This week's Battlefield 2042 update adds voice chat, hundreds of fixes and tweaks

Battlefield 2042 is finally getting voice chat this week, as well as somewhere around 400 tweaks, bug fixes, and balance changes. The VOIP update will be downloadable at 8 am UTC on Tuesday, which is 1 am Pacific, 4 am Eastern, and 9 am in the UK. There is no server downtime planned.

Back in February, DICE announced that Battlefield 2042's first season, which will include a new map, specialist, and a battle pass, would be delayed from spring to summer while the developer makes "extensive fixes" and adds new features, such as the voice chat system being added this week. 

The season one delay was a response to Battlefield 2042's woeful reception—its Steam user reviews remain "Mostly Negative"—but adding built-in VOIP was actually part of the plan even before Battlefield 2042's launch. The publisher told me in November of last year that voice chat would be added "ASAP" after launch.

One change that wasn't planned before launch was a redesign of the scoreboard. Rather than ranking every player in the server, Battlefield 2042's original scoreboard focused on squad stats. The team-focused angle was a nice try from DICE, but we are vain and want to know who has the best K/D ratio—a lot of players hated it. In early March, DICE replaced that new-style scoreboard with a more traditional one, and this week's update will make that full scoreboard viewable at the end of a round, another much-requested change.

The Battlefield 2042 4.0 Update notes contain more than 250 bullet points, and according to DICE community manager Kevin Johnson, there are over 400 individual fixes and quality of life improvements in the patch. A few more standouts:

• A persistent bug which blocks reviving when players are downed close to an object has apparently been fixed.
• The differences between certain weapon attachments have been made less subtle.
• Assists will be awarded more liberally.
• Bolte passengers should be easier to shoot.
• Numerous bugs and inconsistencies related to specialist abilities are addressed.

According to DICE designer Florian Le Bihan, the patch notes don't mention everything, including "changes to mouse aiming" that should make sensitivity work "similar to previous BF titles."

The next big Battlefield 2042 update is planned for May, and will bring "further quality of life updates and bug fixes," according to DICE. 

Also on the way are changes to Battlefield 2042's big 128-player maps. I like their spaciousness, but many players have argued that they offer too little cover and require them to make too many lengthy, perilous jogs between capture points. Last month, DICE proposed numerous map design revisions in a pair of blog posts, and said in a the most recent one that we'll start to see changes to the Kaleidoscope and Renewal maps during BF2042's delayed first season, with layout adjustments to the other maps coming in Season 2 along with "needed visual changes." As a precursor to those changes, this week's update tweaks vehicle distribution, although there's not a lot of detail on that change.

The next aspect of Battlefield 2042 that DICE will propose changes to is one that's been even more contentious than map design: the specialist characters, whose usurping of the typical class system has been a major source of anguish for Battlefield traditionalists.