Following many teases and some leaks, EA and DICE have now formally announced Battlefield 2042’s Hazard Zone mode, and it is not a battle royale (but also it sort of is).
In Hazard Zone, you play in a four-member squad and your objective is to locate and retrieve data drives that have fallen from satellites. You’ll scour the landscape for these drives as you fight against AI combatants and other teams of human players trying to do the same thing.
DICE says Hazard Zone is not a battle royale mode, as the objective is not strictly to kill other players but to escape with as many drives as possible.
There are two time-limited extraction opportunities during the match, and the extraction points are located on different parts of the map. You and your team can opt to leave during the first extraction, which happens mid-way through the match, or wait until the end for the final extraction. It’s riskier to wait, but you also have more time to collect drives, so the rewards will be greater. In any event, only two squads will make it out alive–or none.
Hazard Zone supports 24 players on PS4 and Xbox One and 32 players on PS5/Xbox Series X|S and PC, so that works out to six teams of four and eight teams of four depending on the platform. No matter what, only one player on a team needs to survive and extract for the entire team to win.
Hazard Zone has a meta-game element, too. Drives have values assigned to them, and collecting the drives gives you access to Hazard Zone-specific currency, called Dark Market Credits. These credits can be spent to acquire weapons, gadgets, and upgrades before matches.
Hazard Zone uses all seven maps from Battlefield 2042’s All-Out Warfare mode, and another thing to note is that each squad cannot have more than one of the same specialist character. Also, players who are killed can be brought back into the match through a revive system your team can purchase.
This just scratches the surface of what Hazard Zone is all about. Be sure to read DICE’s full blog post to learn lots more about Hazard Zone.
Hazard Zone is the third pillar of Battlefield 2042’s multiplayer-only structure, the other two elements being All-Out Warfare and the map-making suite Portal. Following a delay, Battlefield 2042 launches on November 19. For more, check out some stats from the 2042 open beta.
Source: Gamespot
