Battlefield 2042 just held its first technical test yesterday, and although EA undoubtedly asked participants to sign an NDA, gameplay footage has started appearing online.
A post on the PC Gaming subreddit eventually got over 7,200 upvotes before it was taken down, and more footage can be seen in other posts circulating on social media. Most of them seem to be hosted by Streamable, and EA is doing its level best to keep them from staying online too long, but it's a battle that EA is losing.
On the one hand, this is a sure sign that fans are eager for Battlefield 2042's arrival, but on the other hand, this is still a technical alpha and it's certainly not putting the game's best foot forward. With EA's less-than-stellar reputation for releasing games in a half-finished state, DICE is likely trying to avoid the worst of it by only releasing gameplay footage that it feels best represents the new Battlefield. A buggy technical alpha certainly isn't it.
Related: EA Continues To Hint Battlefield Will Have A Free-To-Play Future
As Eurogamer notes, it's a really bad idea to upload gameplay footage if you happen to be one of the lucky few testers for Battlefield 2042. All gameplay has a watermark with a username and user ID, so EA will eventually find you and ban you for violating the NDA.
That said, there's at least a few things worth noting from the technical alpha. It appears Battlefield 2042 will use Easy Anticheat, which is the same anti-cheating software used by Apex Legends and Fortnite. Games feature up to 128 players and any free spaces are filled by bots.
Yesterday also brought us the Exodus trailer, reintroducing us to Battlefield 4's Kimble "Irish" Graves (the game's fifth revealed specialist) and how awful the climate apocalypse will be in just 20 years.
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