I agree, I was trashing guys with the pistols.I have more pistol kills than I do with my most used rifle(of course Ive used lots of pistols but its still always my secondary weapon) just over 10% of my kills in BF3 are with a pistol of some sort
the pistols are fine....
I wished they would have offered hardcore during the Beta. I'm not excited about bf4 after playing normal mode..
It wasnt just with expandas, but he does inflate the numbers because he's a damn good pilot. When I could get in the gunner seat with a decent pilot, I would destroy everything on the ground. I really should learn how to fly...I've only been playing BF for like 10 years.
This ^Fly.with.me.
Thanks.
This ^
Aequitas took the time to teach me some neat tricks in an empty server early on in BF3. After that I started getting some kills in jets and soon got those unlocks and air ribbons and medals that I so desperately wanted. Thanks SLU!
Good pilots like him still take my lunch, but I can hold my own against the average Joe.
No worries Bacon!DeadFred, leave those fly boys, ground pounders all the way!
No worries Bacon!
We'll cap those flags and win the game while they take all the glory with their big KDR's.
Roadkilling them by sitting on them is fun but....that would be awesome.They need to make the blades on the choppers a physical thing. Can you just imagine buzzing the tops of buildings with your rotors tilted down like a giant lawn mower. Watching snipers turn to bloody paste.
They need to make the blades on the choppers a physical thing. Can you just imagine buzzing the tops of buildings with your rotors tilted down like a giant lawn mower. Watching snipers turn to bloody paste.
DICEs beta is equal parts action film, art film, and huge crumbly cookie.
Will Battlefield 4 be the world's most excessive game?
In the middle of the fight to capture control point C, I find myself alone in an elevator watching the screen laid into its wall. It displays an animated molecule, then a microscopic view that looks like a syringe entering a cell, then footage of live actorsa man and a woman, holding a childs hands. Artificial insemination? I have time to think before a chime sounds, the elevator doors slide open, and I look out from the top of the world at columns of smoke rising across Shanghai. I see them with great clarity, because our Super Huey is circling this observation deck and the door gunner has blown every one of its floor-to-ceiling windows out.
Loose ceiling tiles flap overhead as I chase a Chinese soldier, who jumps straight out one of the holes that used to be windows; I follow, sputtering bullets at his parachute as we sail over the war, drifting down toward control point D, which is a little mall with escalators and a clothing store and a car dealership inside, which have all by now been shelled and machine gunned and burned, just like every object in the world of Battlefield, which no sane person would bring an artificially-inseminated embryo into.
***
At times, Battlefield 4 feels even stranger than the action movies it imitates, because its so finely ornamented with details that do not add up to anything. The breather in the elevator is a gag lifted from the cinema: a cool second of isolation before the doors open and the ordeal resumes. On the big screen, Bruce Willis would have time to shoot a look of disbelief at the ad as he waited, reminding the audience of the B-plot about his troubled marriage. But there is no second layer of meaning to look for in a multiplayer shooter like Battlefield. Theres only the wash of pale light over rubble, the bleed of a laser sight on your simulated retina, and the sounds of the man on Teamspeak who seems to be sucking rice through a straw.
Each control point in Siege of Shanghaithe only map currently available in the Battlefield 4 betais a meticulously dressed set. Shooting at a soldier in front of the restaurant or skyscraper bar throws light into a deep background of shattering bottles, flower pots, and tumbling paintings. Other touches sow visual confusion, like the mannequins in Finns sportswear outlets (as common as Starbucks in BF4s Shanghai), or the red curtains that trail out of the windows of the skyscraper and turn like shifting snipers.
BF4 is about being in the shit, all the time.Thanks to the ease of squad reinforcement, firefights are now surreally prolonged, and youre always spawning on squaddies crouched under the counters and tables of those lovingly designed settings as gunfire rips the place apart. It feels like waking up on the floor of Precinct 13. The difficulty of getting to the action, which could be a time-consuming and almost contemplative task on a BF2 map like Kubra Dam, has been removed. BF4 is about being in the shit, all the time. Its about glancing at a mini-map that appears to be covered in ants, hearing tanks open fire and watching the concrete barrier in front of you break apart like a very crumbly cookie. The shit, in this game, is not the emotional pressure of war but the presence of more visual information than you can easily process.
In her essay The Concept of Cinematic Excess, the film theorist Kristin Thompson explores the virtues of overstuffed images. She uses Eisensteins Ivan the Terrible to examine unmotivated materiality: details that draw our attention for reasons outside their structural function in the narrative. Its not about excess in the colloquial sense of excessive violence, which could be essential to defining a character or a films style. Instead, Thompsons catalogue of excesses includes shots where the camera fixates on a mans extravagant collar, repeated close-ups of irrelevant emblems, and continuity errors such as the presence of an extraneous body in an execution scene.
The Siege of Shanghai doesnt have a plot for its unchecked materiality to overthrow. But it does have a structure. The five flags are laid out so as to create zones of control, chokepoints at which armor can be obstructed or destroyed, sight lines, multiple access points for infantry, etc. Returning players grok these elements almost instantly, routing themselves through the less-exposed paths and finding vantage points on well-traveled areas.
Its the excess, not the engineering, that defines BF4 in its current state.But its the excess, not the engineering, that defines BF4 in its current state. Some of the happiest accidents may not survive the beta: the infamous landboat, which spawns not at port but at random locations on the streets of Shanghai, will be missed. The player-created emblems stamped on guns and vehicles, on the other hand, will be a layer of madness that endures.
The gleeful height of the games visual eccentricity, though, has to be the live-action ads that play on screens around the level. Theres the enigmatic baby science spot I mentioned, plus another elevator reel of grinning businessmen shaking on a deal. A towering billboard lights up with moving images of a Chinese-speaking ape and a domestic cat stalking across the screen (seen through smoke or over the rise of a bridge, you might mistake it for an approaching vehicle). Even the subterranean section of point B has a screen tucked in the corner shilling for public transit. They seem to share a common theme: things that have nothing to do with Battlefield.
The ads may be intended to evoke the real Shanghai, but they only remind us how surreal the games version of it is. Its a place where parachutes open four times in a row without being re-packed, where men shot in the chest by heavy machine guns dash away at full speed. Is the heart of my twitchy begoggled action golem, who knows the peace of death in only 10-second intervals, moved by the sight of a child? Am I now to imagine that children exist in the world of Battlefield?
Is the heart of my twitchy begoggled action golem moved bythe sight of a child?
Yet I love the ads all the same, for the times they pulled me out of the action and made me wonder what the hell I was watching. Its tempting to think that as Battlefield evolved (or, if you will, LEVOLved) the maps grew smaller, the action thicker, and players patience thinner. But the games may also be getting weirder.
Thompson celebrates Ivan for the wealth of excessive details which make [it] a rich perceptual field, and the same abundance of distractions gives Siege of Shanghai its charm. The mapmakers designed for chaos. They want you to get rammed off a roof by a helicopter strut and die looking up at an ad for cat food. They never saw a perceptual field they couldnt enrich.
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http://battlefieldo.com/attachments/thoughts-jpg.3231/
The beta is finished, and the waiting game has begun! In a recent interview, Patrick Bach gives us a few new insights into many of the development considerations for Battlefield 4. Here are a few interesting tidbits taken from the discussion, to chew on while you wait for the eagerly anticipated release!
Thoughts On Beta
Bach talks briefly about the process of comparing their own list of bugs with feedback from the community. DICE doesn't want to end up in a "Rockstar situation" with a broken game on day one of release, which is why the beta was more about testing the back end instead of just load-testing. He comments on the helpfulness of the beta feedback, while also stating that he hopes people realize that they are not playing the actual game. Many fixes have already been implemented, as we've already reported. Be sure to check out our list of beta fixes that have already been made.
Cloud Computing
When asked whether they plan on taking advantage of the Xbox Live Cloud Compute services, Bach replies "Not from day one." He goes on to explain that there are multiple reasons for this. One major consideration is that Battlefield realistically needed to focus on solutions that work on all systems, since the game extends across five platforms. So at this time, there are no plans for Battlefield development regarding the Cloud services offered by Xbox One.
Challenges Next Gen
Bach relates to the dilemma of Watch Dogs having to delay their release, by stating, "I think people might not grasp how hard that is, to develop a game at the same time as the hardware." He even admits that there were times the team thought of doing that themselves. Battlefield is a complex game, which doesn't make it any easier.
When asked about predictions for the cross-over to next-gen, Bach answers with an honest "I don't know." This is the first time the franchise has had the opportunity to be a day-one available title for a brand new console. He also explains that there is no winner or loser when it comes to a stand-off with Call of Duty. In DICE's book, it's not just about revenue, but about people enjoying their games. In other words, as long as there are enough people doing that (aka buying their game), they are in the position to keep making more.
It's worth noting that this is in stark contrast with some of the folks at EA, who have trash talked about beating Call of Duty in several recent interviews. Oh well, competition is what multiplayer game play is all about, right? May the best FPS win! I know which one I'll be playing the most!
Steam And PC
When asked about Steam and the possible impact of their latest OS and hardware announcements, Bach takes a broad approach to the question:
"Most consumers don't really care what platform they're playing on, they just want a great experience. It's like watching a movie - if you go to the cinema you don't really care about all the symbols that flash up. People don't really care if it's digital or optical projection, they just want the great movie, it's the content that matters.
In the end if it's PC, or console or even iPhone, people just want to play great games."
I couldn't have said it better myself, Mr. Bach.
He goes on to relate that if PC wants to be bigger then they should focus more on ease of use, which is hard because PC is so multi-layered. Of course, this is one of the things that attract some people to the PC market, the ability to experiment and optimize. In the end, it's about your need and personal preference.
Single Player Experience
Many of us wonder why single player is even a focus for Battlefield. Although Bach does admit that the meat of Battlefield is obviously the multiplayer, he describes the approach to single player for the game. Mostly, the feeling is that it introduces people to Battlefield without the hostility of the multiplayer environment. Single player is not for everyone, but the team wanted to cater to those who enjoy those experiences and may not ever play Battlefield otherwise. To this effect, they have worked on providing more multiplayer features in the single player campaign this time around. He is asked about the possibility of single player DLC, and simply replies that it would be difficult. Battlefield is fundamentally a multiplayer game, and that's where the team at DICE spends most of their hours.
Community Feedback
DICE has always valued feedback from the fans, but they do compare these comments to the results of their own data. Bach talks about the built-in telemetry of Battlefield, in which the developers can measure real facts about game play with what people are saying online. About this, he comments on how scary it is to witness how "objectively wrong" people can be.
To sum it up, rage on the internet is not getting the last word when it comes to making changes on the Battlefield.
Matchmaking
Microsoft is addressing the issue of matchmaking by using a ratings system. In addition to this, Battlefield plans on adding a skill system, which will be interesting to test out when the game launches. Players will be matched based on skill instead of rank, because the team at DICE believes that it's more fun to play against people at your own level.
If you'd like to read the interview in its entirety, you can check it out at gamesindustry. So, what do you think about this information? Who is ready for release already?
PonyForever, Yesterday at 2:08 PM #1
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