Battlefield 5's vehicles are now a little less likely to kill you

Electronic Arts has made some changes to Battlefield 5's Firestorm battle royale mode that will make the WW2 death arena a little more survivable (at least in the short term—such is the nature of battle royale, after all) and a little more rewarding for players who take part in the fight.

The personal Armor Plate limit has been increased from three to five, to encourage players to be more willing to mix it up mid-game, and the health of downed players has been boosted from 200 to 300. The risk of riding around in vehicles is also being mitigated through the elimination of "permanent vehicle death."

"So far in Battlefield 5, vehicle death = total death. In Firestorm that’s discouraged you from making use of Transport and Combat vehicles as often as we’d expect, as once the vehicle’s gone, so are you," developer DICE explained. "In this update, you’ll find that your body is pushed outside of the vehicle, and that you can now be revived when playing in Duo and Squads. This fix is also true across the entire Battlefield 5 experience with this update."

Experience rewards in Firestorm are being increased to bring them in line with other, more lucrative Battlefield 5 modes, and the V for Victory (or 5 for 5ictory, as we call it) notification is being made "more special," which as far as I can tell means louder and in your face.

Other fixes of note:

We’ve changed the color of the spotting flare on the minimap so that its radius circle is more distinguishable from highlighted objective areas
If you’ve hopped into the passenger seat of the Schwimmwagen whilst swimming, you’ll find that your weapons and gadgets now work
Dead players won’t be left in a crawling/prone/alive pose when they’ve been killed
We’ve fixed a bug that sometimes caused for weapons to be fired unintentionally after performing a revive
Danger Ping timers have been upped from 7 seconds, to 10 seconds

And some PC-specific changes:

Fixed a bug that could sometimes result in mouse input lag after players alt-tabbed the game or switched to windowed mode.
In Firestorm, players will now be able to initiate matchmaking even in the case that they had previously joined a squad in Firestorm and then left it.
In Firestorm, players will no longer not be able to matchmake if they had previously played with a squad and the squad leader had quit the game mid-round.
Fixed a rare flickering issue that could occur on the Narvik deploy screen.
The hotkey for using the X2 500lb bombs now shows the correct key binding when using the Mosquito FB MKVI.
In Origin when playing Battlefield V, the Richpresence statuses of your friends are now shown in the localization setting that you (and not your friend) have set.

The full, much more detailed Battlefield 5 patch notes are available on Reddit.

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Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.