Battlefield 2042 has been through the ringer, but after a dramatic scaling back in scope and ambition, the devs at DICE are looking to get back to business as usual for the troubled multiplayer shooter. The game’s forthcoming season 2, titled Master of Arms, moves the focus away from game-wide shakeups in the interest of a good old-fashioned content drop.
Kicking off on Aug. 30, roughly three months after season 1 started, Master of Arms will add the new map Stranded which will bring players to Panama in order to do battle around a dried lake and a shipping vessel trapped in the muck. (Perhaps inspired by a real obstruction of the Suez Canal in Cairo?) Also joining the fray is a new specialist, an ex-arms dealer named Charlie Crawford. As far as characters in military shooters go, Charlie seems pretty basic, but he’s got a giant freaking gun and he talks like low-budget action legend Scott Adkins, so that’s kind of endearing.
In addition to new weapons and vehicles, Master of Arms will bring a bevy of new features to the Battlefield 2042, geared towards giving players a way to unlock season 1 content they may have missed and also expanding Battlefield Portal. These include Assignments, which DICE says are “a way to unlock weapons in All-Out Warfare which were previously only available within Battlefield Portal – starting with the iconic M60E4 and M16A3, with more to come in future updates. Players will also be able to use Assignments to unlock season 1’s vehicles, weapons, and Specialist if they missed out the first time.”
All told it seems like a decent, if run-of-the-mill, seasonal update for a multiplayer shooter. Maybe that’s not necessarily enough to lure new or lapsed players in, but for the stalwart Battlefield 2042 faithful, maybe some run-of-the-mill stability is welcome right now.