Battlefield 4 is set to launch on October 29 but, starting last Friday, the game has gone into open beta and I had the chance to try it out for myself last night. As far as my involvement with the Battlefield series goes, I have drifted away. I loved Battlefield: 1942, I even remember getting it on release day in 2002 and my friends and I spent hours upon hours playing Battlefield 2 later down the road. I'll be honest, I did not get into Battlefield 3 when it was released and only recently played it for a bit. I never saw the hype with that one and I guess I felt more like between the Battlefield series and the Call of Duty games, military FPS's were becoming stale and repetitive. No game was bringing anything new to the table besides updated graphics and a few minor tweaks here and there.
So last night I downloaded the beta for Battlefield 4 because why not? It's free and is essentially a demo to try out until the launch of the proper title. I joined a game and while it was loading I thought to myself that its just going to be more of the same and boring and after the beta expires I will just crawl my way back to ARMA III to get my military fix. So the game loaded and I was on the deploy screen and took a few minutes to go through my settings and max out everything to really try and get the most out of the experience. When I deployed and entered the game I was immediately BLOWN AWAY by how amazing everything looked. Just because of the sheer size of the map I thought the graphical increases would be minor at best over Battlefield 3 but with all the action and destruction going on around me on a 64 player map, I was totally not expecting the game to look THAT good (don't get me wrong, it is in no way THE BEST graphics ever, but they are really amazing, this is of course on a PC running everything at max).
I have read a few peoples first reactions to the beta and what surprised me was a lot of people complaining about performance issues such as FPS drops and stutters, to having to lower graphics because of how taxing it is on their system. This was not the case for me though. I had a smooth 60 FPS throughout the majority of my playtime and I believe the lowest it ever dropped to was 45 FPS and that was only when I jumped off the skyscraper and was parachuting down to the ground. I did hit a rather nasty bug towards the end of my play which was a VRAM leak which crashed the game but as of right now I have no problem with that, it is beta after all and I was not expecting a totally bug free experience, but hopefully DICE is aware of the issue and will patch that bug before the retail release.
All in all, it was a really enjoyable experience and just by having the risk free hands on experience with the game made me really consider grabbing it at release. The map was wonderful and interesting, the frostbite engine is really impressive and the gameplay was more refined than Battlefield 3. I truly believe that from what I experienced, 4 will be the installment in the series that really takes that next step to distance itself from other FPS franchises, namely Call of Duty. Now I can't say much for the Call of Duty release basically because I am tired of that franchise but if CoD doesn't step it up majorly with Ghosts then Battlefield will reign supreme and I believe it will only get stronger from here.
Thanks for reading and until next time:
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