I "got" to wait in line for an hour to play Battlefield 4 at PAX... and not only did it just feel like BF3 with some extra stuff, it felt like a bad version of BF3 with extra stuff.
Look, I'm just an amateur video gamesman at best, and they were showing early code. I think it might've been from E3 actually. However, I've played every Battlefield game minus some of the '42 expansions and the early console versions, and won a BF2 tournament in 2007. I've even put a good amount of time into P4F, Heroes, 2142, and played BF3 pre-alpha, alpha, and beta.
Given all that, I feel like I knew what to expect, but it still fell even below that. We were playing on Xbox One controllers hooked up to PC's (the guy next to me crashed to desktop halfway through).
It looked good. A little better than BF3 on PC, and a lot better than BF3 on 360 (yeah I play both x.x). But ugh, it controlled so poorly. The left trigger was extremely sensitive so it would ADS all the time. The tank controls were just broken, period. It was really laggy getting in and out, sometimes you could only turn one direction (my friend could only turn right the entire time). Jumping and vaulting over stuff was bad as well. It was never great in BF3, but it seemed even worse in the demo. I'd get caught on rubble and any little thing on the ground. And just in general, it felt really laggy, even though we were presumably playing 10v10 locally.
Ok, so that's all stuff they can (and should) fix before launch, but the part that bummed me out the most was just how much seemed to be re-used from BF3. The HUD is nearly identical, shooting down the sights on a controller feels the same, that is, a little sluggish and unresponsive. Just the style of the map and how it was rendered looked so extremely similar to BF3 (brown dirty buildings with a slightly yellowed desaturated look).
I don't know. Obviously all this criticism should be read in context of me being a crazy Battlefield player, playing on an early version. Maybe they just fucked up and should not have been showing this demo, and maybe they spent no time on the demo, and are instead working on making a rad game. I just got absolutely no hint from playing the demo that a new, awesome Battlefield was coming out of this, but instead, assuming they fix the major problems, just another BF3 with more destruction and new little things here and there, like the ability to parry a knife attack (I think that happened? yay?).
BF3 is still a great game, and if this is just the same game again, it'll be ok... It's just disappointing that it doesn't seem to be anything more than that. So maybe don't get massively hyped about it if you're starting to get that way? Who knows, maybe I'll read this after it comes out and think I was so wrong.
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