Battlefield 4’s appearance at the EA E3 keynote this year brought the house down by literally bringing a virtual building down. The live demo for DICE’s online fragfest showed a firefight in a multiplayer match involving 64 players in a map with a towering skyscraper at the centre of it.
As the battle reached its apex, the audience in the Shine Auditorium watched gobsmacked as the multi-storied building had its supports blow out. With a scream of tearing metal we then crashed into the map like a felled Redwood made from steel and glass.
A few months on, we flew out to DICE HQ in beautiful Stockholm to get our hands on the game and see how things are shaping up.
Battlefield 4: Environments
The Battlefield series has always put a premium on destructible environments - last seen in Battlefield 3 - but in the latest entry in the series, the scale for this feature is off the charts. Not only does it occasionally look spectacular as in the case of the tumbling skyscraper – which provides the centrepiece of the game’s Shanghai map – it also opens up a ton of new gameplay options.For example, when the skyscraper drops, it creates new pathways through the map, although strictly speaking, players can do their own tinkering with their surroundings. They can, for example, use explosive and grenades against certain walls to create new routes.
The skyscraper drop also covers the whole map in a massive dust cloud that limits players’ draw distance and visibility. This makes ground troops harder to spot from higher vantage points and it makes providing air support a logistical nightmare.
DICE is calling this concept 'Levolution' - literally, the idea is that the map (level) evolves during the game, presenting you with new challenges to overcome, and tactical possibilities for taking on the enemy.
