Battlefield 4 interview confirms vehicular test range, revamped rent-a-server model

Lars Gustavsson, Creative Director on Battlefield 4, met up with IGN’s Cam Shea at this year’s Gamecom to answer a slew of questions regarding DICE’s upcoming first-person shooter.

Among the topics discussed were vehicle tutorials, rent-a-sever options and day/night cycles. Below you can find Gustavsson’s responses to these questions, along with a link to view the entire feature.

Question: A lot of Battlefield players find vehicles like helicopters and jets daunting. Will you have any kind of tutorial or training in Battlefield 4?

Answer: We’ve definitely heard that people are afraid of getting in there [and using vehicles like helicopters] and that’s not our intent, so what we’ve done is, we’ve added a test range, which allows you to try out all the hardware ahead of time so that if you want to learn to fly a helicopter you can get in there and you can find the settings that work best for you. And then start doing some stunt flights just to feel safe before you go out and get the responsibility of a bunch of other people sitting in your helicopter, so I truly hope that this will help people feel more safe about trying out the whole battlefield.

Question: How do you guys feel about the rent-a-server model? There’s quite a bit of chatter on IGN about admin abuse and players feeling as though they’ve been punished for skill as opposed to any kind of infraction.

Answer: We’ve definitely heard the community and we experience it ourselves. What we’ve done is we’ve introduced a new system where basically we have pre-defined scales, so if you’re within certain boundaries it will be an official server, which means that people who use – for example – quick match, will be slotted into this. You will be guaranteed a good Battlefield experience. You’ll know what you’re getting into. If you start tweaking around with the settings a little more, it will go down to being ranked which means that you’ll still get your persistence and everything, but some settings might be a bit different from what you’re used to. And then [finally] you can go crazy and change all of the settings, but then it will go down to unranked, so we give you as an admin the freedom, but also to take responsibility for the end user who wants to have a good experience.

Question: Day and night cycles? Night vision?

Answer: We definitely have change of state experiences. Paracel Storm for instance, starts as a beautiful, sunny day and goes into a raging storm, but we haven’t taken the full day/night cycle. What we’ve really tried to do with the whole Levolution package is to ensure that even though it’s dramatic and epic, we want the level to be fun and guarantee good gameplay, even when you play it two years from now, it can’t start being annoying, so even though randomized stuff is beautiful, sometimes a certain amount of predictability is good, particularly when you go into competitive gaming.

Playing Paracel Storm and going from a sunny day to darker gloomier stormy [conditions] definitely gives you an advantage with your IR night site. By initiating these events on the levels we want people to reconsider their customization and be able to move into another approach to try and outsmart the enemy.

The rest of the two-page interview with Creative Director Lars Gustavsson can be viewed by clicking here.

Source: [IGN]