Battlefield 4 and Your Thoughts

Just finished the campaign. What are your guys' thoughts on the game so far? My thoughts on the Single Player below:

I thought BF3's was overall pretty fun if a bit unpolished, and BF4 is kind of like Last Light in the sense that they fix a lot of issues, but at other features' expense.

Character interactions are leaps and bounds from 3. In BF3, I had to squint to even read my squadmate's names, and they didn't really have any distinct personalities or voices. Dialogue and interactions between characters is damn good, it's hard to forget the people you meet. A few characters from BF3 also make cameos; I won't spoil them, but they're pretty well done and are neat for anyone who played BF3.

Gameplay itself is also a ton of fun, and levels are much more wide open and non-linear. The general path structure is the same, but about 4-5 times wider and more expansive basically, and every scenario gives you plenty of different options on how to tackle every scenario. You can't exactly stealth it like, say, Farcry 3, since you don't have access to any suppressors and lots of enemies stand in pairs, but it's still fun to be able to set up a fight in your favor. Oh, and destruction is more than well-featured in the game, and you can get pretty creative with ways you take down enemies.

Visuals are obviously quite good. My 660 ti gets around the same frame rate at the High preset as it did at Ultra in BF3. All sorts of new post-processing makes character faces and eyes really pop, and environments are as expansive as they are detailed and animated.

And sound is as good as it's ever been. Every single sound in the game is redone, and with numerous variations on it based on distance and location. Playing with a good headset is a must.

But of course, every campaign has its flaws, and this one's are pretty notable.

For starters, while I'm usually one who prefers quality of quantity, I beat the campaign on normal, at a regular pace, with a few deaths, in about five hours. That's short. It is repayable to a good bit with hidden dog tags for multiplayer and a built-in scoring system that unlocks more weapons to use in the campaign, and it certainly doesn't feel all that short, that's still an easy evening's time to beat, and I easily got gold on every mission in my single playthrough.

While BF3's plot was relatively easy to follow after a few missions, BF4's is....kinda convoluted. I got the general gist of things, but it kind of just throws you right in the middle of a conflict without all that much backstory as to why everything's why it is. And at one point, your squad gets into a pretty shitty situation, but things just....kind of fix themselves with no real explanation as to why.

Teammate AI is also kind of....meh. It's nice to be able to order attack commands on groups of enemies, but your teammates seem to be programmed to have a pretty massive accuracy spread, and when they do hit anything, they hardly do any damage, so don't expect them to get the job done very quickly, unless you have vehicle support following the same attack order.

I also encountered a few glitches. Shadows are a bit rough/lined in some spots, I had weird flashing lights all over my screen at first (Nvidia users, make sure to download the latest drivers from Geforce experience before playing), and I had some of the same CPU stutter issues as in the Beta, albeit much less frequently.

Overall though, it was a lot of fun. I certainly think it's a good amount better than BF3's, and had a pretty good time with it. On to multiplayer!

TLR
+Characters
+Visuals
+Gameplay
+Sound
-Short
-Story
-AI
-Some glitches

Post

 

A little bit of both, but much more like Bad Company. There's still an order and generally linear path to follow, but you have a good deal more freedom in how you go about things, and destruction in some levels can really influence things if you use it right.

 

Destruction seems more detailed and plentiful than BF3. Most of the main destruction is in the "Levolution" features, like a cap point that's on a train that drives towards the side of whoever owns it, or a map with a night-day cycle, or the dam that can be broken. They make a bigger difference than you'd think.

MP is pretty fun. There's still a lot of bugs with some weird texture pop-in and the CPU stutters, but I've been playing a bunch of conquest and I'm actually having a bunch of fun, and that feeling seems to largely be mirrored.

 

Eh.....no. It's much less pronounced, and I only remember it ever happening once or twice per game at the most, but it's still there, unfortunately.

A lot of servers are having issues with lag and rubberbanding at the moment though, so if you're on the fence, I'd still hold off a bit to see how DICE fixes some of the issues.

But it's anything but unplayable, and still a lot of fun in spite of the issues. Roof-camping is a bit more pronounced since Recons don't have spawn beacons anymore (only elevators and ladders), but it usually takes a whole bunch of recons in the same spot to be a nuisance to one person, so it's usually not that big of a problem.

 

That's prolly good, there will be plenty of other noobs running around.

And definitely wait just a bit to buy Premium. All of BF3's expansions were either top-notch or at least had a good number of redeeming features that made them worth playing, but Last Light was a good indication of how some season passes can turn out.

 

I've always been kind of partial to the Battlefield campaigns, I always thought the sound design and destruction made firefights pretty fun.

AC4 seems to have gotten pretty good reviews from both critics and users on Metacritic, although I feel obligated not to buy it since Ubisoft is stepping up their DRM game with it.

I personally am not that excited for Ghost's campaign. I liked MW2's and BO2's since they're the only ones that didn't use infinitely respawning enemy checkpoints, but every since MW3...I dunno, the old IW is gone. The current one is just the leftover employees after the layoffs/quits without enough talent/ambition to get a job elsewhere. Hell, they only did half of the campaign for MW3; Sledgehammer did the rest, and Raven did the multiplayer.

Still, always worth keeping an eye out on things. If it receives universal acclaim, I don't see any reason to ignore it.

 

Oh hey cool, Ubisoft went back on their online pass thing.