REVIEW: Battlefield 4

As most of you will already know, Battlefield 4 was a launch title for the Xbox One – and in fact technically launched several weeks prior to that on 360/PS3. I wanted to wait to write this review.

I wanted to wait, because when Battlefield 4 was released it was… broken.

Since then, Dice have been working hard to fix it (for over 11 months now), with 2 or 3 patches a month being released to iron out the creases.

Whether the game should have been released in that state, and what that says about Dice, is for an opinion article. What I want to do is to review the game, which now I feel I can do as it’s been largely fixed.

So I’m looking at a game that has had an extra 11 months development, which has been based on the feedback of the players.

…and that game has a stunning amount of depth. It has a stunning amount of content. It still has a stunning amount of bugs.

So the question is:

Is Battlefield 4 just a fundamentally broken mess, or is it a good game in spite of the remaining problems?

Well certainly for my 10 cents (or in this case £50 plus another £40 for ‘Premium’) this game is great. In spite of any problems or any bugs, this game is still tonnes of fun -and I do mean in spite of them, because this is a game that still has a lot of issues for a ‘flagship next-gen release’.

Battlefield is primarily a multiplayer game. Hell, the first few titles in the series were ONLY multiplayer (although I don’t remember anyone referring to them as ‘half a game’… but that’s not for now). Therefore, the obvious focus of a review has to be the multiplayer. But before moving on to that, let’s have a quick look at the campaign.

I actually think that it’s nice in a generation that seems to be moving increasingly towards ‘online’ that Battlefield 4 actually has a pretty cohesive and surprisingly enjoyable Campaign to play through. Sure, every character that survives the first 10 mins is so annoying that you miss having a friendly fire option, but that’s small beer.

The campaign is short, but it works well. It’s a contemporary invasion story that rings alarmingly true with current events. It’s compelling and keeps the action piling on. The graphics are amazing. The colour depths, lighting and particle effects, in fact everything about the visuals gives a strong example of what this new generation is going to offer.

The gameplay is crisp too. Tight controls, an excellent feel right across the spectrum of weapons (of which there are MANY) and a varied selection of locations (Dams, Underground Prisons and city streets to name a few). It only clocks in about 6-7 hours, but given it’s not the ‘main event’ it a fun blast.

Most of the benefits listed above carry over to the Multiplayer; which is, simply put, the most comprehensive combat experience available on a console. We are talking:

– 10, very different maps (including forests, underground bases, and a collection of islands…)

– 7 Game modes, including Basic conquest (32 v 32 massive combat), Rush (16v16 where one team has to arm 2 bombs with a fixed amount of respawns), Team deathmatch (what it says on the tin), Obliteration (each team fights to take 1 bomb to the other team’s base) etc

– 41 vehicles, on land, sea and air (including tanks, jeep, bikes, helicopters, jets, attack boats and hovercraft)

– 110+ weapons (not including knives and in game pick-ups) all with massive personalisation options (sight, grip, barrel type, attachments etc)

– 80+ kit options to give you AA or AT rockets, medpacks, ammo packs, drones, movements sensors etc

– spread across 4 character classes.

Plus 4 DLC packs offering a tonne of new levels as well as more weapons and vehicles.

The point, and the joy, of Battlefield is that you could play the same map with the same team 10 times in a row and have 10 totally different experiences. In the first game you may play as a long range sniper, camping on a hill with a 40x scope (and if you do, I hate you). By the 5th game you may have been a medic, a tank driver, a transport heli pilot and a squad commander.

When you score a 700m headshot, or manage to transport a squad behind an enemy held-objective under heavy fire, you get a genuine sense of accomplishment. This is magnified by the fact that you’re rewarded in some way for everything you do. Using an individual weapon or vehicle well and you unlock new attachments and camo for them. General XP levels you up, which comes with battlepacks (an assortment of attachments and XP boosts etc) and new weapons. The game also keeps a comprehensive record of your achievements and statistics to view and compare at any time.

Also, the ‘battlefields’ themselves are hugely dynamic now. ALL scenery is destructible. If you hide from a tank in a shed, you better hope it doesn’t have thermal optics -or it’ll just collapse the roof on your head with a well-placed shell.

More than that every level has a ‘levolution’ on it (an amazing feature with a name that makes me cringe as much as ‘drivatar’). This is an event which, if and when triggered, will change the map layout and the way it plays. On Hainan Resort and Siege of Shanghai, this involves an entire hotel and skyscraper falling to rubble. On Flood Zone it involves a dam breaking and (clue’s in the title) the bottom levels of the map becoming flooded.

On other levels, huge ships crash into islands, massive sandstorms reduce visibility to 15 ft, giant satellite dishes come crashing down in the middle of the combat, and a gas main causes a small fire in a tunnel for several seconds (yeah …maybe I’ll start with that one in future). It looks AMAZING.

But there are still problems, even after all this time. The big one for a long time was ‘rubberbanding’. Unlike the effect of the same name in racing games, in FPS this is the effect of taking 5 steps forward only to be suddenly pulled 3 steps back. It’s an effect caused by latency in the server and, for obvious reasons, can be game-breaking. This does seem to have been mostly cleared up with new servers and better netcode, but will still occur occasionally.

Now the major issues seem to come down to the programming. I could throw around words like ‘netcode’, ‘tickrate’, ‘hitbox detection’ and the like, but instead, let’s just look at the effect on the game. When someone shoots at you, sometimes they will still score a hit even though you got well out of the way in time (often behind cover). This same problem can lead to a lot of ‘kill trades’ where both players are recorded as hitting each other, even if one started firing much later. There is a ‘bug’ where one hit can score an instant kill when it shouldn’t. Thrown grenades can occasionally just… disappear rather than explode. Some players will glitch into ceilings or walls on several maps and stay there, immune to incoming fire.

Worst of all, some players will deliberately take advantage of bad connections on foreign servers (connection to which is not restricted) and so dominate due to latency. This one I will briefly explain, as it is one not too well understood. If you have a good connection speed and you join a local server, you will have a strong connection and the information will move back and forth between you and the game server quickly.

Now if someone else joins that game with a slower connection (say, from a different region) the server will try to compensate for the slower connection. It can’t speed up the slow player, so instead it artificially slows the game down a bit to their speed. The result is that all the players with good connections are slowed down and suffer a laggy game, while the slow player is the only one that is actually experiencing the game at the actual speed its running at. TLDR: a slower connected player can shoot everyone more easily.

This is only a minor problem on high quality servers with games that run at a high ‘tickrate’ (the amount of times per second info is sent back and forth). Battlefield 3 would have been ok, with a tickrate of 60hz. Counterstrike never suffers this as it runs at 120hz. But to save money and time, Battlefield 4 originally ran at 10hz… and this explains most of the problems above.

To be fair, they have moved to better servers now and improved the netcode, which has upped the tickrate to 30 Htz. Its better, but its still not perfect

So, Battlefield has amazing potential, and there id so much in this game that 475 hrs in im still having new experiences with my squadmates every time we play. There are some serious issues with it… but most don’t make it ‘unfair’ –they affect everyone the same way. They do make it annoying, tho.

The upshot is a lot of effort has been put into this game, but some of the key areas have been overlooked. As a result, Battlefield 4 will never (or at least should never) appear in competitive multiplayer tournaments, and at times it will make you want to punch a kitten.

However, if all you are looking for is a fun multiplayer blast on a massive scale, take it from this level 120 Shit bucket Brigadier General – you could do a lot worse.

^HooksaN (@HooksaN)