I’m running through the lobby of an office building when all of a sudden an infantry fighting vehicle blows a hole in the wall and comes crashing in like the Kool-Aid man. It’s driving straight for me so I take a breath, knowing I’m going down, and I go prone. The thing drives directly over me without taking one point of my life. Neither tire managed to hit me so while I’m staring at the underbelly of this Chinese war machine I do the only thing there is to do, I slap that sucker with a charge of C4. As it goes in reverse to get the proper distance needed to level it’s heavy machine gun I detonated the explosives and watched the whole lobby turn to a cloud of smoke and debris. This is the type of moment that sets Battlefield apart from other popular first person shooter games. This and giant skyscrapers being leveled, collapsing to the ground and completely changing the layout of the middle part of the map that is, yeah that’s pretty nifty too.
If you can’t tell already I’m loving the kevlar out of this game. Just one map and 3 game modes and I’m pretty much sold that this will be the best first person military shooter ever produced. Full graphics settings on PC are so beautiful and devastating they’ll make you swear you smell gunpowder and the sound is even more brutally crisp than it’s predecessor. Getting the game to play smoothly on ultra settings is another matter entirely though as I’m running it on a very snazzy rig sporting a GTX 690 graphics card and I am still dropping frames way below 60 when the battle gets hectic. Part of this is due to the sheer amount of assets on the screen at a time but mostly it’s due to the game beta still being a beta and being optimized quite poorly at this point. There are numerous “fixes” being touted on the web from disabling processor cores to upgrading to Windows 8. I think I’ll just wait for the finished product before I start doing anything over the top to my computer however. It is a beta and this is what it’s there for, testing. Hopefully all the data accumulated will be used to fully optimize the game for all types of hardware configurations. Of course the game is nowhere near as stunning on Ps3 and Xbox360 but that’s a given and considering those system’s hardware limitations I am impressed D.I.C.E. managed to push their boundaries as far as they did.
So far we have 3 game modes to test out; “Domination” plays just like you’d expect it, “Conquest” perhaps the mode Battlefield is most known for and “Obliteration” which is kind of a cross between previous Battlefield games’ “Rush” mode and a game of capture the flag. All three modes have their own feel of play and make the game seem totally different when switching between them. Obliteration being the newest, not only to the beta but to the series, gave me a bit of a learning curve. A bomb spawns for both teams to fight over. When a player runs over it he or she is then bomb/flag carrier with the objective of taking it to a target and detonating it. This makes the game seem like a sort of roaming Rush mode and is quite hectic making a camping strategy, thankfully, almost pointless. Domination plays just like it has in other shooters for years but I doubt it has had more of a visceral feeling than now. Of course Conquest is still good old Conquest with 64 player counts on PC and a slew of vehicles, never has battlefield looked more like a modern day war movie.
Aside from the lag still plaguing the beta I have greatly enjoyed para-dropping into Battlefield 4 and am eagerly anticipating the game’s full release. If you’re planning on springing for a Playstation 4 or Xbox One you should expect an experience very close to that of PC with 64 player battles and greatly improved graphics over the Ps3 and Xbox360 versions. If you’ll be sticking with your older system for awhile longer you’ll still be treated to the concept of “levolution” which may be the most revolutionary thing to happen to the genre since the original Halo released. Keep your heads down soldiers and watch your backs or you might just loose those dogtags!
