Battlefield 4’s armor, reduced fall and stealth field upgrades explained

Battlefield 4

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In a follow-up to last week’s extensive blog posting about various tweaks and changes made to the field upgrade system in Battlefield 4, DICE’s gameplay designer Alan Kurtz has written a new piece explaining four of said upgrades in more detail. Thanks to NeoGaf for pointing me in the direction of this one.

Kurtz tackles the ‘Armor’ upgrade first, comparing it to “the more limited setups in BF2 and BF2142” rather than the body armour of Bad Company. It doesn’t offer any increase to overall health, but does provide some chest protection for your “small upper chest hit box.” At medium and longer ranges it doesn’t do much, but it’s there to keep you safe(r) from close quarter combat sniper rifle shots. It’ll also mitigate shotgun burst damage a small amount.

On to ‘Reduced Fall,’ which will prevent “small falls” doing damage to you. Lethal fall distance, however, remains the same no matter what. The example given here is jumping from a 2nd storey vs a 3rd storey of a building. With Reduced Fall you probably wouldn’t take damage from the 2nd storey jump, but will from the 3rd regardless.

Finally, Kurtz explains how Stealth and Quick Unspot will work. He says these are “minor adjustments” to the spotting system. ‘Quick Unspot’ doesn’t radically alter any spotting behaviour, it reduces the spotting time from 7 seconds to 5 seconds. Meanwhile, Stealth will allow you to move past motion sensors at normal (not sprinting) speed. That’s about it. In addition, Stealth is only available in a Recon Kit.

In case you missed the images of the US, Chinese and Russian squad outfits from the previous blog posting, here they are again (below.) More Battlefield 4 info will be steadily released on the ‘Road to Battlefield 4’ blog in the coming days.

Battlefield 4 - US

Some familiar looking US fellows.

Battlefield 4 - Russian

Putin’s finest.

Battlefield 4 - Chinese

And here’s China. AKA: The guys with the coolest Engineer.


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