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.
It was canny Geoff Keighley who finally cornered EA COO Peter Moore in LA. He discovered that Battlefield had been running on a PC built to match the specs of Microsoft’s Xbox One.
“[The reveal] was specced to Xbox One, as we said,” replied Moore. “I opened the show by saying, ‘Everything you see today is new code for Xbox One and PlayStation 4’. Battlefield 4, 64-player, I was playing myself, I had the controller in my hands, no different.
But then: “We’re all on dev kits, Geoff, as you know. I mean there’s no final hardware yet and there’s not going to be for a long time, but the spec of what we were playing on is next-gen spec.”
On Monday night, we caught our first glimpse of the new Battlefield’s multiplayer mode (which had remained conspicuously absent from its two previous reveals). And, gosh, it was absolutely stunning: