BF2042 Competitive Conquest

Conquest game mode is Battlefield at its best. We want to bring this classic game mode back to the competitive community. It’s not as straightforward as one might think! We need to tweak some things and adjust additional rules to create a fluent gaming experience for smaller competitive matches.

Portal

Portal as a concept is excellent addition to the franchise. It gives great new tools for event organisers to create competitive game modes. Disabling assets from the server side creates excellent base for competitive gaming.

Unfortunately there are still several things Portal is lacking. Largest caveats from competitive point of view are

• Lack of proper admin features when a server is up
  • Can’t move players
  • Can’t switch sides
• No Spectatror mode (for live casting)
• On the Map rotation RU & US sides are fixedon server is fixed – Teams are always playing the same side of the map – unless the opposing team starts the server
• Can’t limit the specialist count per side
• Joining a server as a larger team is tricky (a squad of 4 can join)

Maps

The maps of BF2042 are huge. In portal you can use Conquest Small maps, but they are still big as they are designed for 64 players and the distances between the capture points are quite remarkable.

To keep the action going with lower player counts we would need to limit the number of flags the teams are fighting for. On some maps it would be possible to set a “home sector” for both teams. The home sector would be a dedicated sector for a team to capture in the beginning of the round.

For example, in Caspian Border the US team’s home sector could be the A sector (with only one flag A1). The opposing team is not allowed to capture this home sector that is acting as the base for the US team.

This way the fight would be concentrated in relatively small area around the three open flags.

Specialists

Walking away from the good old classes is a huge change from any previous Battlefield game. While many of the new specialists are fun and innovative it’s difficult to position them into the competitive scene.

Playing the game – even competitively – should still be fun, so I wouldn’t completely ban the specialists and their abilities. But there needs to be some limitations to balance the competitive battlefield.

Things like The Falck’s syringe pistol is not a problem, unless there would be a team  full of them.

There are also some specialists that just wouldn’t fit to the comp play – like the specialist Paik with the EMG-X scanner – what is practically a wall hack. Boris’s turret gun is also quite controversial with automatic spotting. I would put Sundance and her Wingsuit in “gray area” since it gives extremely big movement edge. Same goes for Macay’s Grappling Hook.

I would still like to see some of these fun Specialists and their gadgets in the competitive scene, but we would need to limit the number of powerful specialists and their capabilities.

Testing the setup

We have the first draft of BF2042 Conquest Rules and we are testing how it works. If we get positive results from our initial test we might have a test cup in January 2022. We will publish the draft setup and rules to the community once we have tested if it is viable to play conquest with current state of the game.