Anticipation quickly turned to disappointment this week with the launch of Second Assault, the second major DLC pack for EA and DICE’s Battlefield 4.
The update brings with it four classic maps from Battlefield 3 – Operation Metro, Caspian Border, Gulf of Oman and Operation Firestorm – with improved graphics thanks to the game’s Frostbite 3 engine and improved gameplay. Unfortunately, however, the transition to the new title has been far from smooth.
Complaints of bugs and glitches have flooded forums including the Battlefield 4 subreddit on Reddit. Gamers have encountered a number of problems varying from stats disappearing to checkpoints being in the middle of the sea, and Reddit’s forum has become a sea of issues since the update became available to download yesterday.
One user ‘05Lanky05’ writes, “Now i’m not sure if this is just me, or just the xbox360 but it’s unplayable. I spawn and have no weapon. It takes a good 2-15 seconds (yes it has taken that long at times) for my gun to show, and even then it can be just a pistol that will show. Also i have spawned where my classes just keep changing from assault to recon in game”
Another big complaint is with ‘rubber banding’ – an issue usually related to players with high latency which results in player sprites bouncing around on screen rather than moving fluidly. In an FPS such as Battlefield 4, it makes it almost impossible to score kills as hits just don’t happen, but it appears that this issue has crept in with the Second Assault pack and it isn’t caused by players with high latency:
“At the moment Second Assault is pretty much unplayable for me in any game mode. The amount of rubber banding makes Lancang Dam seem like a smooth running map.
Conquest is impossible, Domination is pretty bad. I’m pretty sure most of my bullets just vanish in mid air and don’t hit the player. People appearing out of nowhere; all while I have “5 bars” connection strength” writes Reddit user quantim0.
The game has struggled with a number of issues on both the Xbox One and PS4 since launch, but now it seems that the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 versions which have been working well have been hit with a plague of issues. With the number of users complaining stacking up, we’re expecting to see EA and DICE make a comment fairly soon.