Maybe we should all start buying multiplayer games three months after launch. Releasing an online monolith that'll be played by millions is complicated business when there's no way to stress test against those huge numbers, but Battlefield 4 's problems extend beyond connection errors and crashes to its shooting systems which, as a shooter, are almost all of its systems.
Fortunately, patch-o-geddon continues. The latest one fixes a bug that could see you shot to death if changing stance into cover. A desync while crouching could leave your phantom hitbox head exposed even when your vision was safely behind scenery. DICE have also "increased the camera height when crouching and moving to more accurately reflect the actual height of your soldier", cranking soldiers up from Tom Cruise to Liam Neeson altitudes. There are also some crash fixes, which are listed below, as lifted from the latest update on Battlelog .
The patch list from DICE:
Shot behind cover when changing stance
Sometimes the character stance could get into a multiple frame desync and be part of the problem where you got shot even though your character was actually behind cover. This would mostly affect players doing transitions into crouch and prone as well as moving when crouched. The impact was smaller in a standing stance. This bug fix eliminates this particular desync issue.
We have also increased the camera height when crouching and moving to more accurately reflect the actual height of your soldier in that stance (the first person camera was too low when crouching and moving, resulting in that you had a poor representation of how much of your soldier that was actually out of cover.)
- Fixed one of the most frequently occurring client crashes
- Fixed broken collision on containers with open doors. The bug previously made grenades bounce back even though the doors were open.
- Fixed a bug in Defuse mode where defenders could win the round by killing all the attackers without disarming the bomb, if the bomb was disarmed in the previous round.
- Miscellaneous stability fixes further reducing the number of client crashes
- Fixed side gunner jitter when aiming in attack boats & transport helicopters
- Fixed some instances of frame rate drops when shooting at large Levolution objects after they have been destroyed (like the radar dish on Rogue Transmission)
- Fixed broken aiming for passengers on the China Rising dirt bike
- Fixed a bug where the sound when capturing a flag was not playing correctly
- Removed a bug that would double save during MP round transition and SP level transition. This fix will reduce the occurrence of corrupted save files.
We'll probably see more of these patches, as DICE have apparently frozen work on all other projects to get Battlefield 4 into shape. Historically, DICE do tend get their games working well eventually, so there's hope yet, eh.
A beta of backyard FPS Neighbors: Suburban Warfare is out now, and the balance discussion is hysterical: nerf trash can lids and children
An FPS studio pulled its game from Steam after it got caught linking to malware disguised as a demo, but the dev insists it was actually the victim of a labyrinthine conspiracy
