Yo yo PC crew, you know how you wanted a sick ride in that BF3 but EA were all ‘Oh hells no, you get factory standard only’? Well fo’ Battlefield 4 they got their shizz sorted and you fo’sho gonna be able to pimp your ride. There’s screens on NeoGaf to show this news is well legit. Them tanks look well fit.
Pre-order Battlefield 4 on PC, as I imagine many will this weekend, and you’ll get first expansion pack China Rising in with the (relative) bargain. Pay £10 more for the Digital Deluxe edition and you’ll get beta access, as well as something DICE call a ‘Gold Battlepack’. Three of ‘em, actually.
When EA opened its new DICE studio in LA, the potato-clock specu-la-trons industry soothsayers have wired to their knees went haywire, pointing their toes in the direction of the publisher’s recently-acquired Star Wars license.
In reality, DICE LA are destined to play a supportive role, while core development of all of DICE’s upcoming games - Battlefield 4, Mirror’s Edge 2, Star Wars Battlefront - remains in Sweden.
Surely no other developer has enjoyed quite so much conference screentime this E3 as DICE, who’ve popped up repeatedly via the three mediums of Battlefield 4, Mirror’s Edge 2 and their reboot of Star Wars: Battlefront.
They’ve kept mostly schtum on the latter game, however, which like Mirror’s Edge is very much in the early stages of development. What DICE’s Patrich Bach will say is that a simple Battlefield reskin would be too “boring" to hold his studio’s attention.
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If you were to construct a narrative about the various creative strands at DICE, you’d probably say it all changed at E3 2013. After half a decade spent narrowing their focus to contemporary shooting alone, two DICEs have emerged this week: one in pursuit of past dystopian glories, and another with its head stuck doggedly in the contemporary FPS space.
Executive producer Patrick Bach isn’t about to apologise for the past five years of modern warfare, though. "We have more to do in that genre," he says.
It was an errant backspace icon in Microsoft’s Xbox conference that first alerted us to the fact that we were watching Battlefield 4 at 60fps on a PC. It’s since transpired that throughout their breathless promotion of the new consoles, DICE have been running their new game on a very familiar platform.
DICE are getting awful generous this E3 season; first they give the gift of hope, announcing that they’re working on Mirror’s Edge 2 and Star Wars Battlefront 3, and now they give the gift of game by handing out free copies of Battlefield 3’s first DLC expansion, Close Quarters, to all and sundry.
Commanders in Battlefield 4 will be taking control of many different functions that were previously spread out across the different classes in Battlefield 3, or out of the player’s control entirely. What’s shown in the new trailer seems to provide a sense of cohesion to the Battlefield series that’s been lacking, it could well be the best thing that's on the horizon of the upcoming sequel.
Update: DICE have since confirmed both spectator mode and VOIP will feature; two similarly key features.
Where Call of Duty: Ghosts’ ocean looks familiar to the point of friendliness, Battlefield 4’s was denoted in last night’s singleplayer demo to be ‘ANGRY’. As it pulled apart a military carrier in exquisite detail, the sea made its feelings clear: it was peeved by the good guys, pissed at the bad guys, and most of all seemed to despise light aircraft.
DICE’s got round to showing Battlefield 4’s multiplayer in action (it’s about time) and, more importantly, the returning commander mode.
The commander mode allows one player on each team to provide assets and intelligence to troops on the ground. The commander can do all this while working with a tablet. Very nifty.
One of the major components of Microsoft’s press conference at this year’s E3 has been the single player footage of Battlefield 4, it looked gorgeous, had lots of explosions, and showed what the console was capable of. Except, it was running on a PC.
There was a subtle little backspace icon up in the top right-hand corner of the screen.
For a couple of years there, Bad Company was the place to go for shooting with a few laughs and some endearingly destructible terrain. By the time of the sombre sequel, however, the mirthsome script was gone, and since then the series has disappeared from DICE’s development schedule altogether.
The developers say the subseries is still dear to them - but there’s no sequel currently in the works.
Yes, Battlefield 4 will have bullets, explosions, and tanks. We knew that. We expected that. But Dice are keen to show us that there’s so much more to their shooter, it has quiet reflective periods too.
That’s why the latest batch of screenshots show a soldier in a practically Wordsworthian repose.
Battlefield 4 will launch on PC on October 29. As with the launch of Battlefield 3, pre-orderers will be granted a free copy of the first DLC pack, which will be China Rising. The DLC promises a "fight for dominance across the vast and majestic Chinese mainland in four massive maps, using all-new vehicles and high-tech military equipment." Is this date announcement the big reveal we were told to expect, or is something bigger looming just beyond our line of sight? Keep eyes on us, soldier. We'll give you intel as soon as we know.
DICE have taken to the rooftops to tell all and sundry that Battlefield 4 will be the subject of a “big announcement" in the very near future. In probably not unrelated news, Microsoft unveil their new plastic PC before the eyes of the world later today.
EA have stumped up the cash to expand their beloved DICE westwards, setting up a new studio in Los Angeles - though nobody’s admitted what it’s for as yet.
Images allegedly taken from an EA customer survey reveal features planned for the upcoming Battlefield 4. It’s difficult to to tell whether this is A) real; B) EA testing the water and not actually talking about features in the game; C) not all a load of baloney.
If it is real then Battlefield 4 will let you flood maps by destroying dams, cut the power to a base by destroying power lines, and Mass Effect 3-style battlepacks are finding their way into multiplayer.
When I first heard that EA were breaking off their licensing agreements with arms manufacturers I naively assumed it was for ideological reasons, that the publisher had found it was no longer comfortable funding businesses whose primary goal is developing tools to kill people. Nah, it’s because EA reckon they can’t be sued if they don’t pay up.
Since the weekend, Battlefield 3 players on PC have been beset by disconnection issues - and as far back as Sunday, DICE were working to fix them. Only this morning, however, has it become apparent that the outages are the result of malicious intent. Battlefield’s servers are currently struggling under a barrage of distributed denial-of-service attacks.
The future of Star Wars’ long and occasionally fruitful flirtation with our fair medium has been uncertain since LucasArts vanished in a puff of financial logic just over a month ago. Not so now. EA have inked a deal which gives them exclusive license to publish and develop “core" Star Wars games, and have handed the keys to three of their favourite children: DICE, Visceral, and BioWare.
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