I’ve inferred that Battlefield 4’s Velvet Levelution will leave each and every one of its maps irrecoverably flattened by the five minute mark: undulating grey fields of rubble indistinguishable but for their server names. To begin with, though, they’ll be distinct battlescapes of open plains and hidey-holes, skyscrapers and breezy bays. There’ll be 10 of them, visited via seven different multiplayer modes.
Those modes are: Team Deathmatch, Squad Deathmatch, Rush, Domination, Conquest, Defuse, and Obliteration.
You’ll recognise the majority if you’ve seen battle(field) before, but two are new. Obliteration pits two teams against each other on medium-sized maps.
“One bomb spawns in a random central location,” explain DICE. “The mission: To pick up the bomb and arm it at one of the enemy’s three military installations and blow it up. When the bomb has detonated, a new bomb spawns in a random location, and the race is on again. The first team to destroy all three objectives wins.”
Paracel Storm is an Obliteration map. It looks conducive to long-range potshotting via land, air and sea:
Defuse, meanwhile, has the distinct molotov scent of incoming CTs about it. An “even tighter and quicker infantry-only game mode”, it’s defined by the fact that “players don’t have any respawns at all”.
And Bonnie Tyler? O, how quickly ye forget:
Battlefield 4 is out October 29 in the US and November 1 over here in the UK. Just enough time to make use of your Humble Origin Bundle and get familiar with its predecessor, I would’ve thought?