The guys and girls over at DICE are starting to finally wrap up their development of the much awaited seventh installment of the Battlefield series of games. Since there were two Battlefield Bad Company games and a Free to Play Battlefield Heroes game, Battlefield 4 is actually EA’s seventh Battlefield game. Even though I don’t particularly like game companies milking certain game franchises into oblivion, it is fair to say that EA has not milked the Battlefield games or the Battlefield franchise anywhere near as badly as Activision has with Call of Duty. In my honest opinion, Call of Duty ceased to be a unique and innovative game beyond the first Modern Warfare also known as COD4
Now, the guys over at DICE have made some improvements to Battlefield 4 that have made many gamers, including yours truly, excited. Those are namely the addition of new game features that either didn’t already exist or were removed for Battlefield 3 (see Commander). With the addition of new features and vehicles, DICE have also opted to upgrade the graphics engine and the graphical capabilities of the game. This means more eye candy and more physics features that could potentially bring the FPS genre to new heights. And with that, come new hardware requirements, which the guys and girls at DICE have released for the world to see.
If you look at these requirements, you can see that in order to minimally run the game, you won’t need a very new system at all. To us, this means that the game engine is fundamentally efficient when it needs to be and looking at the recommended hardware requirements, it can still chew up quite a bit of resources with a recommended AMD six-core processor and Intel quad-core processor recommendation. What we also found funny was that they recommended the AMD Radeon HD 7870 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 660, but then followed it up with a 3GB of graphics memory requirement. What’s funny about this is that neither card really comes in a 3GB configuration and any model of either card shipping in a 3GB or 4GB variant is an abomination/waste of money.
When you consider that the GTX 660 sells for about $199 before MIR and the AMD Radeon HD 7870 for about $179 that means that most gamers can enjoy a pretty solid game experience at 1080P without having to spend more than $200 to upgrade their computers. Do keep in mind, that the Radeon HD 7870 recommendation is actually a bit cheaper than the Nvidia recommended option and about 10% faster as well. We will see how that performance and price difference pans out when the game comes out considering that it will likely be heavily optimized for AMD’s latest GPU architecture since it is an AMD Gaming Evolved title.
While I really did love Battlefield 3, I feel like a lot of people lost interest in that game fairly quickly, hopefully that won’t be the case and DICE’s improvements to Battlefield 4 make it a better game with more longevity.
