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Battlefield 2042 will fill its huge 128-player matches with “up to 64” bots, if there aren’t enough players.
In an interview with The Verge (via VGC), a spokesperson for EA confirmed that it “will be backfilling those servers with bots to keep games populated.” Furthermore, the company said that there isn’t a plan to allow players to turn that feature off.
Human players will take priority, and at peak times you may not encounter a single bot. It is worth pointing out that this is a feature in other online multiplayer games—Star Wars Battlefront, for example. But it hasn’t been employed at quite this scale before.
EA revealed Battlefield 2042 earlier this month, with a rather gusty trailer:
The description reads:
“Battlefield 2042 is a first-person shooter that marks the return to the iconic all-out warfare of the franchise. Adapt and overcome in a near-future world transformed by disorder. Squad up and bring a cutting-edge arsenal into dynamically-changing battlegrounds supporting 128 players, unprecedented scale, and epic destruction.”
Sadly, the new game will not feature a campaign. I was quite partial to the “War Stories” of Battlefield 1 and Battlefield V. They were like short stories, biting off little chunks of the war and chewing them over in small solo campaigns. Alas, the winds blow toward multiplayer once again.
Battlefield 2042 is out on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X / S, Xbox One, and PC on October 22, 2021.
