Battlefield 2042 is out now for those who pre-purchased the special editions, and players have been experiencing connection issues throughout its first hours. The error we've seen is "Unable to Load Persistence Data," which can appear while attempting to join a server or at the main menu while connecting to Battlefield 2042's online services.
"Unable to Load Persistence Data is a connection issue on our side," said the developer on Friday at 10 am PST. "We're on it, for now you can hit Retry and attempt to join a server."
By around noon on launch day, that first wave of server issues had started to recede, but if things go haywire again, Battlefield 2042 server status updates are being posted on the Battlefield Direct Communication Twitter account.
We're aware that many of you are receiving an error message while attempting to load into a Server, and then being returned to the Main Menu⚠ Unable to Load Persistence Data is a connection issue on our sideWe're on it, for now you can hit Retry and attempt to join a server pic.twitter.com/bDDN3DaIMENovember 12, 2021
Players are also seeing a "Global Game Quota Exceeded" error when attempting to launch custom Battlefield Portal experiences. Part of the problem is an overabundance of XP farming matches (you can earn a limited amount of weapon XP in Portal) and seemingly too little server capacity.
DICE knows about the problem. The developer said on Twitter that it has made XP farming modes less effective, and that it's "working to free up more servers" for Portal.
If you're having other technical issues with Battlefield 2042, the EA Help website may have the answer.
Because Battlefield 2042 isn't technically "released" on Steam (the release date for the $60 standard edition is November 19), we can't see how many concurrent Steam players it has. Those who bought the BF2042 special editions on Origin, the Epic Games Store, and consoles are also able to get in on the early launch, as are EA Play Pro subscribers.
New World is another recent example of a big multiplayer game buckling under launch stress. In that case, it was a week before things started to settle down, but its issues were fairly specific to MMOs: Popular servers were overloaded by players who wanted to be with their friends and clans. Battlefield 2042 will likely recover more quickly.
We'll update this article as the situation develops. When I can get past the "Unable to Load Persistence Data" error to play, I've been enjoying Battlefield 2042. We'll have a full review next week.
