Battlefield is used to a bit of chaos - it's at the series' core, after all, with manic moments in its sandbox what makes it stand out from other shooters - but the disarray of Battlefield 2042's first weekend in the wilds has been hugely frustrating. Since Battlefield 2042 went live on Friday, I've endured hard crashes, server problems and whole nights where the whole thing is simply unplayable. This is another Battlefield that's launching in a sorry state, and it's up there with Battlefield 4's infamously sorry start. From my own experience on Xbox Series X, it's considerably worse.
A lot of that frustration stems from setting aside Friday night to get stuck into DICE's new shooter only to spend the whole evening butting up against a data persistent error that was, shall we say, persistent - across a whole night it was impossible to get into a single match of the All-Out Warfare that's the core of this new Battlefield experience, and only the classic matches and rulesets of Portal offered any joy.