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.
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.
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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.
Look at these men playing with VR goggles, twisting their heads around and having fun. The man who resembles a young Graham Linehan is Nate Mitchell, who works for the Oculus Rift team and still smiles every time he watches people wear his virtual reality headset. Meanwhile the man actually wearing the contraption works for DICE, developer of, among other games, Battlefield 4. Earlier in the year EA and DICE were reportedly investigating the possibility of bringing Oculus Rift support to the Frostbite Engine, which powers Battlefield, Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Now, it seems, they're investigating it a whole bunch.
Forget your electronic entertainment expos, the work of spin magicians thousands of miles away. Your Nintendo Directs, broadcast from boardrooms on the other side of the world. The game announcement has gone local. Fancy knowing more about the next Battlefield or CoD? Simply rummage through the storage rooms of your nearest supermarket, or frequent the online listings of your favourite obscure retailer. That’s what BF4Central did, and you’ll never guess what they found.
Battlefield 4’s ginormous 17-minute trailer was a helluva thing. Remember that bit when Bonnie Tyler shot the window and the water came running in like Rainbow Six? I think I remember that. Anyway, DICE reckon that if you watched hard enough, you can “extrapolate a lot of features that you can then translate into either the singleplayer or the multiplayer". Reason being: Battlefield single player is taking more of its cues from the online arena of death and dirtbikes this time around.
Speaking to Heise.de, AMD’s corporate vice president of global channel sales Roy Taylor said that “you can expect that Battlefield 4 will be part of [future] Never Settle bundles". Confirming that DICE’s upcoming shooter will be bundled with AMD cards, the announcement also suggests that it will be the next generation of graphics cards rather than the current set on sale.
"eSports is an area that we are very interested in," said DICE general manager Karl Magnus Troedsson, during an interview with YouTuber Leutin09. While he did not enter into specifics, Troedsson acknowledged the rise of eSports and said that the studio saw Battlefield as a "competitive" series. At the same time, he also stated that there would be no co-op mode in Battlefield 4.
We’ve not even got our hands on a preview build of Battlefield 4 and it appears that the first DLC pack has been revealed. I say appears because people on the internet love to come up with their hoaxes and this could well be one of them. But, if the images below are to be believed, the first DLC pack for the next Battlefield game will be called Drone Strike.
Last night’s Battlefield 4 trailer was a tour de force for technology. It demonstrated the best fireballs ever put to pixel. It has a factory that falls out of the sky, and a bit where the sea is bucking so hard you can imagine a little bit of sick rising to the top of your throat. As a demonstration of what games can show you: it is amazing.
But it didn’t work. I think you’d struggle to find anyone who super enthusiastic about shooting some AI men in the face over the course of a six hour explosion. As a demonstration of what games can do: it’s a flop.
Here’s the problem. I think I’ve grown tired of guns in single player games.
EA have finally revealed Battlefield 4, which will have Bonnie Tyler sing at the beginning and end of it. They unveiled their kablammo shooter military sequel by showing everybody a 17 minute long cut of the single player campaign at this year's Games Disco Central in San Francisco.
Luckily for us, they then fired that 17 minute video into YouTube's guts and screamed something in military language like "tango my flanks" or "oscar mike all down my legs", which means it's available online for you to see right now, Bonnie Tyler, seagulls and all! Would you like to see it? Here it is!
DICE covered land and sea over the weekend, and this morning complete their elemental triumvirate with what for many series veterans is the most important aspect of Battlefield - air.
Moving from the Iranian setting of Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4’s been confirmed to take place in Shanghai, China’s most populated city, a maze of cheap, rapidly built housing blocks, a dense shipping port, and a cultural centre of the People's Republic of China.
I warn you now, the rest of this post runs rampant with speculation and intrigue.
Two teaser videos for Battlefield 4 have been released, with the official reveal now less than a week away. The two videos, named “Prepare 4 Battle" with the respective “Land" and “Sea", don’t give many details away.
Except... BOATS!
When thinking of Battlefield as a series, a concept, an entity in the universe, things like 64-player games (at least back in the olden games), stunning engine technology for graphics and physics (though with the occasional blip), and the ability to be extremely silly in a game that takes itself very seriously comes to mind, not the artsy past-time of staring through a rainwashed window, idly wiping away the water to stare mournfully at tanks.
Yet that’s what DICE have opted for for their Battlefield 4 reveal website.
It’s well-publicised that a picture can be the equivalent of up to 1000 words. But did you know that, simply by opening an image file in a word processor, you can find out precisely what it’s saying?
“I hope you still like blue-grey and orange," Battlefield 4’s first officially-sanctioned promo image told me exclusively in Notepad. “Because DICE are still all over that palette. Seriously, I can barely breathe under all these filters."
DICE have sent out invites to the reveal of Battlefield 4 at GDC on March 26th. We’ve known for a long time that Battlefield 4 was coming, when EA offered Battlefield 4 beta invites with pre-orders of Medal of Honor: Warfighter in 2012. We’ll certainly have more information come GDC, so stay tuned to PCGamesN.
What we thought might be a pre-echo of a Battlefield 4 announcement at last night’s slightly clunky PS4 curtain-pull ended in a no-show - and yet the echo chamber grows ever louder. Step up EA Labels president Frank Gibeau, who’s come to tell us that transition is EA’s “friend", and next-gen games like Battlefield 4 the beneficiaries of its fruitful console chumminess.
