It helps that the next gen consoles allow DICE to raise the player count to 64. You could tell that the maps in BF3 were made for 32 players. Now you can comfortably have 64 players and not feel like the map is too crowded. And I agree about the sound. The sound engine and recordings are amazing.
Unlocked the AK5C and started using it. Wow. This might be the best gun in the beta. Very little (noticeable) recoil, does good damage, and has a decent ammo supply. It's basically the Engineer version of the AK-12, which itself is a pretty damn good gun.
Just got that myself. Great gun. Trying the SCAR at the moment, but the first ten kills to get the red dot are painful with those iron sights lol.
Agreed. And the SCAR doesn't seem to be improved at all over its BF3 version. In fact it feels a little worse, despite being upgraded to assault rifle status. There just isn't enough ammo in the clip. Which is weird, because if these weapons were in any way realistic, the SCAR-H would actually be the best all-around assault rifle in the game. The bullet spread on the MGs is a little ridiculous. You have to burst with those, even when mounted. And the two shotguns included are just useless, IMO.
I only unlocked the SCAR and the AK5 at the moment. The SCAR is disappointing. Not enough power considering the recoil and limited mag capacity. It just isn't worth it. The basic MG seems fine for me. Mounted is a little more recoil than BF3, but otherwise, I find the one provided fine. I find myself not even engaging at distances I wouldn't hesitate to in BF3 due to the new firing mechanics. It is a lot tougher, and more realistic in my opinion to hit targets at range, so that isn't necessarily a complaint. Limited ammo also part of the decision lol. You just gotta love and appreciate the full 3D map that is Siege of Shanghai. I mean, rooftop to rooftop, underground Metro, I am impressed at the map design and look forward to others. The reason I wanted Warlord from BF2:SF remade was because of the rooftop battles. Siege of Shanghai has essentially took that experience and improved on it immensely - zip lines please. I hope to see other maps from BF4 with similar elevation to it. Paracel Storm won't be. And from the levolution trailer, I don't see others with similar concepts, maybe the Dam map. Either way, looking forward to see what maps come with launch and eventually, what the DLC has in store. About the Dam map, nothing official except this screen cap from a commander trailer. You can see the Dam on the far right. BF2 had Kubra Dam, so I wonder how similar or different this one will be, even though this one seems to have a lot more water than Kubra. Spoiler PS. Got a 4GB EVGA 770 Classified w. ACX Cooler and my old 560ti handled the beta better. :?: I was doing some reading and i heard people with higher end cards were having similar problems. I guess we will have to wait for new support drivers and optimization with the retail version.
The 770 offers best performance for the price, and performs better than more expensive 680. In sli it kills a titan. When the price drops I will sli it, maybe, or just get a new card.
So how'd your 560 best it in BF4? Riddle me that! Also, the 770 IS a 680--with GPU Boost 2.0, more VRAM, and a bump in stock clock speeds. Same GK104 core. Get a new card when you can. I've learned the hard way that using multiple video cards is a waste of money. It sounds appealing, getting two cheaper cards to outperform one expensive card, but you wind up paying nearly the same and the drawbacks of multi-GPU technology--microstuttering, for instance--just ruins the experience. Single GPU is the way to go, IMO. You'll also want to hop on the next gen. The current gen Nvidia stuff is basically two years old. Still performs great, as my GTX 780 will prove, but we're due for a big leap forward next year.
I think you could've waited until the 15th. Now you need to get on Windows 8 if you aren't already. DX 11.1 does a lot for this game.
What 15th? Maxwell comes out Q1 2014, but by the time the better models come out with more Vram, etc, you are looking at March or April. I am happy with the 770. Already mentioned I don't want the 9000 from AMD. Night and day difference compared to the 560Ti (BF3: 560 High Settings 25-30 fps / 770 Ultra Settings 60+ steady). Hesitant to switch to Win8 also, but I am aware of the better performance, and DirectX 11.2.
If Mantle is as expected, then AMD is basically going to steal Nvidia's market share. I would recommend it, especially with 8.1 on the way.
Did some reading on Mantle, interesting that they are focusing on replacing APIs, or trying to overthrow DirectX (if I made sense of all that technical reading correctly), which would of course run better on AMD cards. I don't see the advantage lasting much longer than a launch or two though. Nvidia is too profitable, much more so than AMD, to let this affect them. They will put the necessary R&D into their next gen. AMD will gain profitability with their hat trick of Wii U , Xbone, and PS4, but still not enough to overthrow the giant Nvidia IMO.
The problem for Nvidia, and the advantage for AMD, is that AMD's hardware is in all of the next gen consoles. This is why Mantle was co-announced with DICE; BF4 is the biggest game release from a technical perspective this year. Basically, if you make a console game, you can trivially port it to the PC using Mantle, and you get a performance enhancement over Nvidia hardware. It has nothing to do with Nvidia's R&D, it has everything to do with Nvidia being locked out of the majority of the gaming market--except for the Steam Box.
Back on track, the ACW is deadly within close-medium range, but if you firing in automatic, you better make sure your accuracy is good or you will have to pull out your pistol to finish off the kill. It is so easy to drop two enemies if you get a good jump on them with the quick rate of fire with the ACW, it is incredible.
Agreed. The ACW-R is better than it was in BF3, where it was already a pretty good all-around weapon for Engineers. But it's definitely only a short to medium range weapon. Should be laser-accurate at long range if you can rapidly tap single fire.
Been toying with the PP-2000. It seems to be more or less the exact same gun as it was in BF3, but with slightly better range. It's almost fun to use now.
So I haven't really been following this game a all, but I saw a commercial just now that made this game look awesome. Are the environments actually 100% destructible, because in the commercial it showed a big skyscraper coming crashing down. The lack I destructible environments is one thin I have disliked in the past in CoD games, so if BF4 is more realistic in that regard I could definitely see myself looking into this game.
They aren't 100% destructible. There's one event per map that can happen to change the map. That event is usually some sort of destruction, like destroying the dam on one map to flood the urban area below it and turn it from a street battle into a rooftoop fight with boats able to navigate the city streets. The beta map, Siege of Shanghai, has a skyscraper that's destructible if you blow up its support columns, causing the area to become a rubble field that prevents teams from camping the top and raining fire down on the other four points. It's not always some form of demolition, though. The Paracel Storm map is a series of small islands in a chain; the map event there is for a storm to roll in and for a battleship to crash into one of the islands. I wish it were 100% destructible, but DICE is more concerned about balancing a map than in giving that level of freedom. I actually haven't seen the kind of destruction we had in BF3, where you could shoot an explosive at the side of a building and let the rubble crush the people below it, but that might just be due to the fact that this is a beta.
There is also minor destruction that changes the level as well. For example, on the Beta map, there are overhangs around the perimeter of some buildings. If you damage a support, the overhang will drop creating a ramp and giving the player access to different levels, and sometimes rooftop areas. It is hard to truly gauge the level of destruction from the beta because all buildings seem to be high rises. Hard to put in full destruction for them. I think normal free standing buildings, up to two levels, will be fully destructible like BF3. As far as everything else, fences, wood outposts, crates, etc, they are all destructible. We’ll have to wait for the retail simply because like I said, the level itself doesn’t accommodate the destruction model well IMO.
So I'm a big COD player and have never played Battlefield. I am thinking about switching over to Battlefield 4, should I do it? Is it that much better of a game? I know its a lot more team oriented of a game than cod but I'm not too familar. Any thing to help with my decision. Thanks
Well, you picked the worst time to become inquisitive, because the open beta just ended. You could have given it a shot. I would say this; if you're looking for something different from CoD, then the vehicles alone will provide that. I've never been a fan of CoD multiplayer, and Battlefield is closer to the cooperative team style I preferred since the days of Quake 2. I don't think you'll be disappointed.
I'm biased towards BF, but think of it this way, in COD with enough kills you get air strike, chopper guns, etc. In BF, you ARE the air strikes, jet pilot, chopper pilot, chopper gunner, tank driver, etc. COD is more of a gallery shooter, where BF offers both with varying game modes. You can enjoy the huge open maps in conquest, or hit a TDM for the COD experience/action. I'd say go for BF this time around.
One improvement I see in this game is that you dont go into freaking convulsions when you get hit. Also suppression is much less annoying. I am liking what I see. Thank god my dual Nvidia GTX 670s/core i7 4.7ghz combo can run it nicely on ultra with tweaked AA settings.
CPU usage is way up, like 30%, over BF3. For all the complaints that the game doesn't look better than BF3, the Frostbite 3 engine must be doing something to justify the extra CPU use. I do like the tighter reaction to being shot, since you can now counterattack effectively—at least until you die half a second later. Guns feel much more lethal in BF4, though the pistols and helicopter miniguns feel like BB toys to me.
About the 30% increase in CPU load, I was going to ask if overclocking my i7-3770k @ 3.5 Ghz to say, maybe 4.0 or 4.5 would help with framerates? I have a Corsair H-100 liquid cooler, so I can do it, and the ASUS Z-77 Sabertooth mobo with the graphical interface making the overclock easy (huh! easy........after 6 hours of reading more likely). I didn't want to overclock but until absolutely forced to, but it is free performance that I am not using. Thoughts?
Yes, absolutely. Frostbite uses more CPU than GPU. You'll absolutely see gains with an OCed CPU. I bumped my CPU's OC an extra 400MHz just for the beta. I was originally at 3.6 GHz OCed from 3.4, now I'm at 4GHz. Core i5-3470k.
Interesting. Gonna have to do a lot of reading. I have no idea what I'm doing. Off to overclock.net I guess. Desides, sorry for the constant questions bro, but do you think it is better to upgrade to Win8 or format Win7 and clean install 8 if I do decide to move forward with it.
Well, 8.1 is out as of yesterday, so you'll want to get that. And you might as well do a clean install and grab an SSD if you don't have one.
I have a SSD and a secondary SATA drive. Only have OS. Arma3, and video drivers/peripheral software on SSD, and maybe a few small programs that I forgot to put on the secondary. So, really, it shouldn't be that bad for me.
You'll be fine. But definitely do a clean install of 8.1. It will detect during setup that you have an SSD and format partitions accordingly, as well as enable some garbage collection and maintenance settings that help the SSD long term. 8 and 8.1 get some deserved crap, but under the hood it's a big step up from 7.
The point of this is to get you to buy something from Corsair, but this is still an interesting benchmark suite. tl;dr BF4 wants you to overclock your RAM.
Good to know. I have 2133 DDR3 ram. Not even going to think about overclocking it. Still haven't even touched my i7 yet. Anyone know if BF4 can be preloaded?
I'm on 1600MHz RAM. I might toy with pushing it a little bit. BF4 should be pre-loadable, but so far it's not available. I'd expect a preload on/by Friday. I don't think they'd wait until Monday to preload for a Tuesday release…
Uggggh. And they confirmed it on Twitter. Such a stupid move. Why not let preloads happen over the weekend? Reduces server load when it's out on Tuesday.
It appears to be inaccurate. An Origin dev on reddit offered the following clarifications; http://www.reddit.com/r/battlefield...oad_on_pc_to_start_24h_before_release/ccvbpy4 Looks like it may be over the weekend.
