I probably could have ignored the lure of a free triple-A
title (albeit in Beta) except for the urgings of a fellow gamer. Battlefield 4 held as much interest for me as
its predecessor's "Premium" offering.
In other words, I can wait for a sale.
But in the interest of staying current with the latest PC gaming trends and having
something new to hurl barbs at, I went ahead and downloaded the 5Gigabyte appetizer
from Dice. A supersized sampler platter
designed to whet the appetite and hopefully stir the faithful into a buying
frenzy after getting a taste.
After all the Origin updates my first exposure to Battlefield
4 came in the form of the redesigned Battlelog, Battlelog 2.0. Nothing new to report here other than using
a darker color palette and frequent crashing.
At least it picked up my profile from Battlefield 3. Well, except for not having any of my control
or loadout settings saved.
After searching for an active server it occurred to me that
I was seeing way too many instances of 0/64 (aka: empty servers.) It didn't seem to matter the time of day or
day of the week either. On average, out
of 50 servers it seemed that 45 of them were always empty. Not a good sign for a game that has a new engine
and has been so heavily promoted for almost a year.
Undaunted, I set a goal.
I was determined to play the Beta long enough to advance one rank in the
game. A feat I achieved after
cumulatively playing for 2 hours. Of
course that doesn't count the 3 hours spent finding a PC it would run on. My 4 year old Windows 7 Dual core gaming
laptop couldn't manage to do more than crash at the load screen. My regular gaming rigs fared slightly better
letting me actually play the game but not without hard locks and long waits at the "Loading"
screen.
I've included a video on this page that illustrates all of
this by the way.
Once I'd finally navigated Dice's kludgy web interface and gotten
into the game proper I found the normal annoyances with anything that's been
stamped "Beta." After all the
only price I paid was a few hours of my life waiting for downloads and load
screens right?
Let me cut to the quick.
The game is gorgeous but not as gorgeous or interesting as the cut scenes
we were treated to in the promotional videos on YouTube. It still suffers the same vulnerabilities to
exploits and poor interface design as its predecessor. It's
utterly ridiculous that I have to launch a triple-A title from a web page and
have to join a server before I can configure the most basic settings like
screen resolution and player controls.
This is the first major title to be exclusively 64 bit which
means there could be issues with video drivers but performance should be
better. "Should be" is the
operative phrase here because it's not. BF4
is as I predicted it would be, DLC for BF3 both in looks and experience. The new game engine makes crumbling
skyscrapers a bit more exciting but visually it's not a great leap.
I still had disappearing skylines in the background and disappearing
textures here and there. Server lag is
still an issue even with a lightly loaded server and stat updates aren't always
reflected on Battlelog 2.0. I sacrificed
2000 points to that bug.
A lot of these annoyances can be written off as Beta code gremlins. What's disturbing is that I've had the same
issues in Battlefield 3 which is a much more mature platform after 2 years.
Still for the price I was at least able to evaluate the BF4
experience. In short it's stacking up to
be the next cash cow for EA. It's a good
looking game but not revolutionary and the same issues that existed in BF3 have
followed its successor.
In short, I'll wait for a sale if for no other reason than to not be one of those people who pick up the pre-order only to get screwed over by
a flood of DLC and upgrade packs that invalidate the price premium.
Hey, at least you'll get cool dog tags!
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