DICE are promising to push the Frostbite 2 engine further than ever with September's DLC pack, Armoured Kill. The maps added by the update will be some of the biggest Battlefield battlefields we've ever seen, and it looks as though could turn out to be the prettiest, too. A post on the Battlefield blog from senior environment artist Andrew Hamilton goes over some of the improvements DICE artists are bringing to the new maps, including "higher resolution terrain and vegetation textures, more detail in organic objects such as tree trunks and higher density of objects scattering the landscape."
According to Hamilton, we'll be able to see sand sparkling when lying prone on Bandar desert, the transition between snow and earth has been carefully tweaked and reflection masks allow the team to render realistic ice sheets. See a few of those effects in the screenshots and video of the Alborz Mountains map below. It almost looks too nice to blow up. Almost.
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