Battlefield 2042’s first patch isn’t enough to make the game worth playing yet

Battlefield 2042 will get its first patch on Thursday, a day before its early access period ends and Electronic Arts officially launches the futuristic shooter. The patch contains a number of fixes for issues discovered during the game’s early-access period, which started Nov. 12. But Battlefield 2042 patch 0.2.1 — or Update #1, as the patch notes call it — isn’t enough to address the primary issues the community or our reviewer has with the game.

The patch will include a minor upgrade to the servers to help stability, as well as stuttering. Allies’ names will now correctly display when looking at them. EA and developer DICE will rename the offensive “Little Green Man” skin to “Gator.” The rest of the patch consists of fixes for bugs, XP issues, or consistency problems.

What’s more important to know about this Battlefield 2042 patch is what’s not in it. While the update will address some rubber-banding issues, it won’t solve the lag or hit registration problems that players are seeing. There’s still no gamewide scoreboard for players to track their team’s progress. This patch doesn’t add voice chat. And there are no balance changes here for vehicles — which have been dominating matches — or weapons. The patch also doesn’t touch many of the connection or data persistence errors that players are experiencing.

It’s still early days for Battlefield 2042; the game launches publicly on Friday. But while a small bug fix patch is no doubt appreciated by the community, the game is filled with issues in its current state — issues that will need more than a single patch to fix.

Thankfully, EA and DICE did announce that they have plans to release at least two more patches in the next 30 days. The first will contain more bug fixes, while providing concrete improvements to the game. The third patch will be “a larger and more substantial update,” the companies said.