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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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We know DICE still think about their time in 2142. Remember that future-drone easter egg in End Game? When the grim, blue darkness of the contemporary battlefield gets too much, I imagine they think back to that holiday in Christmas 2006, when the future seemed so mechy.

Paradox man Gordon Van Dyke worked on the Battlefield series in 2006, and would love to see DICE dive into the 22nd century again for a Frostbite-gnawed sequel. But he doesn’t know whether the developers’ man-parts are of sufficient proportions for the job.

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After nearly four years of incredulous existence without them, free-to-play shooter spinoff Battlefield Heroes is to get the whirlybird treatment.

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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.

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Internet, bear with me. For a while from now, as each new game that gets support for the Oculus Rift, I, and other writers, will get needlessly excited and post videos of said game in action. This will settle down in time and normal activity will resume. Until then: virtual reality Mirror’s Edge.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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 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.”

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