Battlefield 4 review: Corralling chaos

Battlefield 4 drops players into a sandbox and unhooks all tethers, loosing scores of soldiers to squad up and take down the opposition however they choose. The series' trademark, free-form multiplayer is reinforced with some smart albeit incremental upgrades, giving players even more incentive to work together. That in itself isn't terribly surprising; multiplayer has always been Battlefield's bread and butter.

What is surprising is that developer DICE has crafted a competent campaign to go along with it.


Battlefield 3's campaign highlighted rote shooting and a generic story punctuated by soldiers whose zest for combat was equaled only by their lust for profanity. Battlefield 4's campaign attempts to present a more relatable story of a squad perpetually stuck between a brilliantly-rendered rock and a slow-motion explosion. The campaign centers around Admiral Chang, an absentee villain in the midst of inciting a civil war in China. Chang convinces the military that Jin Jie, a local politician advocating peace and free speech, was killed by the United States. Chang enlists Russia's aid in his coup and the makings of a modern military drama are born.

Call of Duty's influence on Battlefield 4's campaign is palpable. The campaign is a string of fantastic scenarios from one moment to the next. The five-hour jaunt sees you narrowly escaping death while falling through a collapsing building, surviving an EMP blast in downtown Shanghai, downing enemy fighter planes in a vicious dogfight and hitching a ride on a plane via a skyhook. There's even one especially explosion-fueled moment when you climb a massive dam, lace it with C4 and bring the whole thing crumbling down.

The campaign never languishes and offers a few surprises. While it's odd that you never come face-to-face with Chang or have a big climactic showdown, the majority of the campaign's scenarios and narrative provide a thoroughly enthusiastic adventure that makes up for Battlefield 3's lackluster single-player.

As dizzying and volatile as Battlefield 4's campaign is, there are a few rough edges. The constant waves of enemy AI flushed into the various sandbox encounters are entirely scripted, and their ability to avoid your crosshairs leaves a lot to be desired. Thankfully the addition of a light tactical layer, which allows you to order your squad to suppress and engage individual targets, opens up flanking opportunities and provides just enoughvariety to these scripted sequences. Unfortunately, the distance between checkpoints in some of the larger skirmishes can become a problem in later levels full of enemy vehicles.

Even with these flaws, Battlefield 4's campaign manages to be far more entertaining thanBattlefield 3's bland military affair, and it's clear that DICE learned has learned a lesson or two since 2011.

Multiplayer, unsurprisingly, remains the main draw, presenting a new iteration of DICE's large-scale combat anchored by incremental improvements focused on better squad play. Players assume one of four classes and battle across ten maps, each tailoring itself to the specific mode being played. For example, Hainan Resort, a map composed of a series of tropical islands, will only open up a portion of itself for matches of Squad Deathmatch or Domination, but all of its many islands are utilized when playing Conquest and its 64-player PC variant, Conquest Large.

One of the more obvious changes is that squads can now accommodate five members instead of four. More important to fostering team tactics is the new Field Upgrade system. Each class has a handful of Field Upgrades they can choose from. During any given match, as you perform actions within the squad – things like giving your buddies ammo or reviving fallen squadmates – you'll climb the Field Upgrade ladder and unlock four different skills catering to a certain play style.

For example, as a match progresses and more squad actions are completed, the Engineer's Anti-Tank tier will unlock additional mines and rockets while reducing explosive damage taken. The Combat Medic upgrade path increases sprint speed, decreases Defibrilator charge time and even unlocks a skill that allows friendly vehicles to heal nearby comrades. It's not a revolutionary system, but it's enough to emphasize teamwork and add a new wrinkle to an already strong multiplayer suite.

The many multiplayer modes of Battlefield 4, which include returning favorites like the flag-capturing Conquest and asymmetrical attack mode Rush, are headlined by Obliteration. This new mode has two teams duke it out over a bomb and attempt to deliver it to one of a handful of objectives. Once the enemy team's objectives have all been destroyed, victory is achieved.

Obliteration feels like an intense tug-of war. The bomb is dropped into the middle of the map and only through concerted and coordinated effort can its explosive payload be delivered. The downside is that one of my many matches resulted in a forty-minute stalemate, with both teams pushing the bomb toward each others' base only to have it repelled right back. At launch, it's impossible to impose a time restriction on Obliteration. Still, when playing with a coordinated team, Obliteration offers an intense ebb and flow that's fresh to the series.

Battlefield 4 also marks the return of Commander mode, a top-down RTS-light variant, where players who have reached the rank of 10 can aid their team through weapon and vehicle drops, EMP blasts that disrupt enemy radar and cruise missile strikes that will level anything caught in the blast zone. Commander mode has been absent in recent Battlefield games, and it's a welcomed addition here. Commanders can put in work either throughBattlefield 4 proper or via a tablet app – the latter being an especially intuitive way to order squads toward attack points thanks to a simple touch-and-drag control setup.

The final leg of multiplayer is EA's cringe-worthy buzzword, Levelution. Put simply, all maps have some kind of interesting and exploitable environmental hazard. In Siege of Shanghai, a skyscraper can be toppled; in Paracel Storm, a chain of tropical islands, a storm rolls in and a large military ship crashes onto the shore. Flood Zone features a levee that, once destroyed, floods the entire war zone and pushes infantry toward the rooftops of the sprawling downtown locale.

Levelution often feels more like window dressing than an impactful mechanic, and it works better in some levels than it does in others. The events in Flood Zone and Siege of Shanghai, for example dramatically affect the dynamics of play. When Flood Zone's levee breaks and drowns the city, soldiers are forced to swim on the ground level, making them vulnerable to fire from the rooftops. Bringing down the skyscraper in Siege of Shanghai hampers visibility with a thick coating of dust in the air. Meanwhile, there are weaker interactive elements like scattered IEDs players can trigger in Golmud Railway, or a semi-collapsible hotel in Hainan Resort. It's impressive to watch the US destroyer slam into the shore in Paracel Storm, but it doesn't really do much to change gameplay.

Levelution aside, each of Battlefield 4's ten levels feel massive - especially on PC. Not only are these maps truly beautiful – Battlefield 4 has some of the best lighting I've ever seen – but they're also far more destructible than the war zones of Battlefield 3. Taking part in a 64-player match across the sprawling Hainan Resort, watching jets strafe and battle in the skies while boats assault beaches and tanks level condos is awe-inspiring.

Sadly, the same can't be said for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions, which limit maps to 24 players each. Playing a match of Conquest often feels like a traipse through a ghost town in search of the next guy to shoot. The current-generation console versions of Battlefield 4 are also hampered by short draw distance, texture pop-in and a 30 frames-per-second presentation. Between the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions, the latter suffered from a much more sluggish frame rate and even some animations like reloading were inconsistent. The game would recognize I reloaded by placing a new clip in my gun but my soldier didn't go through the motions. The Xbox 360 and PS3 offerings maintain the solid core gameplay of Battlefield 4, but the gap between PC and current-gen consoles is definitely starting to show.

Ultimately, Battlefield 4 successfully piles more content onto its excellent multiplayer while adding just a hint of innovation through Commander mode and Field Upgrades. The single-player campaign, while suffering from a dearth of checkpoints in some missions, does a good job of entertaining throughout its brief conflict, trading in the abysmal dreck that was Battlefield 3's story for high-energy spectacle.

The main draw for the Battlefield series has always been the chaotic camaraderie of its multiplayer, and that's no different here. But the sum of Battlefield 4's parts shows that DICE is capable of more. Not only has the developer iterated on and progressed its marquee multiplayer, it's provided a tight and cohesive campaign that is everything a military shooter needs to be.

via Joystiq

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Gamer rage: can it be stopped, and should it be?

Two recent twitter storms have led to death threats for one game designer and the cancellation of a new project for another. Is this just the way things are in the video game community now?

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 – should developers face fury from gamers when games are changed?

Last week, David Vonderhaar, the game design director at development studio Treyarch, announced that his team had made some minor adjustments to Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Now there are people online who want him dead. I don't have to list the vile threats that have bombarded his Twitter account - they are handily recorded on the Tumblr, Gamer Fury. All we really need to know is that Vonderhaar and his team tweaked some weapon statistics in the game's multiplayer mode to re-balance the experience, and that some members of the community responded by wishing rape and cancer on his family.
A few days later, indie developer Phil Fish announced that he was abandoning the sequel to his critically acclaimed platformer Fez, because he couldn't cope with the games industry anymore. The announcement came after a raging Twitter argument with games writer Marcus Beer, who had referred to Fish as a tosspot and an asshole during the GameTrailers show, Invisible Walls. Fish is no shrinking innocent; he has actively engaged in social media storms in the past, and his Twitter comment to Beer in which he directed the journalist to "compare your life to mine and then kill yourself" was repellent. But it seems there will be no Fez II now, so, yeah, well played everyone.
These are, of course, familiar tales in the modern games industry, and indeed, they reflect patterns of online behaviour that now exist throughout culture and society. In the Guardian today, we can read about the 21-year-old man who has been arrested for threatening feminist Caroline Criado-Perez after she successfully campaigned to have Jane Austen's picture on the ten pound note. "It's sadly not unusual to get this kind of abuse but I've never seen it get as intense or aggressive as this," said Criado-Perez. "It's infuriating that the price you pay for standing up for women is 24 hours of rape threats."
Yet somehow, this is where we are now.
Naturally, there are a range of theories to explain this bizarre and sickening behaviour. The psychologist John Suler refers to the online disinhibition effect: the way that the anonymity of cyberspace frees us to say and do things that we would ever consider in face-to-face communication. In his 2004 essay, CyberPsychology and Behaviour, there is a theory with particular relevance to the Vonderhaar situation. Suler writes that some people consciously inhabit different characters while online, like actors taking on a role, and that they dissociate the actions of this 'character' from themselves and from real-life consequence:

People may feel that the imaginary characters they "created" exist in a different space, that one's online persona along with the online others live in an make-believe dimension, a dream world, separate and apart from the demands and responsibilities of the real world. They split or "dissociate" online fiction from offline fact. Emily Finch, an author and criminal lawyer studying identity theft in cyberspace, has suggested that some people see their online life as a kind of game with rules and norms that don't apply to everyday living (pers. comm., 2002). Once they turn off the computer and return to their daily routine, they believe they can leave that game and their game-identity behind. Why should they be held responsible for what happens in that make-believe play world that has nothing to do with reality? After all, it isn't that different than blasting away at your pals in a shoot-em up video game... or so some people might think, perhaps unconsciously.

In this sense, the mindless hatred directed toward Vonderhaarr could be seen as a warped extension of the 'trash talk' many gamers indulge in during multiplayer deathmatches – Twitter becomes a part of the experience of Black Ops, and engaging in online bullying is a sort of tribal affirmation with other players. Similarly, the controversial theory of deindividuation, which seeks to explain why normal individuals become unruly and violent in a crowd, may well show parallels between Twitter abuse and football hooliganism: both are about taking on and representing a collective identity which has nothing to do with 'real-life'. Both are about showing off how hard you are to your peers. And in the leveling confines of the online comments section or Twitter feed, the only way to be heard – to be 'admired' – is to be the most extreme.

The problem is, the games community has found ways to explain away abominable online behaviour. You know, "Call of Duty is a horrible game so it gets the fans it deserves"; "Phil Fish is an argumentative guy so he should expect to attract Twitter hatred"; "these nutters are a tiny minority of gamers". But by excusing all this crap, surely we're perpetuating it; we're complicit. And we shouldn't be. It is repulsive.


Game design is a creative endeavour and its proponents, like the great novelists, the great film makers, the great artists, are often introverted and sensitive people. Do we really want to create an environment in which online abuse is accepted as inevitable? Where does that stop? Suggesting that young designers stay off Twitter or remain aloof from communities is not practical – in the digital era, maintaining close ties with your 'user-base' is vital. After all, Valve's Greenlight system has turned community into a financial model; popularity, or at least notoriety, has become a prerequisite to success. It is not realistic to just stay out of the social media milieu.
And ultimately, it doesn't matter what you think about games like Call of Duty, you have to think about David Vonderhaar going home to his family one night last week and explaining to them that dozens of people want him to die in the most graphic ways possible because of a decision he made about a game he loves. All developers understand that their audiences are passionate and engaged, but is hate an inevitable by-product of that?


As for the Phil Fish situation, well, it is more complex – he has courted controversy, he has played that game. But I'm not sure he knew the maelstrom of invective he would bring down upon himself. And if he did, does that make it acceptable? That's an honest question. Does it?
Bullies rely on a status quo that subtly excuses and normalises their behaviour. It doesn't have to be that way. There are plenty of excuses to be an idiot online, but the excuses not to be are always more compelling and enriching. I'm not imagining some sort of happy-clappy pacifist fantasy land here; full-bloodied criticism, satire and argument are vital. I'm just talking about a games culture in which a developer doesn't get death threats for changing an imaginary weapon.
Is it okay to think about that? Is it okay to want it?

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“Call of Duty” maker Activision going independent will intensify the battle for video game dominance

Bring it on AP Photo/Activision

Activision Blizzard, the video game maker most famous for its Call of Duty franchise, has finally broken free. After months of negotiations, its owner, Vivendi, agreed to sell most of its stake in Activision back to the company for $8.2 billion.
The deal should make Activision a more nimble company, which will heat up the already intense battle with rival Electronic Arts.
Activision’s shares rose by more than 14% on the news. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick and his investment partners will also have a stake in the company as part of the deal. The new Activision will have about $3 billion in cash on its balance sheet, a nice stockpile to use for investments in the company, M&A, or other purposes.
Arch rival Electronic Arts is also doing well, and recently reported better-than-expected earnings. But the company has been going through a bit of a transformation, and laid off some staffers earlier this year to streamline operations. Electronic Arts is also still searching for a permanent CEO after John Riccitiello left the company.
Still, the company managed to beat analyst estimates, even though its Battlefield 3 game, a competitor to Call of Duty, is almost two years old. The company is pinning a lot of hope on the release of its FIFA 3 soccer game in China. It will also be launching Battlefield 4 later this year, which will go up against Activision’s Call of Duty: Ghosts.
The one gaming company that has fallen behind is Zynga. Its shares continued to fall today (they are down by about 17%), after announcing that it would not pursue a license for online gambling in the United States. The company—and many investors—had hoped that real-money gambling could help turn it around.
Interestingly, Zynga’s new CEO Don Mattrick is rumored to have been the front runner for the Electronic Arts CEO position. So far, it looks like Mattrick may have made a questionable choice in picking Zynga. He is overhauling Zynga’s strategy and warned it could get ugly at times, but said Zynga will be better off in the long run.

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