Rejoice: our EA overlords have bestowed upon us a new patch for their popular (and infamously broken) man-shooter, Battlefield 4. There’s nothing hugely major in this one – nothing along the lines of “The game totally works 100% now, guys” – but there are a number of stability and balance tweaks to go along with a host of fixes for other issues, so hey, they’re getting there.
The big one is the incredibly nebulous “Various fixes for improving general stability”, which I don’t think anyone can complain about. Other than that there are fixes for memory leaks, sound loops, and “fix for friendly marker not showing when needed to, resulting in players shooting team members.”
On the balance side of things, repair rates have been normalised (which means that everything takes the same amount of time to repair, so low-health vehicles repair slower, and high-health vehicles repair faster), jets handling attributes have been changed which makes pretty much all but one less agile, and the M1 Abrams’ Coaxial HMG ammo box will no longer block the driver’s camera. That last one isn’t a balance tweak but it is funny, particularly as I can almost imagine that as being a real-world design flaw.
The full patch notes follow. Give ’em a read while you download the patch itself, which should be out now.
-Various fixes for improving general stability
-Fixed a memory leak issue occurring after level shutdowns, which could result in a out-of-memory crash in longer play sessions
-Additional fix for the “sound loop” deadlock when running High/Ultra graphics settings
-Added a warning for using Legacy AMD drivers that were out of date
-Fixed a player feedback timing issue where blood was appearing before other damage indicators, and before damage was actually done
-Fixed a bug where players’ rank icons on the scoreboard would not be updated
-Fix for Asian users unable to start Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 on Windows 8.1
-Normalized repair rates across all vehicles. Vehicles with lower health points, like aircraft and transport vehicles, now repair more slowly than before
-Fixed problem with killer health in kill card not being correctly updated (showing 100% health even though the soldier was hurt)
-Fix for friendly marker not always showing when needed to, resulting in players shooting team members
-Fixed a bug where a M1 Abrams Coaxial HMG ammo box was occasionally blocking the driver’s camera
-Increased damage by 25% for the Stealth Jet 20mm cannons.
-Stealth Jets now have more similar handling attributes to each other. F35 & J-20 are slightly more agile, Su-50 is less agile.
-Attack Jets now have more similar handling attributes to each other, and all 3 are now slightly less agile than earlier
-Fixed camera glitch when switching weapons while moving in crouch
-Fixed an occasional bug where players could experience intermittent engine sound dropouts when driving wheeled IFVs
-Fix for player spawning under the map when deploying on Lancang Dam
-Fixed flickering in map and minimap on Rogue Transmission and Operation Locker