I played a shit load of BF3 early on, so I'll definitely get the beta. I don't have premium though so I'll be joining you guys next week.
So I couldn't wait until Friday and managed to play three hours of the beta last night. It's good. Here's some of my first impressions: Early Beta launch seems to have gone off without a hitch since I found a server and was in-game just 20 minutes past the launch hour (then again it was at 4 AM Eastern) after fiddling around in the new Battlelog for the first 15 minutes. My GTX 560 Ti is finally starting to show its age; BF4 is the first game I've played since building my new PC a year ago that I cannot run smoothly on maxed settings (Ultra), though fps was manageable on High (will tweak and check actual performance on Friday). That said the game looks amazing on High. I quite like Siege of Shanghai. For anyone who played 2142, Shanghai feels a bit like Fall of Berlin to me, which was probably my favorite map of that game. While the server I was on had only about 20 players on it initially, of which about a third seemed to be playing, the map and spawn system does a good job at directing and focusing combat from what I've seen so far, so even with lower player counts it doesn't take long to find some action on what is otherwise a fairly large map. Of course the centerpiece of Shanghai is the collapsible skyscraper at C point, which sure enough was knocked down by the end of every game. I did not make any attempt to weaken the building's structure, so I'm not sure just how much effort it takes to bring it down, though judging from the couple games I played and the fact the building was still standing by at least halfway mark it seems DICE has found a nice risk-reward balance for this Levolution event. Actually assaulting C point atop the skyscraper is a lot of fun, and I can definitely see some epic coordinated squad assaults and defenses taking place there as more people start playing. Though the beta has only a bare-bones selection of unlocks to play with, from this cross-section gun-play feels well tweaked and is an improvement over BF3 in my opinion. Recoil has been increased across the board making burst-fire required once again (low-recoil near-perfect accuracy on full-auto was one of my biggest gripes with BF3) and spread seems to have been reduced, so you can more reliably land shots at longer ranges if your aim is spot-on compared to BF3 from my experience. Vehicle combat is probably the biggest change to gameplay from what I've seen. Vehicles are only disabled from mobility hits (tracks and rear on tanks, rotors on helicopters, etc.), so you can manage to keep going even at very low vehicle health. In addition, the limited ammo for primary weapons and long reload times for counter-measures means you really have to make those shots count. This has the effect of turning vehicle-on-vehicle combat into more of a series of protracted duels compared to the first-to-shoot wins meta in BF3. I had an absolutely amazing attack helicopter duel with the enemy attack heli pilot that lasted nearly two minutes where we both traded shots and attempted to counter by either dodging, retreating, or using counter-measures. The new lock-on mechanic for anti-air missiles requires lock to be held and is a significant change that was much needed for air combat. The long reload time for primary weapons also has the effect of making vehicle gunners FAR more important, especially in attack helicopters. All-in-all, I'm quite pleased with the changes and improvements in BF4 and can't wait to play again this weekend.
Game looked amazing. The interface felt a bit overwhelming at first, but all the little hints pointed you in the right direction. Overall the game felt quite polished and you can tell they listened to the players gripes on BF3. Unfortunately, I didn't have such a wonderful playing experience. Even at the lowest settings on my GTX 660 Ti, my game was extremely choppy. All 4 of my CPU cores were being used up to 98%, while RAM was only around 28%. So I'm not sure what the bottleneck was: Video card or CPU. Then again I did play around peak hours, so that could have attributed to the low performance. I plan to do some more testing this weekend.
Make sure your graphics drivers are updated. There is a beta release for the latest GeForce drivers (331) that I've read provide a substantial improvement in performance for BF4, though the game seemed to run fine for me without the beta drivers. I'm guessing if it wasn't your drivers it was your connection. The Quick Join server search criteria looks like it automatically sets for your region, but even so I've seen some horrendously laggy servers within North America. Just use the Server Search and find a good low ping server to join if you haven't. Edit: Durr. I overlooked where you said your CPU was hitting 98%. What CPU do you have IKE? With a GTX 660 Ti I would expect your CPU to be about as recent, which is why I don't suspect your hardware to be the issue. From what I've been reading BF4 is very CPU intensive, though from this blog's benchmarks only the sub-FX6300 series AMDs and Intel i3s were hitting your levels of usage, and that was on Ultra settings.
Played a few rounds today. Generally, they have some major performance issues still to work out, I kept getting major spikes in FPS drop at random moments, although for the majority it was playable. The map they picked is a little too small for me, it becomes too much CQB and generally I dislike having to account for enemies coming from all directions at all times, I'm move of a tactical mover. The vehicles aren't bad but they toned down their deathliness toward infantry in some cases, helicopter flight is a little awkward but I'll get used to it. Guns are... not sure, sometimes good sometimes bad? With the performance issues I was having a hard time figuring out what my issues were. Overall, very BF3ish, more polish I guess. I enjoy the countermeasures auto unlock on all vehicles, makes them much more enjoyable.
Glitchy Battlefield Beta Soldier 4: The Returnening He's Back Was the same for me as well the other day, though I didn't find it annoying enough to mention. Considering this is the beta (demo) and DICE has mentioned it is an older build that does not feature the most recent optimizations, I don't mind the occasional fps drop. I've installed the beta 331 GeForce graphics driver and will give it a go tonight to see if there is any difference in performance.
Finally got a chance to play when it came out yesterday (yup I'm a dirty console player). Still has some ballance issues, it feels like cod with how much relianance there is on rate of fire. the engineers little 9mm pdw, m9 beretta, 870, and airburst all seem like the end all be all at the moment. I'm hoping that hardcore fixes that a bit or they even tweak it for normal play. From bf1942-bf2 I played everything on computer and loved it but finall broke down and bought an Xbox a few years back to play with a group of good friends that all moved out of state. Finally went back to play the bad company that was released only on console and then bf3, now I'm not sure I could do it on pc I'm so acclimated to the Xbox for it.
Can't say I saw any tendency toward one class or the other last I played, classes were about evenly used, but then again that was just 4 hours after the beta went live and really only diehard experienced Battlefield players were online at that time. I'm guessing you're seeing so many Engineers with MX4s due to the fact most people want to unlock Carbines to use them with Support and Recon classes, which you have to progress through three-fourths of the Engineer beta unlocks to obtain. I'd be willing to bet the number of Engineers will steadily decline over the next few days once people find how much more effective their new Carbines are over the Engineer's PDWs outside of 10 meters or so; I know I sure did! (Sorta. Engineer and Recon are my go-to classes.) The AK-5C was far more to my liking and short-to-mid range playstyle than the MX4 was (though I really do like the PDWs still). This is similar to the progression I went through as well, largely dictated by my PC's capabilities. I played BF3 its first month on 360 and got used to the controller, so when I got BF3 on PC free from the Sim City debacle earlier this year I wasn't sure if it was worth trying to get used to playing the game on PC, which I had largely forgotten about until then. I'll say it was well worth the first week or so of clumsiness in-game. After about 50 hours of game time I was back to where I was at my best in 2142 years ago. If you're at all into Battlefield, I recommend switching back to PC if your machine (or wallet) can handle it, since by all measures BF4 is shaping up to be much better designed with PC gamers in mind than BF3 ever was.
If it wasn't for all my friends playing on xbox as a way to hang out once a week I'd be all about the pc version (other than needing to upgrade my pc for it) The locking up mid match is really common to the xbox beta as well, not sure what is causing it.
Played some more this weekend and had a lot of fun. I updated to the beta driver, and things seemed a bit better. Or perhaps I just got used to the jerkiness. I hate that everyone keeps knocking the center building down. It consist of areas for some great firefights, when not demolished. Hopefully, in the full game, it will take more than only 16 tank shells to bring down.
Its fairly fun, just the FPS, lag, and crashing issues are making it a bit hard to enjoy it fully. I can't ever seem to win a 1 on 1 because my FPS tends to jerk right when I start firing heavily, but hopefully the full game will fix that. I should probably upgrade my drivers to the latest again to make sure that isn't the issue. I had a funny bug yesterday, basically my gun kept firing incessantly and I couldn't make it stop. I asked in chat and someone asked if I had a joystick plugged in, which I did. Turns out, the THROTTLE on a joystick is auto-bound to firing your main weapon. WTF? I turned my throttle to 0 and regained control of my assault rifle.
