Battlefield 4 'Dragon Valley' Remake Coming Free Soon
Remaking the BF2 classic
The temple, meandering river, and destructible bridges of Battlefield 2's Dragon Valley are returning in Battlefield 4 [official site] for free later this year, all gussied-up and reworked for BF4. The map's no secret - it hit the Community Test Environment months ago - but DICE have now announced it'll arrive as part of the free 'Legacy Operations' DLC alongside the game's holiday season update. They've also explained some of their changes while showing off how fancy it looks now in a wee trailer:
That's pretty, that. As Battlefield 4 is not Battlefield 2, either in how it plays or its technology, so DICE have made a few interesting decisions in reworking Dragon Valley. They explain:
"Battlefield 2 featured a poor draw distance (how far you can see in the game world) by today’s standards, and the original map was built around those limitations. We tackled this in several ways: first we increased the terrain verticality to closer mimic a real life Chinese river valley – and to give us more terrain occlusion for long distances, especially on the central island. We also added a dynamic cloud layer, which not only adds a welcomed air-to-ground separation in terms of gameplay, but also helps shroud far distances at ground level. This has the added bonus effect of allowing you to have intense aerial firefights above the cloud level, which looks really, really cool in Battlefield 4.
"Our Conquest setup has more flags than any other Battlefield 4 map in the game, to mimic the layout of old and get that same type of gameplay. It's also slightly asymmetrical when it comes to vehicle spawns at flags to mimic the Conquest Assault gameplay. We are extra excited to be able to include Rush on this map, which wasn’t available as a game mode in the original. We think Rush combined with dynamic bridges brings something unique to the table!"
Here, check this video from 'DANNYonPC' comparing the BF2 and BF4 incarnations:
