Battlefield 4: Wreck & Ruin

To enjoy modern Battlefield games is to enjoy systematically reshaping the landscape around you. Every round fired into a wall leaves a permanent mark, every detonated explosive minutely terraforms the ground it once laid upon. Wanton destruction in Battlefield is no mere fallacy. There’s certainly method to the madness. Cutting apart an office building with high-caliber machine gun fire is as much of an implied responsibility as it is an apt tactical solution. Of course, there’s still something to be said for sending sparks and shredded paper soaring into the air just for the fun of it.

But there are only so many walls and barricades that you can turn into chalk before the lust for something more sets in. Pocket-sized packages of plastic-explosives were but a gateway drug for something far more potent, with Battlefield 4’s much touted ‘levolution’ seeking to sate a collective desire for unhindered destruction. And razing downtown Shanghai to the ground was to be but the first etching on the wondrously violent mural that would represent Battlefield 4’s prospective legacy. Some two whole years since its initial release however, and that very legacy remains as scorched as the games many hallowed fields and hilltops, the long campaign of reforming every twisted plane and reforging every broken building having been set in motion far too late.

DICE’s Battlefield 4 was a victim of haste, and it was haste that first brought us the Battlefield 4 multiplayer beta. Downtown Shanghai beneath the bright light of day was colourless and muddy. The city was a lifeless, angular arena devoid of sound and contrast and character. And by the time that the tower at its heart had finally collapsed beneath the weight of concentrated heavy fire, the lack of colour was emboldened by the blanketing of an immaculate ice-white shawl across every roof and winding road. Shanghai was now a city of snow, if snow was ever textureless and unnaturally consistent. This was never a beta meant to collect and collate community feedback for the sake of improving the final product. The time between its conclusion and the release of the full game was mere days. The beta was but an imperfect slice delivered with a quivering hand and a nervous flicker of the eyes. DICE knew that they had run out of time. Battlefield 4 was to release as a broken product.

If Battlefield 4 was one of the primary catalysts for ushering in a climate of sudden and abrupt game delays, then I suppose its biggest achievement was being something of a martyr. Seeing a release date pushed back so as to not deliver a title in a sub-par state is now a relatively common occurrence, and I can’t help but think that DICE’s Battlefield 4 is at least a little responsible for this entirely welcome change. But to reach this point, there had to be a game so reprehensibly defective, that it almost transcended traditional criticisms. It was hard to lambast Battlefield 4 for its flaws as a first-person shooter when its technical aspects stood out above all else.

In the weeks and months following its release, Battlefield 4 remained a cavalcade of breakage. Death on the battlefield was no longer in your hands, with the roulette of disconnections, crashes, netcode issues, frame-rate drops and latency problems gathering momentum by the day. When you did luck-out and avoid some of these problems for a short period, others would quickly arise to take their place. On the Xbox 360, joining a match on the map ‘Dawnbreaker’ meant an unavoidable system crash. On ‘Hainan Resort’, triggering the ‘levolution’ event reduced your game to a literal single frame-per-second. And on ‘Rogue Transmission’, starting the game on the Russian side of the map meant crossing your fingers in the hope that the floor wouldn’t swallow you whole. Patches were met with thinly-veiled reassurances and the chronic ache of the same old problems returning to the fore. DLC’s released all bearing the same issues, and double EXP weekends kept the river of golden Battlepacks and underbarrel flashlights flowing without relent. The cycle never ceased. You weren’t being rewarded for accomplishing something, you were being rewarded for enduring. But much like the animated rain on the games main menu, this was a downpour too torrential to navigate unscathed.

Calmer waters awaited me when I decided to boot up the game for the first time in eight months. It was on ‘Final Stand’, the only expansion I had yet to sample, that I began pacing myself for a barrage of problems to halt me in my tracks. But that barrage never materialised, and the vitriol I had stowed away since the last time I had played this game was of little use to me anymore. The snow-capped hilltops and billowing factories of wintertime Russia were relatively faultless. It was almost as if I could see the black and yellow caution tape still hanging from the trees and draped over the mountains. DICE Los Angeles had taken over in DICE Stockholm’s stead, and through their interim period in charge of the Battlefield scape, they had managed to fill in the cracks and give every monument a new lick of paint. I could pick up weapons off the floor now. I could ascend vertices without comically jutting back down them. This was the bare minimum I had ever expected, but at the very least, the game was now in a functional state.

Battlefield 4 had reached a point of welcome purgatory. The Premium calendar had run its course, and nothing more but the tweaks and adjustments of a development team with a singular focus would disrupt the games slow descent into irreverence. And after all of the turbulence, that is a fate worth cherishing. As DICE LA remain at the helm of the vessel that they have claimed as their own, DICE Stockholm now find themselves manning the rebooted Star Wars Battlefront franchise. This is not yet a series synonymous with their previous transgressions, but the stigma that DICE now carry with them is a rather damning account of Battlefield 4’s disastrous lifespan. And such is the burden of their failings.

It’s quieter now, though. The vocal majority have seen their issues tended to, if but within a timeframe that had far outweighed their patience. The shells may have stopped falling, but the blackened smoke continues to pour forth from the charred craters of Battlefield’s damaged character. Battlefield 5 is presently a pipe-dream. It’s a whisper and a joke. And if it is to ever rectify and regrow, then that may depend on how DICE navigate their next project. For now, Battlefield relies not on the might of the assault rifle or the knife, but on the blaster and the lightsaber. Reparation begins with functionality and purpose. It begins with Star Wars Battlefront.