"Fishing in Baku" - 17 Minutes of BF4 Gameplay

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8HVQXkeU8U

Can't embed videos these days. Anyways - here's the 17 minutes of gameplay demo EA/DICE has shown at the reveal event at the GDC '13. *will elaborate more, after actually watching it*

Enjoy.

Guess I am technically impressed. Just can't shake the notion that EA/DICE has put like 50 million bucks into a singleplayer campaign, that's nothing to write home about, besides being a magnitude prettier than the last one. I'd rather have EA/DICE allocate these efforts onto a that much more elaborate coop - or other alternative playmode to classic competititve online multiplayer.

This thing will be fun for the 6 hours it lasts, at best. It's a one and done deal. Both for us players, as well as EA/DICE. There's no further business opportunity in a modern military FPS campaign. No microtransactions, no story DLC, no nothing.

I always wanted DICE to make a Battlefield MOBA, with two AI armies marching on each other, and a squad of players on each team, respectively one squad of players versus the AI. Now that'd be something I'd love to see 50 million dollars worth of effort spent on. Just think how much money EA/DICE could be making with things such as cosmetic skins for personalized vehicular spawns in such a mode - like let's say a golden Mi-24 Hind. And I could see me playing the shit out of something like that.

I can dream. Oh well - a 50 million modern military rollercoaster it is. I didn't ask for it, I don't really want it, but I'll play it, before diving into the main game - I'm talking competitive multiplayer of course.

P.S. the return of the spotting Dorito doesn't make me a happy camper. With 64 players in the field, these things become more useless and obstructive than otherwise, especially on friendlies. Silhuetting friendlies when in line of sight (or by holding down a mutator) makes so much more sense to me. All HUD should be silhuettes, because silhuettes never are obstructive, opposed to the god damn Doritos, which will inevitably superimpose on other stuff, and give misinformation.

Total Eclipse of the Heart is the easiest way to my money

@seppli: You can still insert the regular size video.

Baku....as in Azerbaijan?

Yup. You hear him mention Azerbaijan just as steal the car from the civilian.

P.s Wonder if it will look that good on the PS4. Graphically it was amazing.

Actually really hyped after that gameplay, such a big improvement in visuals and BF3 is still one of the best looking games out. Facial animation is great, voices and sound design is great, when he is firing the grenade launcher at the helicopter with "Total Eclipse of the Heart" playing is pretty bad ass in a weird way. The building falling down was really cool. BF3 campaign was really average but this looks fucking awesome. Now show us the multiplayer =)

Would love to know what specs that is running on.

Oh, my parents were born in Azerbaijan. I think they might have lived in Baku.

Kind of a weird place to be a setting for Battlefield 4.

Wow ... it looks so boring to play. I want to play Games and not 100 script sequences in one level.

By the way for the consoles it is of course a big step forward, but when you know BF3 from the PC, it looks similar. The character models look way better, the water is better, but the rest of it could be BF3.

Girl in my office is from Azerbaijan, or at least her parents were, She lives in Edinburgh and the rest of her family are in London.

So it's BF3 again. Cool, think I'll pass this time.

@subjugation:

I can't use your video's embed code. Don't know why. New site, new bugs.

Don't know if this has to do with the fact that I didn't play BF3, but this looks pretty cool. The set pieces are impressive and the gameplay looks like there could be some decent strategy involved if the player is given more freedom.

Just rewatched it. Damn - is it clean looking, or what?

I think of this video as basically a gameplay tech demo.

A much more color saturated environment with extra detail going on. BF3 visually impressed when it came out. This looks better.

Playing more, better looking BF mp? Sign me up.

HIT [ F ] TO CUT LEG

I dunno, man. Graphically, that was really amazing looking. Everything else about it looks as boilerplate as I could ever imagine. Sneak through area, oh no we're spotted! Shoot! Cut to... sneak through another area, oh no we're spotted! Shoot! Cut to... take an elevator to an area, oh no we're spotted, run! I don't know how excited I can get anymore about following a checkpoint market and being told to hit a key to activate [ emotional moment ].

Eh.

Bonnie Tyler FTW!

DICE wants us to get 'emotionally attached' to the characters in this 100% linear singleplayer story... :(

This is going to be the first major Battlefield game I'm not pre-ordering. At least that's special about it from my perspective. I'm not confident enough that this is moving in a direction that I want to support. I'll see how it does a few months after release. I agree that BF3 is a good game and it is worth playing, mainly because no competitor is better right now. That doesn't mean that the overall progress of the series and the genre has been disappointing. Let Crytek worry about making every game into a tech demo, and lets have DICE make memorable gameplay instead.

Graphically, it was amazing, but in terms of the actual game, it just looked as boring as BF3. The problem is, they try to do the CoD thing, but they just aren't anywhere near as good at it. BF3 had some serious pacing issues here and there, and it just brought the whole thing down. Plus, it's copycat story was poorly delivered, filled with unlikeable characters. This seems to be heading down the same path. I'm not that interested right now.

Sadly. I agree. Let's just look at their past three Battlefield games. It isn't anywhere near where I wanted the series to go after Battlefield 2. There's nothing bigger and better about any of them. Introduction of multi-platform has brought graphics and physics to the table, but at the cost of performance, bigger maps and more players per server. I mean come on, they even took away prone at one point because they felt it ruined the flow of gameplay. To be sophisticated about it: Poop.

I think their problem is that they kinda are trying to ape COD, but also kinda aren't, if that makes sense. They don't want to be as bombastic and over the top ridiculous as COD so they can play the "we're about realism" card, but they still go for the corridor-action gameplay with dudes just standing in front of you waiting to be killed. So they end up with a game that's not very exciting to look at (meaning no explosion every 3 seconds with Hans Zimmer trumpets blasting in your fucking ears), and very simplistic in its gameplay.

I thought BF3 took the worst of both tactical shooters and COD-like action, and BF4 looks the same to me.

"Next gen is not about polygons and shaders, it's about the emotional connection players will have with these characters."

That was quoted in context with those screenshots this year.

I'm crying a little.

Just look at this Battlefield 3 article from CNN, published in 2011:

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/08/02/behind.making.battlefield3/index.html?_s=PM:TECH

"Creators strive for emotion in making 'Battlefield 3'

So...

Why Don't you want more story and emotion in your games? I do. I actually liked the trailer^^

@darji: If I want to cry or experience a story there are games devoted to that. Look at Mr. David Cage and pretty much everyone else now; all games do this now and it has actually gotten to a point where gameplay takes direct hits as a consequence of developers wanting a more cinematic, dramatic and emotionally touching experience. What about the video game, giving us options, giving us the freedom of choice, giving us the means to cooperate, to organize and to enjoy the multiplayer, the main reason Battlefield is popular? Who thinks about emotion when playing a Battlefield game multiplayer? Will DICE implement the sadness and grittyness of war into the multiplayer as well? Giving us a button to cry over our fallen comrades that'll most probably be respawning any second?

Every year now they focus on the story. I'd love to see a Battlefield game where they give the credit for their success to the multiplayer portion of the game and actually seek to hone that experience instead of all of this "get personal with the singleplayer characters and truly feel their experience"-type of approach. I'm totally being distanced by all of this nonsense. Are they going to give us moral choices as well, kill the soldier or not kill the soldier? What is going on?

Honestly I want more from games that costs 60$ or in my case Euro. If i go only for game play I rather buy indy games which let me do exactly that. From my "full" retail titles I want more. I play these ´because of the story. And EA want to have a COD game sales wise. We all know how the MP will be and that it will be fantastic now with sea combat but EA also wants the COD customer that buys these game for the SP campaign. And in my SP campaign I want drama and emotion.

Will it be cheesy? Sure of course but I love cheesy and that is also the reason why I loved Binary Domain so much. Some games are already bigger than movies revenue wise. And These games also have a huge SP focus as well as the co-op and MP stuff. BAttlefield already nailed the MP part what it needs to deliver on is a great SP campaign.

I think this trailer looks promising, and not just because of the graphicsfest. If you take a closer look at it they kind of made a big point abut how the half-way mark - the part where the group is heading towards the factory - is completely unscripted player-wise. Flanking the enemy jeep by blowing out a piece of wall, stealing said jeep to destroy a truck and then ordering the squad to suppress the enemies at the house so the player could flank are all stuff that they went out of their way to demonstrate as being due to player choice, not from scripting.

Of course, we can't tell from the trailer what other choices - if any - there are for the player to make and, granted, it's still a just a big corridor - if a wide one. But it's clearly a step in the right direction from BF3's SP and DICE clearly wants to point that out.

Sure, in the end most of the trailer consists of scripted events. But that's to be expected. It's a trailer after all and those always prefer scripts to non-scripts because they are more cinematic. They're also part of the prologue which are more scripted in most games in order to walk the player through the games' paces after which it can open up more in later levels. So I'm cautiously optimistic. Besides, MP will be where the real action is as always - and I have very much enjoyed the direction DICE has evolved BF3 through its DLCs and see no reason why that won't carry on into BF4. If BF4 turns out to be the perfect version of BF3s vision, I'm sure I'll love the game even more than I loved BF3.

Oh, and to pre-emptively debunk any cries of EA being stupidly PC by including female soldiers: newsflash people, the Pentagon just ended the ban on women in combat roles.

At this point it would be anachronistic of DICE to not include female soldiers in a game set in the near future.

They almost always show off the single player portion of these games in big demonstrations. The reason? The single player portion graphically looks better and is more dramatic. Hence it makes a better trailer. That doesn't mean they will focus more on SP than multiplayer. This happens with every major game that has both SP and MP. All that said, I entirely disagree with you. I want something emotional to happen in all of my games. Battlefield 3 was just plain boring from a SP perspective. If they can ramp up the quality of the story then I'd be really excited. Really the only modern military shooter that did anything interesting from a story perspective this generation was Spec Ops The Line. And that story made playing a game that was not really all that great from a gameplay perspective entirely worth it. Now obviously the best situation would be a game with great gameplay and a great story, but no modern military shooter has managed that.

For me, though, it is what makes games like Half Life and Bioshock much more interesting than most other shooters. Also, on the topic of bringing story elements to MP I really liked how in Bioshock 2 and Halo 4 they gave a context to the MP. In Bioshock 2 is was about the war between Andrew Ryan and Fontaine and in Halo 4 it was a training simulation for Spartans. I think that kind of context can make a battle more interesting.

Anyone else thinking about walking dead during the leg bit? i don't get why these games have the ''push button to do thing'' i think it's clear what you need to do in that section when he hands you the fecking knife!

Weird side point here, if it's in Azerbaijan, why does at the start it show (quite prominently) a Free Libyan flag on the wall?

EDIT: I'm an idiot, that's the Azerbaijani flag, although it looks very similar to the Libyan one.

So did anyone else notice the UI elements in the upper right corner of the gameplay sections? I wonder if these are just artistic impressions of what XBL/PSN might look like, or our first glimpse of a new standard that MS and/or Sony has instituted, asking devs to surface network info in a minimalistic way while allowing it to remain ever-present on-screen. Regardless of whose idea it is, I really like it.

EDIT: Hmmm, nevermind, looks like it's in-game, similar to AutoLog.

They should have shown that. In COd you see people are burning to death. A leg cut should be nothing that gross^^

I don't know why this bothers me but I guess when your game is almost photorealistic, any break from reality kinda shatters the illusion. So the first time in a decade I've just noticed that... Battlefield has never had animations for getting in vehicles. And now it's bothering me.

Is it just me or does this looks boring? Its the same old thing, bombastic nonsense and explosions with a group of military bros shouting orders at each other and cutting down nameless enemies. The trailer even recycles the cliche trombone farting when the logo pops. Maybe its unfair to assess a multiplayer game by a single player campaign trailer but this looks tired. Pretty photoreal graphics with the same mechanics as the last game. Pass.

i'm basically just interested in ze multiplayer

Don't use any embed code, just copy the youtube URL and paste it into the video embed box.

Probably going to get this on release day. Definitely looking forward to seeing more of it.

Usually I'd be all over it. Seriously I love the concept of Battlefield. But the past few games haven't been all that, and with the PR they're running on this now it seems to focus on areas that just don't matter to me as a video gamer in relation to Battlefield. We definitely need to wait and see them present what they believe to be the meat of the multiplayer portion of the game.

I want to see them try new things, and make old things better. They're taking fewer and fewer chances as the budget grows.

It looked great, don't get me wrong. However, I find myself just absolutely tired of first person shooters. At this point, I'd take any sort of third person shooter just to have something different.

Once again, the bloodthirsty CEOs of the game industry promote SENSELESS violence towards fish.

The trendy desaturated bullshit ruins it for me, I can't believe they think a lack of color looks that good

A lot of the animations are BF3, which shouldn't be surprising but I would have liked to see a newer knife animation at least.

Hopefully since the tech is just an advance over BF3 means they get to spend more time on the MP which is where the meat is. I still haven't even touched the BF3 SP.

Nothing works. Not even the embed code of the embed players in this thread.

Take this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8HVQXkeU8U

Click "video" and paste it in there and click ok. You don't use any embed code, just the URL.

I think it's a fallacy to equate more players with more action and more fun and better gameplay. There are many more downsides to the 64 player count, than there are upsides. Higher playercounts and larger scale pose unsolvable problems to balancing and pacing - and if one attempts to solve them, like MAG did, one ends up negating the upsides of it.

The more players there are, the less weight the actions of the individual have, and the more one is at the mercy of strangers - that too is another major downside for me. Some like the codependency such circumstances lends itself to, I loathe it.

I want empowered kits, that are independent and omni-capable, just in various ways. I don't want teamplay to be mechanical, but about action - to do what needs doing, and always be empowered to adapt to any situation. BF3's crossbow is the perfect example - that's the direction I want Battlefield to go in. The crossbow is adaptable to pretty much any situation. From AT to Recon to Longrange to CQC, I can adapt its funcitonality to the situation at hand.

In other words, taking the example of the Assault kit, I don't think it's fun to chose between med-pack or grenade launcher. I think the kit should have both - always. I also don't think the choice between HE, Smoke, Pellet 40mm grenade is a fun choice - at least not in the spawnscreen. That's a choice that'd be the most empowering and fun, when made in the field - adapting to the situation at hand. Regardless of realworld logic, this is how I want my Battlefield experience to be.

The first Bad Company got me back into the fold, because it was empowering. Every kit was omni-capable. And of course the whole destructibility/high interactivity did the rest. Since BF3, kits are again so specialized at a spawn, that adaptive gameplay is almost dead. It breeds passive behaviour. I hate it so much.

The case that should be made is, that it doesn't take *as many players as possible* to bring the Battlefield to life. 24-48 players at most are just about right for that. A playercount still low enough to allow for more empowering kit design and a more even-handed balancing - that's not relying on rigid rock-paper-scissors interplay. I'd much perfer a tighter and leaner Battlefield experience, over the bloated behemoth that is BF3. A Battlefield game, that puts fun before fulfilling great expectations, that yield nothing but trouble.

Who plays Battlefield for the single player? I worry there isn't going to be huge improvements from BF3 but I'll wait for BETA.

That's the first thing I did, and no it does not work. Just believe it already.

Edit: Solved it. Just had to Allow the Site like 100x in NoScript, until it finally allowed whatever GB is doing to fetch the video.

Damn this looks beautiful.

Also: Omar!

I'm hoping, the part when they are moving across the construction site type area is showing that the campaign will be more open in spots, this is what was missing from BF3. And hopefully the squad tactics have some meat to them, that's a cool addition.

Can't wait to see multi but this was good to see too. Didn't enjoy BF3's campaign but I'd sure take a good one in 4 in addition to the rest of the package.

@seppli : 64 players is a great spot to be. One guy can make an impact at 64, one squad can dominate. The action is fun moment to moment. You spent a lot of words saying otherwise in your post but there is a whole history of the BF series successfully using 64 players on PC to prove what you say false.

Where's that ahmed guy with his battlefield insanity?

I bought a GTX 670 two weeks ago and have been going back playing through my older games and seeing how they run. Right now I'm in the middle of playing Battlefield 3 again. After playing Battlefield 3 and watching this trailer the graphics are nice but it's not much of an improvement over the previous game. The animations and characters do look better though. I'd say Crysis 3 looks better overall.

The sounds are the same as the ones from Battlefield 3, it makes me wonder if DICE feels they're at a point where you can't do any better gun sound effects so they'll just keep using these over and over.

Some of the models, like that white truck in the center of the street, are reused from Battlefield 3. I understand using the same gun models or helicopter models but Azerbaijan has the exact same white trucks as Paris? Also, reused melee animation, anyone who has played Battlefield 3 for any length of time should notice that. If you're going to show 17 minutes for your reveal you could make a new melee animation!