’re fulfilling our role perfectly. Online games would be no fun for the top third of players without the bottom-two thirds to line their pockets from, padding their k:d, boosting their XP and unlocking weapon attachments we can only hope to snatch a peek at in a pro gamer’s stream. 

Intentionally or not – and one suspects not, as the same bots are used to fill its massive 128-player servers – Battlefield 2042 subverts that whole paradigm. One that’s been in place since Call Of Duty first introduced multiplayer gear-gating and killstreaks and gradually cemented the consensus that if you want to get kills, you’d better have played more than anybody else. 

Online I’m a bit-part. I’m the guy next to the guy who throws up on the boat in Saving Private Ryan. But here in the solo version of Battlefield 2042’s large-scale Conquest and Breakthrough modes, I make a difference. I’m the Leo Messi of clearing out control points, my lithe runs between objectives often proving the decisive factor in a round against so many intermediate bots. In the absence of a solo campaign this year, here is where I find my narrative adventure. It’s a cartoon of war where one player and their occasional drop-in co-op buddies take down entire armies.

Because of this, it doesn’t matter as much that these bots aren’t in the AP class of online shooter opponents. While their aim and aggression improve when you ratchet up the difficulty, their problem-solving and teamwork are the stuff of The Apprentice contestants. Often that lack of coordination makes them easy to outfox in an objective-based match. But sometimes, like a particular round at Hourglass that endures in my memory, their idiot savant quality emerges and they prevail. I’d taken all but the last point in this game of Breakthrough, striding through Charlie 1 and 2 like the god-king of near-future warfare. Enemies lay about my feet in droves by the time I’d taken Bravo 1 and 2. At Alpha though, a helipad on top of a skyscraper, they simply gathered in their dozens, and waited. 

I’m not proud of my conduct during the next 35 minutes, but what I can say is that upwards of 50 soldiers holding a helipad in ultra-close formation is pretty hard to beat. Humans would never arrange themselves in such a preposterously compact fashion, but these stupid little robots proved absolutely unbeatable by doing so. 

The first and most emphatically fired salvo against playing in this way is that victory is hollow. You haven’t actually outskilled or outsmarted anyone, you’ve just played to a standard slightly higher than an arbitrary threshold set by the AI behavioral programming. If it wanted to, it could absolutely crush you. It’s basically an aimbot who’s toying with you. When you beat a human opponent, on the other hand, you know that in the moment you were better than them. 

If that logic wasn’t sound, almost nobody would be playing on Battlefield 2042’s online servers right now. They’d all be running rampant on bot servers, claiming 300 kills in some virtual equivalent of looting a Foot Locker. Playing against other humans is a massive draw.

But so is being the ruler of your own domain. That’s the pull of every Bethesda RPG, every Ubisoft open world and every eye-dabbing Sony exclusive. You’re the single most important being in the universe, and the fate of everyone you meet hangs on you. By all means, spend four hours gathering herbs and leveling your alchemy. We’ll all still be here when you decide to sort out that dragon.

That’s the same sensation I’m getting from playing 2042 solo and in co-op. I know the hours I spend with it don’t add up to Gladwell’s magical 10,000, a time investment threshold required to become an expert online player, but they might be more enjoyable than the ones I’d spent online if already was an expert player.

Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.