DICE and EA gave a first look at Hazard Zone today, the third and final major game mode Battlefield 2042 will have at launch alongside All-Out Warfare and Portal. The mode has squads dropping into each of the game's seven massive maps for a tactical and survival experience akin to Tarkov or Hunt: Showdown. This involves completion of objectives, surviving against other squads and AI, and finally, safety extracting.
When a match starts, the main objective is to collect Data Drives scattered across the map, and players can choose where they deploy to either go for risky but high reward locations or opt for a more quieter approach but with less loot. Other squads with real players and an AI-controlled enemy faction will be swarming these locations as well.
Each squad will choose a Specialist from the game's main roster to drop in with, and each player only gets a single life unless their squad mates can find a Redeploy Uplink, one of the bonus pickups that spawn around the map.
At a certain point in the match, the first extraction stage will begin, focusing all the action into a random location on the map. Getting out here means defending the location, and any hard-earned Data Drives, until the helicopter comes in. Missing this chance, squads will have to survival until the final extraction phase, but here, teams can also track each other for even more dangerous encounters.
While all this is going on, a massive storm is also approaching the map to serve as a cataclysmic match timer. The better a squad does in a match, the more experience and "Dark Market Credits" they will earn. The credits allow squads to gear up with better equipment and perks for other Hazard Zone insertions.
Each round will have 32 players on PC and current-gen consoles while 24 players will drop in on previous-gen systems. According to DICE, a Hazard Zone match can last between 5 and 20 minutes. Head here for a deep dive of the mode.
Battlefield 2042 launches on November 19 across PC (Origin, Steam, and Epic Games Store), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
