Battlefield 4’s launch was a high profile cock up – one that our Tim detailed at length. But as players sift through the wreckage, labelling errant bits of wing and still-spinning engines, it’s getting better. A series of hotfixes over the last week or so has culminated in this, the game’s ninth update – a major patch DICE believe will bring an end to frequent crashing and, er, being shot through walls.
“We believe this update will solve a large portion of the most commonly occurring game crashes, and the improvement in overall stability should make a big difference for many players,” wrote DICE on their forums.
“We understand that stability has been rocky for some players, and hope that this update will make the game run smoother and more stable for you.”
Onto the shot-through-walls thing: not the result of aimbots or such, but a network sync bug that saw damage lost in the post on the way to players. When it was finally delivered, they were often behind cover – and understandably confused to be suddenly killed.
DICE have eliminated what they suspect was the main cause of that – and are continuing to work on optimising network performance in multiplayer. Elsewhere, they’ve also made some improvements to ‘network smoothing’ – the functionality that lets you determine the rate of interpolation of other players’ data. It’s another means of adapting the game to your connection speed.
“If you haven’t tried it before, please explore this setting and set it to the lowest value you can without experiencing graphical glitches in the game,” suggest DICE. “By setting it lower, you can get a tighter multiplayer experience, depending on your specific network situation.”
Full patch notes are to come, but DICE say these are “by far the most important” changes induced by today’s patch. Which is most important to you?