Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

EA ending Hazard Zone support in Battlefield 2042

EA announced that development is winding down on one of the new modes introduced in Battlefield 2042. Hazard Zone is getting taken off of life support, with future development being brought to an end as active player numbers wind down.

Battlefield 2042 | Battlefield Briefing - Development Update May 2022

The end of development for Hazard Zone doesn’t mean that the game mode will meet its end. EA confirms that the playlist will remain active within 2042 and will even have possible future critical errors addressed. However, things like future maps, content, and experiences won’t have any presence in Hazard Zone at all.

Related Videos
Battlefield 2042 | Hazard Zone Official Trailer

Hazard Zone features several four-player teams on one battlefield, tasking them with beating other squads to gather objectives called “Data Drives.” Since last year, many players have complained about the mode feeling dead. This is just one of many issues that Battlefield 2042 faced following its launch, and EA has clearly determined that Hazard Zone is no longer a mode worth supporting.

“All of us on the team had great ambition and high hopes for this new Battlefield experience throughout our development,” EA’s blog states. “But we’re the first to hold our hands up and acknowledge that it hasn’t found the right home in Battlefield 2042 and that we’ll benefit greatly from letting our focus and energy stay on the modes we see you engaging most with.”

While Hazard Zone is meeting an early developmental end, EA still plans to keep content coming to 2042. The blog confirms that more content, maps, modes, and core gameplay updates are the main focus of the development team going forward.

Editors' Recommendations

The best Final Fantasy games, ranked from best to worst
Final Fantasy X

While the role-playing game (RPG) has become a catch-all genre, now encompassing an almost silly range of games that don't share much in common, there was one video game franchise in the 1980s that was the quintessential RPG. Yes, we're talking about Final Fantasy from Square Enix.

The fantasy Japanese RPGs debuted on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1987, but they became cultural touchstones in the '90s as Super Nintendo games. From there, the series made an incredibly successful jump to 3D on the PlayStation 1 before the mainline series started to take more risks, including the elimination of turn-based battles and massively multiplayer online game (MMO) entries, and the latest game, Final Fantasy XVI, becoming a full-on character-action game.

Read more
Don’t start the Resident Evil 4 remake before playing these 5 games
Saddler looms in front of amber in the Resident Evil 4 remake.

Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 remake is just a few days away and the anticipation couldn’t be higher. After a wave of glowing reviews, fans of the GameCube classic are ready to have their heads chainsawed off all over again. That wait will come to an end on Friday, March 24, but impatient players may find themselves looking for a way to kill the time until then.

If you’re in the boat, or simply want to properly prepare yourself for the remake, we’re here to help. Part of the Resident Evil 4 remake’s appeal is the way it engages with not just the original game or the series’ past, but the 20 years’ worth of gaming history that would follow it. With a game as important and influential as Resident Evil 4, you don’t need to go far to see how it impacted the action-adventure genre. The remake shines because it’s seemingly aware of that idea, examining the original through a modern lens.

Read more
Atlas Fallen unexpectedly gives Forspoken some real competition
Two Atlas Fallen characters stand together in key art.

Atlas Fallen has the potential to surprise a lot of people. Although it's launching in just two months, we haven't seen much about this new game from The Surge developer Deck13 and publisher Focus Entertainment since its reveal at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2022. That's a shame because after going hands-on with an early build of it, I've found that Atlas Fallen has the potential to appeal to people who didn't like one of the year's most divisive titles: Forspoken. 
Atlas Fallen - World Premiere Reveal Trailer | Gamescom Opening Night Live 2022
Square Enix's open-world action RPG featured some neat ideas with its fast-paced magical combat and freeing traversal abilities, but many people couldn't get into it. While more focused on melee combat than magic, Atlas Fallen is a similarly ambitious open-world game that delivers satisfying movement and action that's different from the norm. That makes it a game that might scratch some itches that Forspoken didn't fully reach due to its heavily criticized writing. If it's not on your radar yet, you might want to know what Atlas Fallen has to offer.
Encouraged exploration
Based on my demo, I'm not fully sure what to expect from Atlas Fallen's mysterious story yet. The basic premise is that player was a person from the lowest caste in this world's society who was bonded with an ancient gauntlet. That gauntlet has an amnesic spirit named Nyaal living inside it and is now trying to save the world from gods that have left it in desert-filled ruins. The narrative wasn't a big focus in my preview build, though, and the script is full of jargon that probably will only make sense once I play more of the game.
A talking companion bonded to the player's arm and hand is already an unexpected narrative coincidence between Forspoken and Atlas Fallen. But neither game's story is the appeal of either to me: It's their fun traversal and combat that interest me. The few seconds of Atlas Fallen's sand-surfing and fighting in its Gamescom trailer caught my eye last year, and both lived up to the hype.
 
As I worked my way out of a cave at the start of the demo, I learned how to raise large structures out of the ground, surf across large patches of sand, and dash through the air with the help of my gauntlet. After I entered the game's open world, I could play around with all my movement options and found them to be a treat. Open-ended games with large worlds like Atlas Fallen can live or die on how satisfying they are to explore, and making movement fun is a crucial way developers can make traversal enjoyable.
Forspoken was able to capture some of that magic despite its problems, and it looks like Atlas Fallen has too. Of course, that's only one part of the game, as players will run into many enemy Wraiths and need to fight them. That's where Atlas Fallen's engaging combat system comes into play.
Satisfying combat
Deck13 and Focus Entertainment had yet to go into much detail about Atlas Fallen's combat before now, so I was shocked by how unique it was. The core combat revolves around attacking, dodging, and parrying, with weapons shapeshifting as you use them in different ways. It's faster-paced than I expected from a developer who previously made Souslikes, but it's the Ascension system that really caught my attention.
In between fights, players can equip their character with Essence Stones that buff or add abilities, assigning them to one of three tiers in the process. Once they are in a fight, attacking and defeating enemies causes players to gain momentum, which fills a bar at the bottom left of the screen. As this bar fills, or "ascends," players gradually gain those Essence Stone abilities, getting more powerful the more aggressive they are.
Ascending does come with a catch: The more momentum you build, the more damage you take. Players can counteract this by equipping defensive or health-related Essence Stones or using "Shatter" once an Ascension tier is filled to deal lots of damage and crystalize enemies for a short while. To succeed in Atlas Fallen, I needed to fight aggressively, but fights would quickly turn in the enemy's favor if I missed a crucial parry or dodge when I had lots of momentum.

This system gives each fight a push-and-pull feeling not common in action games. Most of the time, games like to make players feel significantly more powerful or weaker than everything around them; Atlas Fallen does both. This unique system hasn't gotten more attention and promotion, but it ultimately is what makes Atlas Fallen stand out the most at the moment.
There's something exciting about how mysterious this game still is to me, as that means there could be lots of surprises when players finally get to try the whole thing in a couple of months. It's shaping up to be an unexpected, almost accidental alternative to Forspoken. If you're still looking for an action-heavy RPG with innovative movement and combat gameplay ideas, Atlas Fallen should be on your radar.
Atlas Fallen will launch for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on May 16.

Read more