The other night, my brother Tillman and I dove into the Battlefield 4 beta for the first time since it launched. To give you a little background, he has been playing the series since the first Bad Company, and I jumped in – or was pushed, really, by Beth – with Bad Co 2. We played the single-map beta for BC2 almost every night from the time it went up to when they closed the servers; our total time logged in the full game is measured in weeks. When BF3 came along, I took the steps to actually get in the PC alpha, though it didn’t run all that well; the 360 beta saw a fair amount of play from the entire group, and we were very excited for the full launch.
That game ended up letting us all down, in one way or another, and Tillman was the only one who continued playing it consistently, though even he skipped out on the last few expansions. Tillman makes a habit of buying me a game for Christmas every year that we can enjoy together, and shooters tend to be the trend. We tried Medal of Honor: Warfighter last year, and were suitably impressed with it, but again found that the spark just wasn’t enough to keep us engaged. The BF4 beta offered us an opportunity to test out the assumed front-runner for this year’s holiday brothers-in-arms game.
The beta front-end system wasn’t great – there seemed to be no way to join each other before actually getting into a game – but we don’t play this kind of demo for the menus. Once we were in-game, the first thing we noticed were the textures; more specifically, the lack thereof. From the guns to the buildings to random bits of road, any sort of detail seemed to be either bland or missing completely. Now, I know that this is a beta, not the finished product, but the video shown at E3 was supposedly of people playing this very demo; you know, the one that looked shit-hot and featured a skyscraper falling down in majestic Frostbite glory. For more on the graphics, I’ll let the guys over at video gamer talk in their wonderful accents:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfid4FhL654
To that end, I have personally witnessed that building falling, and while it isn’t quite the spectacle from that E3 video, it was really cool to experience. Tillman and I were on a separate part of the map, and the entire area shakes and fills with an exceptionally robust sound of destruction; it was fun to watch every player stop in their tracks and sprint for the nearest viewpoint to watch. After the smoke clears, that entire area of the map is different, something which a few FPSs have tried over the years, but none have every solidly pulled off as more than a gimmick. The last few Battlefields have at least offered some cool manipulation via building destruction, so I guess it remains to be seen if this large-scale demolition will be part of every map.
The absolute best part of the game, for me, was a series of little events that fell into the category of “Battlefield Moments,” as DICE and EA have dubbed them. Tillman was sniping from the top of a skyscraper, and I spawned in on him and another squad mate. To our back was another, smaller building housing one of the Conquest capture points. We started losing it, so I ran and jumped off our building; about halfway down I popped my parachute, cooked a frag, and tossed it through the skylight above the objective. I was lucky, and it caught the attacker in the blast right as I hopped down into the area.
As this happened, Tillman let me know that there was at least a full squad heading my way from the street; I stuck my head out from a side stairwell in time to see a few drop from his sniper fire, but I was still overrun. I fired for suppression and fell back, but found myself out of SMG ammo. As the radar indicators entered the stairwell, I hit the roof with an RPG; the resulting wall collapse took out another opponent. I was desperately watching my soldier reload the tube when my screen spun to face an enemy player; I was getting knifed. At the last moment, a prompt appeared for me to hit the melee button myself, and suddenly I kicked the other guy’s feet out from under him and turned the blade back on its owner! This was, of course, met with jubilant swearing as I attempted to describe the events to Tillman. He calmed me down enough to let me know a tank had rolled up, and we took it out with a mixture of RPGs and airborne C4.
That entire five minutes was great, and reminded me exactly why we fell in love with the series in the first place. Unfortunately, it was the only five minutes out of the half hour or so we played that captured the “Battlefield Moment” magic. The rest of the match was dull, and that ended up being the biggest issue. There were a few other complaints that I genuinely don’t feel were because the game is “in beta” as well: Several buttons have been remapped with no explanation as to why; the level of small-scale destruction seems to have been greatly reduced; and the few small touches like deployed bridge pylons to stop vehicles, or water shooting up from destroyed hydrants, couldn’t stave off the feeling that the map was… Empty.
I think the combination of those two feelings – “dull” and “empty” – is what I ultimately took away from the experience. I know the larger maps in BC2 and BF3 could generate that feeling when there weren’t enough players, but we were playing on a full server, so it a lack of something for those players to do; other than the previously described moment, I never got the feeling that I was contributing, a feeling which Tillman echoed. Regardless of how many capture points I help take, or the kills I scored doing so, there was never a sense of urgency; I never got the simulation of being on a battle field.
The end result was a strange one, but one that has already paid off over the last few nights: Instead of getting us Battlefield 4, Tillman purchased us each a Battlefield 3 Premium package, which grants us access to all of the existing content. Our thought process was that we did enjoy BF3 for a time, and mostly stopped playing because of the attitude of other players and the exhaustion of what content was available at the time. We were also hoping that the upcoming releases of BF4 and Call of Duty: Ghosts would eliminate certain… unsavory elements from the BF3 playing field.
The plan has worked great so far, with us having a bunch of new maps to explore, and encountering only minimal spawn-camping douchebags with handles like xXn00bzlickerzXx. The Endgame maps especially have caught our interest; the new dirt bikes are the most fun, ever, period, for eternity. I spend most conquest matches performing “patrols” around to each capture point just to ride them. Also, last night I shot down a helicopter, which isn’t unusual in these games, but it is my favorite thing in the entire game. One of these days I’m going to shoot down a helicopter from the bike of a dirt bike, and immediately my spirit will arrive at the Pearly Gates, having accomplished the work it was sent down here to complete.
So there you have it, I guess: I played the Battlefield 4 open beta, and the end result was that I spent less money to buy expansion packs for a game I already own, instead of spending more money on a game that’s not out for 2 ½ weeks. On a side note, the campaign was in no way a draw for me, as I despised the story mode in BF3, and the story trailers for BF4 have either offended or bored me in equal measure. I guess there’s a part where a ship sinks, and Bonnie Tyler is there giving orders, or something? Anyways, I have to go see if I can headshot someone on an approaching dirt bike just right and hop on it as their corpse falls off at full speed.
[amazon_link id=”B0098QPPL6″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Battlefield 3 Premium Edition is currently available on multiple platforms.[/amazon_link]
[amazon_link id=”B00BXE4KYE” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Battlefield 4 will be available on October 29 on slightly more platforms.[/amazon_link]
…does this count as our Battlefield 4 review?
