Battlefield 4 Chat

The Beta

What I liked.

The MAP
The Siege of Shanghai Map was very open and yet had a lot of complexity. The map offered a lot more vertical options when it came to flanking and attacking when compared to Battlefield 3 Vanilla maps.

Control points A, B, C (before destruction), D, and E can be captured from different vertical levels. I really liked A Point as a small two storey car park with its four entrances (front, back, left, and right) and five stairways and a vehicle ramp. This is a major step up from Battlefield 3 Vanilla. When I think of Seine Crossing and Grand Bazaar I remember the limited flanking options and the messy choke points. Siege of Shanghai has two choke points in it's two bridges and they are wonderful.

A three tier choke point. Its road path having a hill for limited cover from forward and rear. The road also has small side and centre partitions giving a little extra protection. The pedestrian path is covered by the road and protects against sniping. The pedestrian path also has two entrances and two exits with the entrances offering a stationary AT and anti vehicle bollards. The last path is the water, you might not think of it as a path but any escape may be worth it and now that you can use your pistol in the water it can always be a last desperate method of getting out of trouble. Never in the map did I feel I was going into the meat grinder like it did in Grand Bazaar.

Siege of Shanghai always gave me options for my play, whether I was attacking with my tank or retreating with my IFV, it always felt fluid and my goals acheiveable. There while there were many ways to attack an objective it didnt feel like it was over complicated like BFBC2's Arica Harbor with all its little buildings and windows.

The Weapons
I think the weapons handled well for the the most part. Counterknifing is nice. Kitting your sidearm was a nice touch. I love hitting a tank in the right place and causing a mobility hit. The C4 back with the recon and the Support getting the Airburst was a nice trade and will mix up the play nicely.

In my opinion, the XM25 is a game changer. It offers that extra attacking option that the support have been missing in Battlefield 3. Support now has the ability to shoo away enemy air support, he also has the ability to push enemies back from behind cover or rooftops. Playing in Domination mode, roof campers would get a severe dose of the XM25. I even found myself locking onto the walls and ceilings to get the range I needed to hit someone where I couldnt get their range normally through multiple cover. This is a new weapon for a new game, that will offer new strategies.

The Graphics
I liked the two toned aspect of the map. When the C skyscraper falls the dust that covers the cars and roads and buildings does change the look of the map. Not that I could appreciate this as my 6950 was not up to the task.

The Deploy Screen
This is a nice upgrade and a lot more involved than the last mess of a deploy screen that was in Battlefield 3


What I didnt like

The "new" Frostbite 3
So I played Battlefield 3 on medium to high with mesh at ultra and I am always past 60fps. Battlefield 4 halved my FPS. I had to lower my resolution, I had to lower my settings, I had to wait for two patches, and I barely hit 60fps. I am now running at 40-60fps in most situations. These maps are not that more advanced than aftermath's maps so why is it so bad?

Why am I looking at buying a 290x? No other game I play is pushing my 6950, so why should this game warrant me spending €300-€600 on an upgrade to play at 60fps+ (I would consider a 280X ~€300 but I am waiting to see the price point of the 290x) I would forgive this game of many things if i didnt see the framerate spike as I was trying to shoot an enemy player and miss. Its probably my aim but **** me when it happens am I not enraged. "Battlefield 4 has stopped working"

The Battlelog
OF all the things that they didnt have to mess with and they make **** of this. No Platoons until 2014. Could they not coy and pasted the code over and simply change a few headers and assets. I have re-installed chrome and all my internet runtimes and it still I have to use Firefox to view my battle reports. On IE it claimed was I am using a tablet internet browser.

The Weapons
As much as I like the XM25 there are a lot of issues with the other weapons of the beta.
Stinger are useless, RPGs are now the default weapon against air support. I dont think that it is a good idea for RPGs to be allowed to lock on to enemy air support. I think it is dumbing down of the engineer class. Why bother carrying a stinger when an RPG does the job better?

The transport chopper's miniguns are pathetic in comparison to the .50 cal weapons on the vehicles. I dont understand what worked fine in the previous game had to be broken/changed for this one.


Verdict

I am not excited for this game.
I cant bring myself to pre-order this game without looking at a new GFX card where it would be a waste for any other game I have.
I cant pre order when I didnt like most of the Battlefield 3 expansion packs. I like Battlefield 3 Vanilla , Back to Karkand and Aftermath. The "classic" or rehash map pack is going to be the second expansion so the old favourites are not in the preorder.

There is still nothing else like it, for all its faults, for all my complaining, I'll probably pre-order and buy that new AMD mantle card. It is ten new maps, couple of new weapons, and an extra four maps about a six weeks after launch.

I am glad that the RPGs will not be able to lock on in the full game.

You cannot give out about optimisation or crashing issues in a beta.

This I dont agree with.

Aside from the fact that "Something went wrong" was nightmare for some Battlefield 3 players. The random death/suicide with no explanation that was "Bad Luck". Battlefield 3 was a very stable game for me. It wasnt a very stable game for many of the players that I play with. It did iron itself out for our little group after "Close Quarters"

We were a month away from launch of Battlefield 4 and we are treated to a two week Beta. We were told that this is a recent release version of the game. Now a month away from launch and I would be *assuming* that most issues would be minimal and affect a small minority of players.

There has been two patches to the Beta to fix the FPS issues and the loading/deploy issues. People who had the minimum system requirements could not play this game. There has been a huge frenzy of posting FPS issues to the Battlefield 4 forums. There are people doing worse after these patches. There are people claiming that Windows 8 solved all their problems yet it certainly didnt solve mine. Gaming witch doctors tried to ply their best mojo but there were no easy answers for many players. People have been told to use Beta graphics card drivers (which can be a scary thing for an nvidia card user after beta driver mishaps).

They have 14 days to fix these.

The floating TOW launcher. The Boat that respawns at C can respawn in the most stupid of places. We have the re-appearance of Mr Stretch who first graced us in the Battlefield 3 beta, a bug from a previous game's beta. The scoreboard blocking the buttons on the game end screen. The missing icons for the weapon unlocks. There are nine other maps that we havent played and havent the chance to find out all their bugs.

They have 14 days to fix these also.

What people call a beta can mean very different things. The SC 2 beta was very playable on my PC and they spent the time doing balance changes. The Guild Wars 2 beta was very playable as well, even if the servers and overflow servers were bursting with players.

DICE have not been the masters of scaling and optimising their programs. With 14 days to go I cannot assume that it is all going to be fixed and infact it is my thinking that DICE are forced into these release dates to have their product ready for sale for the peak shopping season. I find it easy to blame EA for all this.

A beta does not shield a developer from criticism if they have only 14 days to fix a large amount of issues. If the game was being released in December then I would be more confident that everything would be fine, that bugs would be fixed, the engine optimised for the PC market.

If I repaint the spare room and do a half arsed job should I stick up a sign saying "Temporary"? Ill then fix it little by little once a month for the next year.