Trailer - AKA 17 minutes of gameplay.

Frostbite 3 at work, utterly gorgeous.

Michael K. Williams from The Wire plays Irish, and from what's shown he does a pretty good job on the VO.

Rather gnarly in parts, one in particular.

Also, the MP412 Rex is back. Yay. I love that revolver.

Enjoy.

 

Saw it yesterday. Definitely very pretty. A minor step from the later maps in BF3, but it is enough.

Some other thoughts:

I'm disappointed knifing is the same as BF3. I miss the knife fights of 2142 era Battlefield.

Hoping the ridiculously quick health regen is a single player only aspect.

I don't actually care for the single player at all. MMS are too scripted to be interesting, with BF4 looking to be firmly entrenched in that scripted nature. I'd hoped EA had learned something from Warfighter. Sadly, no.

No blue tint on the visuals, which is nice.

Still an excessive amount of lens flare on the sun.

All in all, seems to be the most iterative update in the Battlefield series history so far. Vietnam was quite a bit different from 1942, BF2 was from Vietnam, 2142 from BF2, BF3 from 2142 and BC2. Hopefully this will be the game the devs wanted BF3 to be but ran out of time for.

I'd have preferred a 2142-sequel though. Titan mode was great. I miss Camp Gib too.

 

I won't be touching this no matter how good it is. I don't do Origin.

 

I didn't think the single-player in Battlefield 3 was anything to write home about, and I doubt Battlefield 4 will be much different in that regard. I think if they want to put more emphasis on single-player for whatever reason, they have to do something more than a fairly generic "fight da terrorists!" story that runs on quicktime events.

Besides that, I'm not seeing a whole lot of difference between this one and Battlefield 3. That iron sight on the side of the gun in addition to the scope was new I suppose, and I'm told that the graphics look a little nicer, but frankly I couldn't really tell with the sun glare distracting me.

I just upgraded my BF3 copy to Premium not even a week ago, so I'm in no real hurry to buy a whole new game just yet.

 

BF3 was introduced with singleplayer gameplay as well, so I don't think they're trying to put any extra emphasis on it. They'll probably give out more details about the multiplayer this summer.

Biggest differences I noticed:
- more natural coloring (less of the infamous "blue tint" from BF3)
- amazing water effects. BF3 water is pretty shitty, BF4 water actually looks and behaves somewhat like water
- the ability to free-drive vehicles in singleplayer (meh)
- slightly better textures/overall graphics
- better destruction

It's definitely an incremental update compared to previous Battlefield titles - they're reusing a lot of character models, weapons look to be generally the same, and several of the same vehicles are returning (off the top of my head, we've seen the VDV buggy, Venom, Havoc, and RHIB boat already) - but I'm kind of hoping for the "what BF3 should have been" angle as well. There are a ton of features that should have been in the current game that weren't included for one reason or another (Battlerecorder, in-game VOIP on PC, and official mod support, to name a few), so I'm hoping that by reusing so many models, they have time to put those features in.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the release that turns Battlefield into Madden.

 

I would do many things for a Bad Company 3, or even a BF4 with Bad company gameplay.

 

I haven't played Bad Company, how is BF3 worse? The games sound very similiar, although BF3 had a crappy campaign.

 

I preferred BF3s multi-player but the Bad Company campaigns are much, much better. Not story wise, because most of these sort of games' stories suck, but in terms of gameplay. Bad Company 1 and 2 featured large, and open singleplayer maps. Imagine something like Caspian Border but on single player, and with most of the map open for you to explore. It had secret weapons and stuff that you could find doing so.

But the main thing, and what I love the most about Bad Company is how the missions work. You're dropped in a map and given an objective, eg. clear out a base, and you can go about it in many different ways. Go in guns blazing, snipe from a nearby rooftop or find a tank or a helicopter and kill everything.

Also a much, much better destruction engine than the toned down BF3 version.

 

Did anybody else start the beta today? Besides being poorly optimised(low fps/stuttering at parts) right now I find it fantastic.

It feels and looks better than BF3, I like the changes to vehicle ammo and bigger cooldowns on flares.

 

Unfortunately I'm running Windows 7 32bit, so no beta for me.

 

It's a BF 3.5. It definitely looks great (makes my gfx card heat like a mofo), but it's basically BF3 with some new weapons, new maps, and better graphics.

Some of the changes are welcome though, like longer cooldown on flares.

That and I've always disliked the Battlelog feature, which unfortunately stays.

Not convinced.

So probably still gonna play BF3. The servers are still populated, and the massive waves of banning by PB and GCC ensure that we're playing a clean game.

PS : I also have a bad feeling about fairfight. IMO a stat tracking anticheat is bound to get plenty of good legit players banned. Then DICE will have to review the bans manually, which takes time, and money.

 

I'm torn on the longer flare cooldowns. Making them longer is great for maps like Shanghai, where there are tons of buildings to hide behind and use to soak up missiles if you have the skill. Currently, any half-decent chopper pilot is more or less invincible on a city map. It's also nice for jets because they have the speed to avoid locks and rarely need to flare on stigla shots.

This is going to doom choppers on the big maps though. They don't have the speed to avoid getting locked, and on a map without much cover (think Bandar), they'll have no way to avoid SAMs during the cooldowns besides flying below radar and praying they don't run into a tank or hovercamping at the edge of the map with zoom optics. I have a feeling that the second option will be the most popular, which sucks because the only counter is to have a better pilot on your team.

 

There's a lot of small changes which I like. Being able to run into a chair and have it move instead of it acting like a solid wall for example, or how the cargo attached onto vehicles moves independently of them, improved physics it feels more immersive.

 

So anyone playing this and willing to give a short Review?

I had high hopes for this but from what I gather it has massive problems. (unbalanced maps, crashes etc.)

 

That seems unplayable Jon. I'v about 30 hours on multiplayer so far and my quits are at 28.97%. (Which is still way too high as 95% of those are from crashes, most of which happened in the first 2 days of launch).

 

Before I begin, I'd just like to mention that I have nearly 1200 hours on BF3. It was a game that had a major learning curve to nearly every class, vehicle, weapons and piece of equipment. I loved it on the Xbox 360.

This lack of learning curve has to be one of the biggest faults of Battlefield 4: Every class starts out with some of the best weapons or equipment in the game.

The biggest would have to be the vehicles, but I'll get to that later.

Let's start with the Assault class. The AK-12 is a weapon that comes equipped with the arguably best sight in BF3 (Kobra) and is one of the most balanced assault rifles in the game. The starting player also comes with a first-aid pack and the standard M320 grenade launcher. With this set-up, nearly any player can run into the action and get kills with ease. Even if you're a bad shot, it's not hard to aim an explosive at the doorway in front of you.

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Next comes the Engineer. The starting weapon is the class-specific MX4 and it's a Personal Defense Weapon, while the carbines can be used with any class. This is odd, as the roles were flipped in the previous game, but not necessarily a bad thing.

It's not the weapons that make the Engineer class crazy, though. The MBT-LAW is essentially a fire and forget rocket that can reload in just over a second. A tank or other vehicle can't dodge, flare or repair through the overwhelming damage that the LAW puts down on them. Essentially, a map with just two engineers for any one tank is impossible to overcome. The damage output is just too high.

Some would argue that this is balanced out by the complete lack of damage an repair tool does to an enemy tank. In BF3, you could disable an enemy tank in under five seconds and kill them in about seven or eight. You can repair tool an enemy tank in BF4 until it overheats, do so again and on the third time you'll kill it. Compare this to the one-and-a-half tool cycles it takes to fully repair a tank at 1% health... you can repair a tank twice as fast as you can disrepair a tank. it needs a good patching.

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The Support kit shouldn't even be mentioned, as it's one of the most useless in the game. Kill to death ratios are so much worse in this game than BF3 that you generally die before you need a resupply. Worse, you get only a fraction of the points per resupply than you did in the previous game. More so, C4 is the very last equipment received while leveling the support kit. It means that you have to play a mostly useless class through to the very end for something you get as the very fist equipment with the Recon class.

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Mentioning the Recon class, it may be the most interesting of the four. Zeroing in allows a sniper to set the center of their reticule at either 0m, 200m, 300m, 400m, 500m or 1000m. Using your binoculars, which allow you to laser designate targets as well, the sniper can range out a target at distance, set to the closest zeroing distance and fire. The very first sniper you receive, the CS-LR4, comes with a 6x scope and a variable zoom that gets up to 14x. Add on a bipod and you have a sniper that can head shot at any range with good accuracy, visibility and decent power.

The re-addition of the C4 equipment to the Recon class is a bit ridiculous. It means that the most popular class in every Battlefield game once again has the easiest means of destroying vehicles. As I'll explain when reviewing the vehicles, tanks are the least likely thing to kill other tanks in Battlefield 4.

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The vehicles will take forever to explain, but I'll do my best.

No matter the vehicle, the lack of ammo capacity is just exhausting. Despite the ability to destroy most buildings in the game, you cannot waste your ammo on them or infantry. This means that your secondary CANNOT be an explosive like a guided shell or tow missile. You need a Light or Heavy Machine Gun for the infantry, so you can save your main rounds for other vehicles.

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The tank is incredibly underpowered in this game, both for the driver and gunner. The tank driver starts off with a primary AP shell, a secondary coaxial LMG, the IR flare countermeasure, zoom optics and the maintenance upgrade. The sabot round is faster than its AP counterparts, so it might be the best as a tank killer. With your gunner getting out and firing LAW rounds at the same time, the quickest shots should win.

Ignoring all secondary explosives, the HMG is the better of the three options for a secondary weapon. The LMG overheats too fast for too little damage, while the canister shell is a single shot that takes too long to reload and has an odd hit box. The HMG only needs three or four hits on normal and two or three on hardcore, so it can do some awesome damage in the time before it overheats.

When looking at countermeasures, the only viable option is IR flares. They have a ridiculously long cool down, but everything else is useless The smokescreen is useless, as it doesn't force rockets off target. It blocks your eyesight, and you still get hit. The Fire Extinguisher works once to let you keep running from a fight, but it won't do anything about the next hits that keep coming from the LAWs. The active protection requires you to time shots before they happen. Honestly, all countermeasures are useless for the most part. Their cool downs are just too long.

The gunner's issues really can't be helped. The proximity scan has a slow scan rate and a shorter radius, so the enemy will often be right beside you before the gunner can recognize it. Worse, each round of the gunner's .50 cal only does around 10 damage a round. This means that you need somewhere around 10 shots on normal to kill an infantry unit. The addition of multiple gunner optics is interesting, but zoom is still the preferred method for most.

Because of the ammunition issues, the lack of a truly helpful countermeasure and the slower proximity scanning rate, C4 and MBT-LAWs destroy tanks and IFVs far more often than AP shells, HE shells or rockets.

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The IFVs are murky water for me. I'm not entirely sure if I want to call them useless, though they are very weak at the start. It takes nearly three full cycles of HE rounds to destroy another IFV without any help, so you're basically useless against any other vehicle. Say you switch your light machine gun for the zuni rockets as your secondary; now you can kill other vehicles easier, but you are near useless against infantry after wasting your rounds. Essentially, Tanks, air vehicles and boats can all kill an IFV faster than it can kill them, unless the Infantry Fighting Vehicle destroys its ability to fight infantry...

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The mobile anti-air is something I haven't played in much, though I'll go through it anyway. The main weapon is a fast-firing 20mm cannon, while the next upgrade is a slower 30mm cannon that does much higher damage. The first secondary is a set of heat seekers, though the last two upgrades are by far better. The zuni rockets are powerful against ground targets like tanks or infantry, so it's probably the best secondary available. If you select passive or active radar, you'll be near useless against IFV or MBTs. IR flares is again the best of the options, with zoom optics and reactive armor.
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All air vehicles have the same issue: gyro stabilizers are necessary to keep in the air. This takes away the upgrade slot, so air radar or belt speed aren't viable options anymore. Worse, even with the stabilizers a single hit by a heat seeker or anti-air missile causes your vehicle to drop towards the ground rapidly. This means that flying between skyscrapers or close to the ground is asking to die. There's no such thing as below radar anymore.

IMPORTANT: Due to the way reloading works on heat seekers, gyro stabilizers and countermeasures, only fire ONE of your heat seekers at any target. This way, you can near instantly fire your next missile at them, destabilize their vehicle and happily get it out of the air with some well placed main-cannon fire. Otherwise, you'll be waiting somewhere around a quarter of a minute or more for your heat seekers to come back.

Scout helicopters are still powerful against ground infantry, though they require nearly twice as many hits as in Battlefield 3. This is still very powerful, as they were overpowered before. The ridiculous thing is trying to take out another scout helicopter. It takes THREE full cycles of 7.62 miniguns to take down another helicopter, so essentially it's useless to battle other air vehicles with the scout helicopter until you get heat seekers or a laser guided rocket. IR flares are necessary, as the ECM jammer is broken and the extinguisher is useless. IR flares give you a couple seconds where they cannot lock on again, and you can escape.

Attack helicopters are very different from their BF3 predecessor. Given the ammo capacity, you have to be sparing with all ammo. The gunner does little damage with the 30mm, the swivel turret can't aim nearly as high and the secondary weapons have limited ammo. More so, the TV missile that was basically the one-hit skill shot of BF3 is now utterly useless. I hit another helicopter TWICE with it and didn't blow it up. Hilarious. Like other air vehicles, the only countermeasure worth anything is the IR flare. Still, flying down to fight infantry is an awful idea because your flares sometimes fail, your stability goes out and... boom. Instant bad news that you can't control with piloting skill.

Jets are probably the best air vehicle in this game, though that's no surprise for anyone who knows DICE games. The primary weapon is the 30mm GAU cannon, which cannot be changed. This is fine, as the cannon is super overpowered. You can disable any vehicle with one full belt of rounds, while you can near instant kill other jets or scout helicopters with a good shot. Your vehicle also comes with a laser-guided missile that requires a constant lock to hit its target, but it does constant top-fire damage. The heat-seekers are useful, though only against other air vehicles. The best secondary is probably the hydra rockets. They do high damage to air, ground and infantry so are the most versatile.

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The boats are the last thing to talk about and are probably the most awesome addition to this game. While only two maps have the attack boat available, they are awesome to play from the very beginning. The primary 25mm cannon is fun to use, though the burst cannon is by far superior. It can rock pretty much anything with the addition of the secondary weapon. Though you start with a TOW missile, the zuni rockets are what you want. They allow for the most damage between reloads of the burst cannon. Add on IR flares, zoom optics and belt feeder... your attack boat is a damn monster.

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TL;DR The LAW is overpowered to the extreme, air and ground vehicles are underpowered, snipers are interesting, ammunition is near impossible to conserve properly and the attack boat is a monster.

 

Great post snarf, just a quick point though; the attack boat is in 5/10 maps.