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."

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.