BF4 updates

Wet, have you got your pc yet? I thought you had, and you seem to be waiting for somethng.

Been a healthy number of people playing bf3 over the last week. See if you can get a decent deal on bf3 and we’ll show you what you’ve been missing over the last 10 years, WET

You need to jump on TS mate if you’re after a game of BF42, and I’m certainly up for it even though it’s not as good as BF3. I had a few rounds on it the other day, and while it was certainly a good game for it’s time, it was incredibly frustrating in many ways that we tend to forget through the fog nostalgia. Although BF3 is not perfect, it’s a much more balanced experienced than BF42 ever was, with aircraft no longer as ridiculously overpowered as they once were in the series. The guns take a bit of getting used to again as well, and I have to say that while I was initially against the ADS system which I first saw in COD4, and which BF3 adopted, going back to the older style of really just hip firing, shows why it had to change. The game’s these days are so much more complex and better for it. One thing I do like though is the old gold silver bronze medal system and the way you can just not care at all about stats. You don’t get the same rewards for team play but still it’s nice when a drunken death streak doesn’t show up on your permanent record for all time 🙂

Regarding BF4, remember that right now we only have videos to go by and it’s very easy for people to say that it “looks like a bf3 clone”, and some people are even saying that as a criticism. We have to be realistic about it and I would expect the game to play similar to BF3, but there could be some massive differences. Commander mode is making a comeback from BF2, and it’s no small thing that you’ll be able to play as commander from an ipad in your living room (in fact we may have to monitor how this works as you could have people, like max, playing as commander from the train on the way to work with a 17 million ping, which could ruin the game for others). The class abilities are being shuffled around a bit and the guns are being changed, along with modifications which will affect what you can do in certain situations. The maps of course will also be different, and I’m hoping we see a little bit more imagination in how the control points are distributed, compared to BF3. It would be nice to have more tactical advantages to holding flags again, aside from simply the vehicles which spawn there and the effect on the ticket count. That’s one thing BF42 did well, with maps like Iwo Jima, where you could set up a monster defence on the mountain, simply because of the geography, but you’d be in for a tough time if you lost control of your airfield; also on Midway if you controlled the island, you’d have a much easier time of it, as you would in Market garden if you could stop the germans crossing the two bridges. There are some similar situations to the above in BF3 maps, but only really on the linear ones and on the old maps converted from BF42/BF2. It happened in BF42 and in BF2, but quite often you’re running around capping for the sake of capping in BF3, with little tactical value gained from controlling a particular area. That’s a hard thing for them to get right in a game, in particular when it comes to the game’s balance, but it would be nice to see a bit more of it. Oh and although I’ll not be holding my breath, one thing EA are apparently promising (again) is that BF4 will have a few more features which will aid competitive play, which I really hope to see.

Anyway, I’ve said this before, but if I was in your position WET, i’d get onto BF3 asap and get used to what will feel like a completely new style of play for a FPS game. You’ll have a potentially frustrating learning curve ahead of you if you want to be able to avoid continuously dying in BF4, and the sooner you get started the better. How you move, how you aim, and how you control your weapon has changed dramatically since bf42, and you’ll have to pick that up overnight, compared to the rest of us who’ve been able to learn it gradually over the years as it’s evolved through various games.

Oh and one final thing that I want to see in BF4, and probably the most important from XDC’s point of view, and that’s a server browser which does not discriminate against custom setting servers. We have a very happy compromised agreed between the hardcore and normal mode fan boys, but have been completely unable to implement it due to the issues with the server’s listing on battlelog. I’ll not hold my breath on this though.

Go on with default settings first. I think it will automatically put everything to suit quite good for your system specs…

And oh get an new monitor ASAP 😯 😆 😆

baptism of fire!!!

….and whats your battlelog name?

Firstly, regarding your GFX settings, I wouldn’t worry too much about them just now. If that is the maximum resolution you can get out of your monitor, you should have no issues running the game at max settings with your hardware, and in fact you could probably maintain a high frame rate in most game scenarios at most resolutions. Until you have higher resolutions available to you, don’t worry too much about it, but it’s worth adding that I don’t stick my settings up as far as ultra as rival xfactor persuaded me otherwise in several of his YouTube videos. Below is a good guide from him:

http://m.youtube.com/channel/UCXN76fKLJUFeMK12fAN5Gug

Anyway, welcome to 2013, and the wonderful world of First Person Shooters, as inspired by COD. Don’t worry though, it’s not too difficult to get the hang of once you know the basics, and really what you’re doing is learning how to aim down your sights much more than you used to have to, as well as coping with a much lower time to kill than in previous BF versions. As a first step what you might want to do is play the single player campaign, or alternatively team up with one of us and play some coop (I’d be up for this actually as I’ve had too long away from BF3 and need to sort my own aim out again). Although it’ll be nothing like playing against a human, it will atleast get you used to controlling your gun and your character’s movement. It’ll help you sort out and get used to the key mappings as well.

Once you’re comfortable with that, you may be in a position to appreciate this series of videos, which were also produced by rival xfactor:

http://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1F48902248C7593B

In general, you cannot go wrong with anything that guy says, and his channel is a gold mine of information on how to play this game.

You’ll now want to jump into a multiplayer game, and there’ll be no shortage of people around here who’ll be up for a squad with you – bear in mind though that in Max’s world, “teamwork” means everyone in the squad trying to keep up with him as he sprints from flag to flag. I’ve been doing other things the last few nights, but I’ll try and keep myself on TS to help you out over the next few days, assuming you have a chance to jump on?

Finally, don’t be discouraged when you first jump online and find you’re dying a lot. Hopefullyyou already appreciate this but, even if you play through single player and the coop missions, it’ll stilltaketime to get used to each gun and to get your reaction time up to scratch. There are plenty of players out there who have literally hundred of hours sunk into playing this game and you can expect them to kill you a lot, however believe me when I say that time isnot everything. Plenty of those players still make basic mistakes, and if you use the videos above to improve your game, you’ll see a dramatic improvement over a few weeks of play, and that’ll put you in a good position for the release of BF4 in about 6 to 8 weeks time.