DICE and Electronic Arts will roll out a major Battlefield 2042 patch on Tuesday, which will bring an important, long-awaited feature to the beleaguered first-person shooter: in-game voice chat.
The VoIP feature won’t work across an entire team, however. The only channel options are for parties and squads (which can have a maximum of four members). Given that teams can have up to 64 players, voice chat could get messy fast with that many people talking over each other. A proximity-based option might have been helpful for callouts, though.
While Battlefield 2042 players can use party chat features built-into their console or third-party services such as Discord, they haven’t been able to speak with teammates they don’t know until now. For a game like this, that’s a heck of an omission. It’s good to see DICE and EA finally correcting course.
Elsewhere, the 4.0 patch will overhaul weapon attachments to make many of them more distinct. It should be clearer to understand how switching to a different one will affect your weapon. Doing so might mean you’ll have slower aim-down-sights speed or more magnification for a scope. In addition, players will see the updated scoreboard on end-of-round screens.
DICE listed many other changes in the patch notes, including progression tweaks, map alterations, bug fixes and modifications to some specialist abilities. The patch will go live at 3AM ET tomorrow.
Looking ahead, the next patch is scheduled to arrive in May. DICE said it will fix more bugs and introduce other quality of life changes. Battlefield 2042‘s delayed season one, meanwhile, is expected to start this summer.
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