Just the other day, DICE released a new trailer for Battlefield 4 called “This is Battlefield,” which not only showcased…
Just the other day, DICE released a new trailer for Battlefield 4 called “This is Battlefield,” which not only showcased the kind of multiplayer mayhem you’d expect with their flagship game, but they even showed a few brief seconds of the new maps, too.
For reference, the base game itself will come with 10 multiplayer maps, of which, we know two: Siege of Shanghai and Paracel Storm. While we don’t exactly know the other maps’ names aside from Operation Locker and Golmud Railway, we at least have a few details surrounding them.
Shown below are screen grabs of the aforementioned new maps since, y’know, the video itself zooms past them in a jiffy.
Collected by Symthic Forum member J0hn-Stuart-Mill (via Reddit), the images below are broken down into things we know but bear in mind, this isn’t official and not 100 percent accurate. Also, we’ve omitted any screens that shows Paracel Storm and Siege of Shanghai since they’ve been dissected and played to death at this point.
Aside from the two screenshots, all images below are courtesy of the “This is Battlefield” trailer.
Tropical Resort Map
This is definitely not Siege of Shanghai, and not likely the the dam/levee breaking map, since this map you can clearly see palm trees, while in the shots of the Levee map you see deciduous trees. Also the C Flag’s name is “Hotel” so it seems this is a Tropical Resort Map.
For the snow map, we now have official confirmation from BF4 Lead Gameplay Designer Alan Kertz that it is indeed the same map as “Operation Locker.”
Operation LockerAnother thing to keep an eye out here is that we can see frost building up on the player’s FOV (field-of-view), which is a nice touch and if I’m not mistaken, DICE used for the first time in multiplayer in 2010’s Medal of Honor reboot and you can see that in effect below.
Icicles from the ceiling and frost effect around the FOV.
The screens below bear a resemblance with Operation Locker but have no “frost effect” on them. This might mean that they are different maps, or the snow effect is part of Levolution and will come at a specific point in the match/map as an added dynamic.
J0hn-Stuart-Miller noticed that some of these non-frost screenshots were presented in the trailer next to Operation Locker, but they do not resemble it at all, so we really can’t say for sure if they are the same.
In the next screens, it shows the levee that floods the city, and yes, I assume this is the same map shown in the E3 “Levolution” trailer.
Speaking of the levee, here’s a detailed look at the differences behind another stage which has a dam breaking but with no water. We can’t say for sure that it’s not the same map, but J0hn-Stuart-Mill does a very good job of disseminating it.
This shot is from the Levolution trailer, as the levee breaks and floods the city. It is clear there is no water behind this one, and is visually very different from the levee that breaks. I included it because it shows Birch Trees, which are not native to the same regions that palm trees are, and palm trees are outside the fancy hotel seen in the one and only screenshot we have of the third city-looking map, Map #1, which might be a Tropical Resort. My point here is, the tropical resort map is NOT this map, and not likely to be the Levee map, and these two along with Shanghai are the only maps we see of very modern buildings.
Note Giant Dam wall behind it. Patrick Bach confirmed that there is both a Levee map that floods, and a Dam destruction map that does NOT flood the city (ED: Yep, Bach confirmed this). It doesn’t make sense though, why it would violently hurl bits of itself into the city. This is the map from the Battlefield Blog post about Commander Mode.
Next up is a ton of shots of Golmud Railway, which looks to be a map similar in scope and feel to those in BF3’s Armored Kill expansion.
Golmud RailwayFirst Image shows the Factory, second image shows more of the map.
Factory Visible below as well.
Matching Mountains with above.
And these mountains match the silohette with above as well:
Notice the new jeep on the lower right:
The non-snowy peaks here match the mountains from above as well.
The next map the trailer reveals is the one with a giant radio telescope. It does bear resemblance to Caspian Border’s falling structure, as well as Kharg Island’s towers which was the favorite perch of snipers.
This is likely the new Radio Telescope that just began construction in 2011 and it’s very similar to the Giant Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico called Arecibo Observatory. Notice the base of this pillar matches the support pillar from the first screenshot of this map.
And finally, we have what they’re calling the “Conifer Forest Map” (not the official name).
We don’t see much of the forest map in this trailer, but it is featured in the Levolution trailer more prominently where the player throws a grenade into a rail-car and closes the door, and the reason I am pretty sure it’s a unique map since none of the other maps feature a forest of conifer trees. So this forest map is likely the one we’ve seen the least of.
So, final tally here’s what we can expect from the game’s 10 base multiplayer maps at launch:
1. Island Map – Paracel Storm (Not pictured in this thread)2. Snow Map (#2)3. Additional map with a hotel and palm trees as a setting, possibly tropical resort themed3. 2 or 3 Urban/City Maps (Siege of Shanghai, Levee Flooding Map #3, and Dam destruction map #44. 2 or 3 Indoors or Underground Maps5. 3 or 4 Wilderness Maps (Rural, Radio Telescope Research Station, or Forest Oriented
Again, these are not confirmed by DICE and we are going with what we know so far.
Based on the screens above, what map are you itching to give a go first? Also, might just be me but there doesn’t seem to be a counterpart to Operation Metro in BF4 — which can both be a good or bad thing depending on your point of view.
For more BF4 news, make sure you read on how “100Erect_Penises” has made its way into DICE’s latest trailer, and how EA won’t stop until they take the FPS crown from Call of Duty.