Battlefield 2042 Season 3 will add ‘3D spotting’ back to the game—sort of

Battlefield 2042‘s upcoming Season 3 update will add a new map, Specialist, tank, and several new weapons to the game, but it’s also bringing back one of the series’ most controversial features.

After going hands-on with Season 3’s launch content, I noticed that when I pressed the ping button (right bumper on an Xbox controller) on an enemy, instead of simply pinging the enemy’s location, it actually 3D spotted the enemy for the entire team. So are Doritos back on the menu in Battlefield 2042?

When I asked a DICE developer about this, they replied that the ping system is “getting an update that removes location ping and makes all pings contextual only [plus] adds spotting. This should give some responsiveness to the system and make information shared always relevant [and] less out of date.”

Community manager Kevin Johnson gave some extra context:

We are planning a significant rework of the Ping System. These changes are aimed at reducing the complexity of the existing ping system that we have in the game today, which should hopefully allow for improvements to the pacing and accuracy of communication between your teammates.

Pressing the ping button once will no longer place a location ping but instead check for targets in that area and place a ping in relation to that data it checks for. 

If a threat is within the radius, it will get pinged or spotted for a duration of time.

Spots are still shared to the team, while pings are shared to your squad.

We’ve made a few improvements around the system, to improve the speed of them and how long they remain etc. But that is the abbreviated version of the Update Note for 3.0!

While these changes to the ping system might bring back more traditional 3D spotting, Battlefield 2042 has featured ways to 3D spot enemies since it launched. However, DICE previously locked the ability to 3D spot with certain Specialists and gadgets. Now it appears that any Specialist can spot enemies for their teammates.

Whether or not this is a good change for the game is yet to be seen. Players will have to wait until November 22nd to go hands-on with the new content coming with Season 3. Before then, you can check out my impressions of the new map, Specialist, and weapons.

Battlefield 2042 is available on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.