Games Thirst – Amazing Life
Battlefield has always been about teamwork, the power of the many, and never the power of one. Teamwork was always the recipe to victory, and the team roles were the ingredients. Lead Multiplayer Designer Thomas “Tompen” Andersson writes in the latest Battlefield blog update:
“The way we’re going about it in Battlefield 4 is to highly encourage team play – but never force it. We want to promote team play by creating great gameplay mechanics such as Field Upgrades, Commander Mode, and a new range of gadgets specifically designed to expand co-operation in the field.”
The four kits/classes/roles from Battlefield 3 are coming back: Engineer, Recon, Support, and Assault. Andersson comments that “while keeping these core kits intact, we are increasing the ability for players to more strongly specialize their combat role while also increasing flexibility and catering to different play styles.”
The “Field Upgrades” concept is not new; Andersson said that:
“If you’re a long term fan that played Battlefield 2142, you will already have an idea what these are, but we have tweaked them for Battlefield 4. In short, Field Upgrades are chained boosts that can affect a number of gameplay mechanics for your player. Similar to the specializations in Battlefield 3, these can for example provide you with faster sprint speed, stronger personal armor, or expanded ammo capacity.
The idea behind Field Upgrades is to give individual rewards for squad based team play performance. You earn them through squad scoring such as squad healing, completing objectives with your squad members, squad resupplies, squad repairs, and other squad actions. Instead of one single specialization like in Battlefield 3, you can now pick from different upgrades paths, each containing four specializations. Keep the squad alive, and you will move through the accumulative upgrade path. But watch out! If your entire squad is eliminated, you will lose some of your progress.”
How upgrade paths work will be detailed next week, while Andersson also said we’ll have a sneak peek at some brand new specializations being added to Battlefield 4.
What do you think of these? I always roll with Support/Engineer and sometimes Assault, and Recon is my least used class.
