Under the Hood With Battlefield 4

MojoKid writes "EA took the wraps off Battlefield 4 this past week, offering players a chance to try an early beta. AMD has also been talking up Battlefield 4 in combination with their new Radeon R series line with a vengeance, highlighting the features of its new Mantle API and close partnership with DICE, Battlefield 4's developer. Sometimes, enough modest changes evolve into an entirely new product, and when you factor in the tessellation improvements, terrain deformation, Mantle API support, enhanced audio cues, and better particle effects, that's what BF4 is shaping up to be. And it appears likely the game is going to be a premiere title across all of the current and future consoles plus PCs. Battlefield 4 is going to be closely watched for a number of reasons; Mantle performance, comparisons between the Xbox 360 / PS3 and Xbox One / PS4 versions, and, of course, on its own merits."

Comments

Generic Shooter X

[Stickerboy]

Yay! It's got prettier particle effects than BF3! Glad that's $60 that would be well spent. "The blood spatter will be even cooler now!"

Battlefield 3.5

[Anonymous Coward]

I played the beta quite a bit, but it felt much more like a rehash than a sequel, especially given the strategy they seem to be pursuing when it comes to DLC.

If it's like BF3, a lot of the special effects and "audio cues" they spent all that time on are made for selling the game (making it look like a hollywood war movie) rather than for playing it long-term or adding strategic depth.

Graphics are the LEAST of BF3's problems

[GodfatherofSoul]

Teamplay was obliterated in BF3 compared to BF2 and 2142. It's almost as if they intentionally removed the element that separated BF from CoD:

* No commanders, therefore no one directing traffic
* No commander assets and their perks
* Smaller squads
* No built-in voice chat, so communications are limited to text chats (and virtually ignored by most players).
* Point scoring now rewards individual play. You get 500 pts for winning where rounds can score you 20K points. In older BF games, losers got 1/2 points.
* They kept nerfing other vehicles (especially AA) to appease people who love flying jets while making jets far too powerful.
* The one thing I loved about BF2142 was there were no jets; just 2 gunships. This really balanced the air and anti-air.
* No real anti-griefing features (besides a high vote threshold) to deal with disruptive players.
* Same old hacking

EA said with BF3 "hey, how do we get the CoD players?" rather than asking the question "hey, how do we improve Battlefield?" Personally, I'm done with the franchise. Nothing more frustrating than trying to win a team game when 90% of players are stat whoring.

Re:Graphics are the LEAST of BF3's problems

[LoneBoco]

Did you mean this to be a reply to somebody else? This article is about BF4, and at least half of those complaints are fixed in the new game. Commander mode is back, squads are larger, there is in-game voice chat, you get a LOT more points for completing objectives, and air vehicles can easily be murdered via teamwork and RPGs.

Re:Graphics are the LEAST of BF3's problems

[Nemyst]

Playing Battlefield for the singleplayer is like getting Playboy for the articles. There wasn't even any singleplayer before Battlefield: Bad Company, only multiplayer maps with crude, terrible bots. The campaign was added later, probably at the request of execs to "compete" with Call of Duty. The BC campaigns weren't half bad, but BF3 went full Modern Warfare and suffered for it.

If your sole experience of the game is the campaign, then I'm sorry but you know nothing of the game. It's neither the draw nor the focus, and does not represent the rest of the game at all.

Re:Graphics are the LEAST of BF3's problems

[Ash Vince]

Playing Battlefield for the singleplayer is like getting Playboy for the articles. There wasn't even any singleplayer before Battlefield: Bad Company, only multiplayer maps with crude, terrible bots. The campaign was added later, probably at the request of execs to "compete" with Call of Duty. The BC campaigns weren't half bad, but BF3 went full Modern Warfare and suffered for it.

If your sole experience of the game is the campaign, then I'm sorry but you know nothing of the game. It's neither the draw nor the focus, and does not represent the rest of the game at all.

I have to admit, I fell for it :)

I have bought BF3 and BF:Bad Company 2 just for the single player. I ended up playing a fair bit of Bad Company 2 but I never really liked it that much. As soon as Black Ops came out I jumped straight in.

The thing with BlackOps and even more so with BlackOps2 is that it allows casual player to be halfway successful. You can join a server on your own and have a half decent game without being constantly murdered by some git in a helicopter or a clan who have forced your entire team back into spawn with concerted teamwork.

Games that encourage teamwork are all very well, but the problem is that financially it is a bit of a disaster for the company that make them if they get known as being filled with decent clans who relentlessly punish casual players such that they never get any kills.

When we had a solid clan playing BC2 on a friday night we would have the entrance to the enemy spawn constantly mined so as soon as they tried to get a tank out it blew up as we always had 2 engineers on. We also had a sniper, a guy on resupply duty (assault) and a few medics. We all generally put in at least an hours play a day as a minimum and had a few serving army peep in the clan to give us direction. If anyone joined the server for a casual game they got slaughtered and that simply cannot be fun.

So what a surprise, more and more games are now moving to the CoD idea where they use things like matchmaking, small teams, and nerfed guns to try and make things playable for people who only play a few hours occasionally as that is where the mass market is so where games companies make more sales.

highest point of the series

[Tifer]

was Battlefield 2142. I played all the Battlefield games starting at 1942, and I have to say it peaked with 2142. Everything since then has just been "post-2142" for me. Walker robots, commander-based teams, flying bases--that's all I need. That's all I ever needed, EA.

Re:highest point of the series

[danbert8]

The problem with 2142 and all the modern games is the experience and upgrades system. If you don't buy the game at release and play it hardcore, you log into the multiplayer server armed with a staple gun, and everyone else has a 50 caliber gattling gun. Good luck ever getting good when you are at that much of a disadvantage. In 1942 whether you logged in for the first time or you'd been playing a thousand hours, you've still got the same health and the same loadout. I agree team elements could have been handy in 1942, but it was a pretty early game in the massive multiplayer FPS and even the command points structure was newish at the time.