Battlefield 2042 Season 5 Pre

Aug 08, 2023

The Battlefield 2042 Season 5 pre-load is now live on PS4 (version 1.35) and PS5 (version 1.000.038), and this brings Season 5 into the game! Season 5: New Dawn kicks off on June 6 and we have the start times and official BF2042 Season 5 patch notes listed.

File Size: 6.9GB

For non-PlayStation gamers, patch roll out is: 8:00 UTC/4 am ET/1 am PT/4 pm HKT

What's new in Season 5?

Here is an overview of the new content in the Season 5 Update, alongside highlights for changes and improvements:

What's New?

New Map: Reclaimed

War has descended upon an abandoned industrial facility, slowly being reclaimed by nature in the Czechian region. Fight in and amongst derailed trains, abandoned turbines and warehouses as you work towards secrets hidden within the mountains.

The Crash Site, featuring the derailed train, is designed primarily as a vehicle combat area, with the Landing Zone an area of forest providing a circular area that will enable close-quarters combat and new sightlines opening up when trees are destroyed.

You may see the inspiration we’ve taken for the Abandoned Turbine and Military Warehouse. The indoor space of the Abandoned Turbine will enable crossfires due to its verticality and cover. While the Military Warehouse's floors will no doubt attract snipers and a range of gunplay experiences due to the narrow layout.

Hidden inside the nearby mountain lies The Bunker, forgotten and made up of a central room whose linear space will bring intense, short-range, close-quarters combat. In comparison to this, The Silos is another outdoor area set up for vehicle combat with its generous roads perfect for tank battles. Easy to spot due to its four towers rising up from the ground, The Silos also provides plenty of elevated areas for infantry to get a shot at vehicles dominating the ground.

New Weapons: BFP.50, XCE Bar, GEW-46

The weapons arsenal is expanding this Season with not only new weapons, but also further much community requested improvements to Vault Weapons.

BFP.50

The BFP.50 is a powerful hand cannon, giving you another sidearm that dishes out heavy damage at close range. Anticipated to become a highly popular choice due to its size, sound and power, we just know you’re going to love this updated version for The World of 2042!

GEW-46

The GEW-46 assault rifle offers high stability with short-burst fire. Great for the medium-range environments that you’ll experience across the Reclaimed map.

XCE Bar

The XCE Bar is a high-precision bolt action rifle. It has expanded attachment capability to accompany its stopping power, allowing you to quickly swap through attachment options to engage the enemy at various distances.

New Gadgets: Spring Grenade, Anti-Tank Grenade, Mini Grenade & RPG-7V2

Anti-tank Grenade

A bundle of grenades that will detonate on impact against vehicles while dealing substantial damage.

Mini Grenade

An anti-personnel grenade that can be thrown a longer distance, and after a short delay explodes across a small area.

Spring Grenade

An old familiar projectile behavior as seen before in the form of the S-Mine or Bouncing Betty. It operates through a spring-activated thruster to reach head-height altitude before imminent explosive detonation.

RPG-7V2

Veterans of the franchise will be familiar with this much loved gadget, and we’ve heard your requests to bring this boomstick through to All-Out Warfare from Battlefield Portal. With Season 5, you’ll now have access to use this fan favorite gadget however you see fit!

New Battle Pass

Season 5 brings with it two factions – one that's cutting-edge, calculating and professional versus a more survivalist group who are savage, independent and ruthless.

You’ll see this in the cosmetics available as you play through the Battle Pass, some of the best we feel we’ve ever brought to Battlefield! From Falck's ‘Regenerator’ Skin at Tier 0, to Dozer's ‘Overthrower’ Skin at Tier 100.

There's a whole load of items to unlock across 100 tiers of the Free and Premium Battle Pass including cosmetics, XP boosters, and the new premium Seasonal Booster! Additionally, those that were Year 1 pass holders will also receive an Epic Skin and XP booster during the first two weeks of Season 5, as a thanks for continuing to play.*

Lastly, we’re continuing to work on the game beyond Season 5. We are committed to continuing the Battlefield 2042 journey and are working through the best ways to bring new content and experiences for you all. Expect to hear more from us on what's planned later in Season 5.

Quality of Life Improvements

Vault Weapon Attachments & Universal Cosmetics

We will be adapting Vault Weapons for use with All-Out Warfare attachments during Season 5. To start, we’ll focus on Assault Rifles and Sniper Rifles with attachments for the M16A3, A-91, M416, MTAR-21, AEK-971 and the GOL Sniper Magnum. We’ll continue to provide attachment support for Vault Weapons in subsequent updates.

With Season 5, we will also be introducing Universal Cosmetics for all Vault Weapons, from Forest Multi-terrain (Unlocked at Rank 0) to Desert Technical (Unlocked at Rank 19) and more. You’ll now be able to decide not only the attachments and versatility of your Vault Weapons, but the look of them too. We’ll also be extending Universal Cosmetic support to Battlefield Portal!

Reworking Vehicle Loadouts

We’re restructuring vehicle loadouts to ensure their combat roles are clearly defined and to reduce prevalence of explosive weaponry. This will also add further readability on the battlefield to ensure you know what to expect from vehicles when you encounter them.

The restructuring of loadouts primarily focuses on our ground vehicles, and we’ll both remove and add weapons to each available vehicle loadout. For example, explosives will no longer be an option for all vehicles, and overall you’ll find more choice through a larger selection of weapons available to you.

Let's use the LATV4 Recon as an example of what that looks like.

The LATV4 Recon is one of the most used vehicles in the game, and having explosive weaponry readily available pushed it outside of its intended role as a transport. We’re removing all its explosives, such as the 30mm, 50mm and Grenade Launcher, and will replace them with anti-infantry weaponry instead.

Specialist Improvements

Dozer and Irish will receive improvements to ensure they provide similar gameplay experiences as others within their class.

Dozer

For Dozer we will be enhancing his movement and animations when using the SOB-8 Ballistic Shield. You will now be able to strafe, rotate and pitch with your shield more quickly than previously, as well as being able to traverse ziplines with your shield equipped! Lastly, we’ll also be including two new XP Events to reward further acts of teamplay when playing with Dozer.

On the receiving end when firing at his shield, we will be increasing its spread and introducing more bullet trajectory upon hitting his shield. This will ensure that during these encounters you still have a fighting chance, and at the very least, won't be as impacted by your own bullets as before.

Irish

Irish will receive a balancing pass to the capabilities of his APS-36 Shootdown Sentinel. We’re doing that by having it cycle through new intercept and recharge states alongside an added short cooldown, versus its previous always-on state.

We’ve also improved its audio, alongside adding new colors to help you identify which state the APS-36 is currently in.

Squad Management Improvements

Alongside the Season update we’re also adding improvements to the current Squad functionality.

Squads and Players

The Squad Menu is now separated to give you a full overview of all squads on your team. In this menu you can make someone else the leader, and see how many players or friends are in a squad. It also shows class icons so you know how to best complement a squad before joining it. And to add some personal flavor, leaders can also show off their Player Card Tag as the squad icon.

We also worked with the narrative team to come up with code names for each squad for that additional personal touch. One of our personal favorites is Gravedigger — surely the Gravediggers know how to PTFO. We definitely don't mess with that squad!

Create and Join

At any time you’ll be able to create or join a new squad directly via the Squad Menu. Previously you could only switch to a random squad, and only from the deploy screen. If you create a new squad then we’ve also added a short waiting period before other players can matchmake into your squad to ensure you can play together with your friends.

Easy navigation

The Squad Menu was created to make it easier and faster to manage and navigate through squads on your team. While before it was unclear when and how to change squads, you’ll now be able to do that at any time and with only a few clicks.

We hope that with this new improved Squad Management experience you feel that you have the control over who you’d like to play with during a match. Once this is in your hands, please stay in touch and give us your feedback about how you feel about it!

Later during Season 5 we’ll also add Squad Orders functionality which allows you to work together as a squad to receive increased XP rewards. In short, PTFO – and get rewarded!

Other Areas of Improvement

Damage Unit Functionality

As part of Season 5, you will now be able to decide if you wish to show damage units at the bottom of your screen, at the side of your crosshair, or not at all. This new functionality can be defined to your liking via Options > Display > HUD General > Damage Numbers.

Accuracy & Dispersion Changes

Since Launch, our Level Design team has been reworking our maps to react to feedback on cover opportunities, and traversal improvements. These changes have also resulted in alterations to combat distances, and our weapons were tuned for these previous distances and combat scenarios in mind.

Over time, this has resulted in feedback from you about several weapons being too accurate at long ranges without penalty.

With Season 5, we aim to address this gap with balancing the accuracy and dispersion of several categories of weapons. Assault Rifles from All-Out Warfare and their Vault Weapon counterparts will be the first to receive this treatment.

You will notice that the maximum dispersion has been increased by an average of 15-20%, and the weapons will now reach that maximum dispersion level when they reach half of the magazine while on full auto, and full spray mode!

This should encourage everyone to do smaller bursts instead of prolonged fire towards a moving target, and in consideration with the map rework should increase survivability at longer ranges to encourage further up close and personal combat.

We will be assessing your feedback to this change over time and continue to make necessary changes in future updates.

New Unlock Requirements for Lis, Crawford, Zain and Blasco

Lis, Crawford, Zain and Blasco will now be available as rewards as you gradually gain Player Levels through earning XP. Their previous unlock requirements are no longer available. Go get ‘em!

Camera Sprint Movement

We have made adjustments to the Camera Movement when sprinting in Battlefield 2042.

This change is meant to add physicality to sprinting by introducing more immersive camera movement dependent upon the type of weapon and sprint type that you may be using at that time. You will notice a different amount when using an Assault Rifle compared to an RPG for example.

We hope you enjoy this new sense of weight and body motion through the camera. For accessibility you may turn off the new motion in the accessibility options.

On top of that, there are also some golden rules to camera motion in FPS games that ensure your understanding of where you are in space, aligned with what the camera tells you, and we have taken the opportunity to improve that further by focusing on rotations rather than translations in space.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Aim Down Sight Field of View is now active for all players.

Normally a scope will adjust your field of view. With this option set to "On", the field of view will instead be taken from the field of view you chose in general, in your display settings. Some weapons will not be affected if they have specifically been designed to have a certain field of view that should not be changed.

Why is this important?

The amount of input it takes for your aim to move across screen space changes when field of view changes. Uniform Soldier Aiming calculates your aim rate to take the same amount of pixel distance on screen for a given physical movement of the mouse.

In 4.2 we set Uniform Soldier Aiming to On by default (see our Dev Note for further detail). Setting ADS field of view to On, ensures the consistency achieved by Uniform Soldier Aiming remains the same across various scopes since your field of view will not change when zooming.

Like Uniform Soldier Aiming, this will help to build muscle memory, which is essential to aiming in first person shooters.

Changelog

General Fixes and Options

Audio

AI & Soldier Improvements

Battlefield Portal

Specialists & Gadgets

Dev Comment: This change has been made so that each grenade will now have a set detonation timer, increasing the readability as opposed to a chain reaction style of play. Players will still be able to shoot a grenade with bullets.

Concussion Grenade

All Recon Specialists will now be able to use the Concussion Grenade.

We have also made substantial changes to how the Concussion Grenade works in a couple of areas, based on distance to the player and in comparing the direction of the player upon grenade detonation.

The effects of the Concussion Grenade are defined by Near, Far and Frontal scenarios. When it detonates within close range it will heighten the duration and intensity at the point of detonation. Beyond that near range, it will lead to a lessened duration and intensity. This effect is also decided and impacted by if the detonation takes place in front of the player.

Prox Sensors

Through telemetry and community sentiment, since moving the Prox Sensor out of the throwable slot and into the Gadget Selection field we have seen this gadget decline in relevance compared to the TUGs and other viable gadgets. We have made some adjustments to allow for the Prox Sensor to be an equally viable choice as part of your loadout.

Angel

Blasco

Dev Comment: We have made this change to help players in locating Blasco's X6 Infiltration Device, allowing for a better understanding of where to find the device that is blocking their spots.

Casper

Dozer

Falck

Irish

Sundance

Dev Comment: Sundance's Anti-Armor Grenade had poor readability which would result in vehicle players being unable to detect between an incoming missile or an Anti-Armor Grenade. Which resulted in being unable to react suitably with countermeasures. Going forward, the only time you will see "Incoming Missile" alerts is when it is actually an incoming missile.

Zain

Progression

Hazard Zone

Vehicles

M5C Bolte

CAV-Brawler

EBAA Wildcat

EBLC-RAM

Jets

Tanks

Vehicle Loadouts

LATV4 Recon

LCAA Hovercraft

EBAA Wildcat

MAV:

M5C Bolte

M1A5, T28 and EBLC-RAM:

Weapons

In other Battlefield 2042 news, DICE has confirmed that we’ll be getting Season 6!

Source: EA