Through DICE's Community Test Environment, an initiative for players to help develop and improve Battlefield 4's experience, the developer is testing and rolling out improvements for the game's Rush mode, Dragon's Teeth DLC and core gameplay.
According to a Battlelog post by associate producer David Sirland, DICE will start making changes to Battlefield 4's core gameplay beginning with improvements and fixes related to the new Dragon's Teeth expansion pack. The expansion will launch with fixes made to its new Ballistics Shield, where its bash damage has been tweaked and is no longer possible to one-hit kill enemies and single tank AP-rounds now kill players carrying the Ballistics Shield.
The developer is currently testing out changes to Rush mode in CTE to increase its balance and flow. The new changes are being tested on the Siege of Shanghai, Zavod 311 and Operation Locker to start with. General tweaks to Rush include the removal of commander by default, radar sweep has been reduced around attackers base, changes to MCOM placement and cover passes.
Additional areas of improvements that the developer will be looking at in the future through the initiative includes general weapon balance and suppression tuning, 3P head-flinch dampening, visual recoil ADS tuning, vehicle tuning/balance, HUD improvements and bug fixes. Continued tweaks to Obliteration Competitive and Conquest small will made. You can find out more about the changes in the video above.
DICE began recruiting Battlefield 4 PC players in May to help test possible patches and ideas to the title before rolling them out on all platforms. The developer hopes to improve the overall quality of the game through CTE where it can collect player feedback early on in the design process.
Through CTE, the developer tested out and released updates to the game's Netcode in June. The updates included improvements with player-to-player interactions within the game such as registering damage done to others. The developer also tweaked the game's general networking capabilities and the "tickrate" of its servers.
Battlefield 4 launched for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One last fall and has been plagued with ongoing issues since its release. To date, DICE has published numerous patches for the game across all platforms and delayed some DLC to focus on improving the game's quality.
