Battlefield 4 is getting a free map that was made largely with community input. The Community Operations DLC coming later this year, includes Operation Outbreak a jungle map created with the help of longtime Battlefield players and community testers. First announced in February, the project started by asking players to vote on a general concept, (mountain, desert, or jungle) moved on to helping developer DICE plan, test, and finally execute the map that will be featured in the update.
Enter the dense jungle to battle for supremacy in a valley with a medical research facility, an ancient temple, and a lush waterfall. The valley is infantry-focused with limited access, making the use of agile vehicles (such as RHIB’s on the river, quad bikes for fast transportation, and light attack vehicles) critical for success.
Assuming you’re not busy shooting stormtroopers in DICE’s Star Wars Battlefront, you’ll be able to experience the Battlefield 4 Community Operations DLC this Autumn.
Electronic Arts and DICE have released the Winter update for Battlefield 4. It contains bug fixes, further adjustments to netcode, minor map geometry changes, a new 5-vs-5 Squad Obliteration mode, and collision enhancements for player characters. It’s all good stuff, but buried in the list of changes is something that should make ground troops fear the skies again.
All helicopters have new more agile physics applied (you can do both barrel rolls and loops!)
From now on an upside down helicopter is not a sure sign of distress. That pilot could just be lining up for the perfect kill.
Battlefield 4’s recent Final Stand map pack release was the end of new content for the game, correct? Time to get ready for Battlefield: Hardline! Not so fast. According to Electronic Arts and DICE, the Final Stand, er, wasn’t so final after all.
With Battlefield 4 Final Stand released, we hope and believe that you will enjoy it together with the rest of the game for a long time. However, there is one thing we want to assure you: there is more content coming for Battlefield 4.
We will share details on exactly what this new content will be, and when it will arrive, in the near future. We understand that this may lead to even more questions about our plans, but rest assured that we’ll get back to you on the future of Battlefield 4 when the time is right.
The post then asks for players to vote on which past Battlefield maps they’d like to see “reimagined” for Battlefield 4. The survey lists possible candidates from Battlefield 2, Vietnam, 1942, Bad Company and 2142 as well as more modern installments in the series.
Electronic Arts’ E3 press briefing was full of bombast, but one game outdid them all with the promise of insane action. Dragon Age: Inquisition had severe people impaling each other with large swords. Criterion’s unnamed prototype racing game lets players wingsuit through towers and flip ATVs. Dawngate has lane defense and hero killing. Previews of a new Mass Effect game and Battlefront 3 had the promise of epic battles. The Sims 4 trailer had fisticuffs between a Jersey Shore reject and a grandmother. Battlefield Hardline features the most heavily armed cops ever commissioned blowing up buildings and killing robbers. But all of these were try-hards next to PGA Tour 15.
Not even the appearance of a virtually resurrected Bruce Lee in UFC could match the nuttiness of PGA Tour 15 which promises to give you “Golf Without Limits.” It’s powered by the Frostbite engine and has a naval warship from Battlefield 4 running aground and smashing into the golf course like Speed 2. Peter Moore told IGN that golf needed “rethinking” and “reimagining.” Drop Tiger Woods and add the dynamic event from Battlefield 4’s Paracel Storm map! Sounds like a plan. With explosions, maybe golf won’t be the screensaver for TV any longer.
The launch and subsequent weeks of Battlefield 4 multiplayer have been lessthanstellar. Glitches, connectivity issues, crashes, and weird exploits have plagued the title on all platforms. Although the most egregious issues have been addressed, the launch was something of a black eye for the franchise. It was bad enough that DICE promised to not work on anything other than fixing the problems. Meanwhile, EA is being sued by two separate firms over the damage the title may have caused to their stocks. In fact, EA’s investors are asking questions about Titanfall. There’s a lot of money riding on this next-gen game, and the money-men don’t want a repeat of Battlefield 4’s rocky performance.
In yesterday’s quarterly earnings call, EA executives tried to put investors’ fears to rest. Patrick Soderlund, EA’s executive vice president of EA Games label, took some time to address Battlefield 4’s issues, the lessons learned, and how EA and Respawn will apply that to Titanfall.
I’ll cover Battlefield 4, and I’ll quickly touch on kind of what happened, what we’ve done and how we’re learning from it? So on the first segment, the what happened part is when Battlefield 4 launched, it was a very complex game, launching on 2 entirely new console platforms, as well as current-gen and PC. We were pushing innovation heavily and we’re delivering 60 frames per second gameplay for 64 players plus the ability to connect via mobile tablet as a commander into the product, coupled those with some very innovative features in the gameplay side. Based on our prelaunch testing, our beta performance, we were confident the game was ready when it was launched. Shortly after launch, however, we began hearing about problems from our player community, and the development team quickly began to address the situation. So what have we done since we encountered the problems is we were fortunate to have an architecture in place that allows us to adjust and update the game rapidly, and that’s actually what we’ve done. We released multiple software updates across all platforms to resolve the primary issues and game stability has significantly increased. To the final point, which is how are we learning from this? The challenge that we’ve faced with Battlefield 4 were different from anything that we’ve seen before with other games. There were different issues that only manifest its scale in the post-launch live environment. We’re taking multiple steps to evaluate what occurred and incorporate those learnings into our development process for future products, so we don’t experience the same problems again. I would close on the fact that Battlefield 4 remains an amazing game with massive innovation, and we’re confident that gamers will be logging on to play for a long time to come.
They have their top men working on it now. Top. Men.
Battlefield 4 continues to have multiplayer issues across platforms even after multiple patches as noted on DICE’s official issue tracker. Players continue to experience problems connecting to servers, random desynchronization, hit detection, drops in framerate, and other errors. A new notice on the Battlog page notes that a special double XP event has been postponed presumably due to the intermittent connectivity issues.
The end of December 2XP event for premium members has been postponed and will be run at a later date. Stay tuned for more information. We apologize for the inconvenience.
The issues in Battlefield 4 have gotten severe enough that two separate lawsuits have been filed on behalf of EA investors.
What’s up Battlefield 4? Why are you so crash-prone? Why does every few online matches end with a hard crash or a failure? It’s been over a month since EA’s shooter launched and it’s still struggling with basic issues like stability. DICE released a patch for the PC, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 ahead of the China Rising map pack but even they admitted that it was only partly successful in addressing critical fixes.
It could be worse, I suppose. On the PlayStation 4, DICE hasn’t even been able to push out a partial fix yet. The PS4 patch, which was originally supposed to be published yesterday, has been pushed back to a later date due to technical issues.
Why do you make it so hard for me to love you Battlefield 4?
The Playstation 4 and Xbox One? Pish. Leave it to EA’s technical wizards at DICE, a Battlefield game, and a souped-up PC to rip the curtain back from the next generation. You can’t very well watch one of these skyscrapers topple — as carefully scripted as anything in Call of Duty, but with some secret ingredient that actually instills awe — without feeling like you’ve arrived somewhere you haven’t yet been. Unfortunately, the skyscrapers aren’t the only things that topple.
In most games, you’d just reboot at this point. But Battlefield 4 reboots itself often enough that you have to keep playing whenever you can. You can update your drivers when it crashes before the next round.
So far, I can report that the doo-dad physics in Battlefield 4 are top notch. As you’ll see in the above screenshot, the van that opens the second of seven single-player missions that constitute the campaign — basically, an extended tech demo for the Frostbite engine’s latest ooh-la-la incarnation — has a tiny T-Rex dangling from the rearview mirror. In the PC version, on an Nvidia GTX 770 using the just-released 331.65 drivers in Windows 7, the little T-Rex bounces and twirls exactly as you’d expect while the cutscene drives you through Shanghai. We haven’t yet run our T-Rex dangling diagnostics on the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, but we’ll keep you updated.
Battlefield 4 has a story according to EA and DICE. As seen in the trailer above, it’s something about gender integration in combat units, naval craft safety, and canine assault. Remember the story in Battlefield 3? I do. It was about yelling. Also, there was that time I was shooting at some guys next to a capture point while a jet got into a fight with a helicopter overhead. The jet flew too low and smashed into a tank. I respawned a few times. Finally, I unlocked a sight for my rifle at the end.
DICE plans to add a “test range” to Battlefield 4 to allow aspiring flight-jockeys to practice flying without endangering the team during an online match. The often-requested feature was revealed by Lars Gustavsson, the Creative Director of DICE, during an interview with IGN.
“We’ve definitely heard that people are afraid of getting in there [and using vehicles like helicopters] and that’s not our intent, so what we’ve done is, we’ve added a test range, which allows you to try out all the hardware ahead of time so that if you want to learn to fly a helicopter you can get in there and you can find the settings that work best for you. And then start doing some stunt flights just to feel safe before you go out and get the responsibility of a bunch of other people sitting in your helicopter, so I truly hope that this will help people feel more safe about trying out the whole battlefield.
Smashing your plane into the side of a building won’t have the same quality in Battlefield 4 as it does in Battlefield 3 if no one is around to laugh at your incompetence.
