Battlefield 4 Analysis
A game with no meaningful purpose or heuristics.
Battlefield 4 is a game that was not enjoyed by many people. This analysis will discuss why people disengage from the storytelling of battlefield and why, ultimately, it is not as successful as other games.
The Battlefield series developed by EA has always been a difficult game to enjoy. The objective of Battlefield’s design is to have open ended maps for large warfare scenes and a multiplayer focus with realism. While Battlefield
does succeed in what it attempts to do, it does some so well that it makes Battlefield inaccessible by some people, primarily for those who are not good at competitive multiplayer.
The multiplayer in Battlefield is the primary experience of the game and promises large and open maps for large scale battles and realism. The problem with this promise is that players will spend between two to five minutes running to the battle or the objective before getting caught by an enemy, getting shot once, die, and repeat. This creates a large gap of no gameplay for running to the objective, with the actual exciting bits of Battlefield are limited to only a few seconds while the boring travel time takes minutes. The long term heuristics of this gameplay is to reach the objective while the short term heuristics are to kill people quickly. The game could be improved by making the objectives closer to spawn points and have multiple objectives. Games like Hotline Miami discovered that the frustrating difficulty of the gameplay is counteracted by the extremely fast time between death and getting back to the action and that is exactly what Battlefield lacks. If the time between death and getting back into the action was less than 15–25 seconds, the gameplay would be exhilarating. The multiplayer in Battlefield consists of games like Team Deathmatch or objective based, making Battlefield a two player game. This simplifies Battlefield’s targeted action to hurt the other team. This could be by killing the other team’s people or collecting as many objectives as the player can. This all depends on the heuristics the player chooses to use. The gameplay creates a level of complexity that does not
provide enough depth for any player, and for some people they can tolerate this amount of repetition and lack of elegance. However, the multiplayer does an excellent job of using affordances, signifiers, and feedback so the player
can develop heuristics and player agency, which is not the case in the single player.
One of Battlefield’s main flaws is the lack of juxtaposition in the gameplay. They try to create a visceral and intense recreation of what it is like to be in war. However, if the action doesn’t take a break once in a while, then there is no room for comparison and is too overwhelming to focus on. What makes intense games is when there is clear contrast between action and moments of low stress. If the player can experience both of these, it would make the action more intense and a collapsing building would actually come off as effective because you haven’t been knocking them down since minute one.
Ever since Battlefield Bad Company 2, the Battlefield series has tacked on an additional single player experience to the game in an effort to provide more value to a multiplayer only game. In the past, Battlefield has done a fairly
mediocre job of making the signifiers and feedback of their single player experience accessible so that players can develop the heuristics they need to succeed and understand the game. In Battlefield 4’s campaign, the story is
extremely poor and providing understanding and agency to the player. In terms of story, there are no signifiers to tell the player what is going on and there is no feedback to make the player feel agency towards the story. In fact, most people have no ideas on what is occurring in the story. Some play Battlefield 4’s story for hours and have no idea what they are doing and why they should care. This is because the single player has a lack of affordances, signifiers, or feedback in the story and many elements of gameplay that makes the player unaware on what their heuristics should be. This creates confusion making the gameplay and story a down moment, and when this occurs for a great period of time, the player loses engagement. The player’s inability to form heuristics creates a lack of engagement and destroys the experience of Battlefield 4.
Battlefield attempts to use the engagement types of Accomplishment, Challenge, Fellowship, and Sensation. However, for some, this list can be shorter. Battlefield uses Accomplishment feedback as a reward for finishing an objective. However, for some, this only applies to the multiplayer, as the single player experience does not clearly state what the victory condition is, and asks the player to shoot a bunch of people and listen what the teammate says to do
without a clear objective, goal, or heuristic. Battlefield uses the challenge of realism and multiplayer to create engagement. Realism in Battlefield can be very challenging as this means a player can die with one or two shots from
someone far away with the added challenge of playing with online professionals who are much better than you are. While for some people, this is a turn off, this gameplay is very engaging for some people. In multiplayer, the fellowship between players is vital to win the objectives. However, some people do not choose to work as a team and just get as many kills as they can. Finally, Battlefield bases it’s advertising on the Frostbite Engine for it’s “stunning” graphics, creating the engagement of Sensation for some. For some gamers, the graphics can mean nothing, but for others, the graphics are everything. Most players buy new games for the graphics alone. Dice created these engagement types to try to appeal to a large group of people. For those interested in the engagement types listed above. They put thousands of hours of work to make sure that the game fits into as many engagement types as possible so that they can appeal to the gamers who are interested in those engagement types.
Many people in the world like Battlefield for the reasons of realism, graphics, and competition; and while Battlefield works to fulfill those engagement types, Battlefield can’t help but push people out of the way by trying to
please everybody, which is not possible. Many people stop playing the game for a variety of reasons. I stopped playing Battlefield is because of the inability to form heuristics or become engaged in the single player, the repetitiveness and realistic portrayals of combat and environments that make it impossible for an inexperienced player to play the multiplayer, and as some say, “Good games stop.”