EAs eternal icy grip on DICE, Battlefield 4 announced

[BobbyFizz]

This went under the radar for me for a couple of days. http://uk.ign.com/articles/2012/07/1...ised-on-origin

I tried BF3, thought it was a slimey version of BFBC2, and neither a patch on the brilliant BF2.

So now it seems they're doing an almost call of duty release schedule. What do you lot think of this sort of release process? Obviously nothing is essentially being improved as it has to run on the xbox 360, so it's not an iterative improvement like games used to be.

My thought it the frostbite 2 engine is just made to be scalable, so they can release BF5 on the new consoles late next year.

edit: ok not "announced" but as good as.

Edit 2: Now it is.

So, now it's official:

http://www.medalofhonor.com/bf4-beta
http://www.battlefield.com/battlefield4

The video games/japan journalism blog thingy website starting with a K talks about beta in fall 2012, but I cannot find that info anywhere on those websites.

*edit*
Now it's talking about next instead of this fall. But I still cannot find that information anywhere outside their post.

*edit2*
Okay, more websites talking about fall 2013. So "this fall" seemed indeed to be a mistake.

[squirrel]

I almost try to reach my pocket to buy BF3 main programme and the Premium to join the party (I found a place with good free Wifi and I can bring a laptop there to play, solve the Origin account problem), and then you post this news.

USD30 for main program and then USD50 for Premium, meaning USD80 for BF3 with life span maybe for only one year. Looks like a retareded investment to me.

And I dont believe it. Amazon.com is still pricing the main program at USD53.

If it is a USD60 with a life span of 2 years, that will be a great deal. I still so much admire the rather cost-justified life span of Bad Company 2, USD50 for 9 maps for one and a half year (actually USD35 for East Asian Hong Kong import version), and one year later 4 more maps for the game to run for another 9 months, only to be concluded by the launch of BF3. Of course I always want more, but at least that is kind of deal I would be willing to consider spending money on.

And I can smell some dirty as pussy office politics here. Someone tries to undercut another within a company by cannibalizing on another, only to be stopped by the superior when gets caught......

[gganate]

Battlefield 4...that's what, actually the eighth Battlefield game? The Desert Combat mod for 1942 basically did everything all the future sequels did. I'm done with Battlefields and CODs and other endless sequels, with the exception of Bethesda RPGs.

[Hypernetic]

Battlefield 4...that's what, actually the eighth Battlefield game? The Desert Combat mod for 1942 basically did everything all the future sequels did. I'm done with Battlefields and CODs and other endless sequels, with the exception of Bethesda RPGs.

Uh, to be fair this is the first time they've done something like this with Battlefield. All of the other games were drastically different before BF3.

BF:1942: WW2 game that was pretty innovative for it's time.
BF2: Modern combat game with massive maps and scale. Again, it was pretty innovative for it's time.
BF 2142: Future combat game that did some pretty interesting things (titan mode, for example).
Bad Company: Weird console game.
Bad Company 2: Less original than previous games, but still brought some good ideas like rush mode.
BF3: BF2 with less features and prettier graphics.
BF4: Who the fuck knows?

So BF is far from a series that whored itself out like COD.


THAT BEING SAID:

This is retarded and EA sucks. It's no wonder the lead designer of BF3 jumped ship from DICE last week.

[Rii]

DICE is an American zombie studio. The lights are on but nobody's home. Sad really.

[jnx]

DICE is an American zombie studio. Sad really.

Ummm.. What?

[Rii]

Ummm.. What?

An American-owned studio churning out games about Americans for Americans. Said games being near identitkit copies of one another with less artistry in their differentiation than between one generation of consumer electronics hardware and the next. DICE is a motherboard factory in Shenzen.

[SirKicksalot]

Uh, to be fair this is the first time they've done something like this with Battlefield. All of the other games were drastically different before BF3.

BF:1942: WW2 game that was pretty innovative for it's time.
BF2: Modern combat game with massive maps and scale. Again, it was pretty innovative for it's time.
BF 2142: Future combat game that did some pretty interesting things (titan mode, for example).
Bad Company: Weird console game.
Bad Company 2: Less original than previous games, but still brought some good ideas like rush mode.
BF3: BF2 with less features and prettier graphics.
BF4: Who the fuck knows?

So BF is far from a series that whored itself out like COD.

Each year since 2002 has seen at least one entry in the series, either a full game or an expansion. We're past the 20th Battlefield product by now and I'm pretty sure COD reaches that number only if you include the handheld and vintage console adaptations in addition to its DLC.

[Vandelay]

There are plenty of reasons to complain about the direction BF has gone, but I don't think it is fair to accuse them of going down the CoD route of yearly "updates." It is incredibly unlikely that BF4 will be released this year and will probably end up being closer two years after BF3's release, as it will almost certainly come out sometime after the final DLC of BF3 in March 2013.

Pretty sure I have seen EA include beta entry to other games that are not due out for ages before too, so this doesn't really tell us anything.

[Leopig]

Battlefield 1942 was a C&C Renegade clone.

[Moraven]

Expect BF 1942 was better. They came out the same year. Doubt the could clone something in 8 months.

[Leopig]

No, it wasn't.

[Moraven]

DICE is an American zombie studio. The lights are on but nobody's home. Sad really.

As in the fact EA is American or somehow a Swedish studio is?



I just hate the fact EA is simply copying Acti by having two rotating FPS franchises released ever year, giving 2 years to work on one. The game communities are being forced to die every 2 years (on PC, maybe not, since older games tend to live on, but mostly due to the fact older games have the ability for the user to run servers)

[Leopig]

TBH I can see BF and CoD both going the way of Guitar hero and Rock band soon. With the pay to win revolution currently plaguing gaming it is only a matter of time.

[b0rsuk]

TBH I can see BF and CoD both going the way of Guitar hero and Rock band soon. With the pay to win revolution currently plaguing gaming it is only a matter of time.

I don't think this will happen. Modern-themed, tacticool FPS games are the lowest common denominator in my opinion. They require next to no imagination (war is omnipresent in news etc; it's extremely common to play war among boys), they're slow enough so that everyone can participate (tacticool), they use the most natural point of view (first person), and they're about shooting people. No geeky elves or robots. Everyone understands shooting. Hell, even women like it (in a way - many love war movies).

Maybe BF or COD will wane, but only if beaten by another modern warfare FPS game. I think mainstream games have found their MTV product in modern warfare FPS games.

[Hypernetic]

Each year since 2002 has seen at least one entry in the series, either a full game or an expansion. We're past the 20th Battlefield product by now and I'm pretty sure COD reaches that number only if you include the handheld and vintage console adaptations in addition to its DLC.

Expansions really don't count man.

[Voon]

So......... Manly mans shooting Iranians again?

[Hypernetic]

So......... Manly mans shooting Iranians again?

I'd actually be a little excited if they made another 2142 style game. If it's just BF3.5 now with MOAR GUNZ AND SPLOSIONZ! Then yeah, no thanks.

[Voon]

You and me both. And yeah, if they want to counter CoD sales so much, why aren't they doing a BF2143? It only makes sense when BLOPS 2 is going to be set in the future and EA wants DICE to out-do them

[Nalano]

The game communities are being forced to die every 2 years

This is what hurts me the most: There's no point in waiting for the price to go down because the online community will have disappeared for n+1 by the time it does. FFS, I want to go back to the heady days of UT2k4 and BF2 in 2005, where there was a huge gap and those games' communities had some time to breathe.

I mean, shit, not to squee about Valve any more, but TF2 - now there's proper support for a community.