Amazingly, Battlefield 4's post-release problems were foretold by its own soundtrack, thanks to the inclusion of soothsayer and pop legend Bonnie Tyler. To quote her power-ballad prediction: "Once upon a time I was falling in love, but now I'm only falling apart. There's one thing DICE can do, a promise to fix what won't start." In fairness to the studio, they've taken these words to heart, going so far as to halt all development on future projects until they've fixed the game. Now they've released their sixth patch for the PC version, bringing further stability fixes, bug squishes, and even a little jet rebalancing.
Why not peruse the following patch notes with the appropriate musical accompaniment :
- Various fixes for improving general stability
- Fixed a memory leak issue occurring after level shutdowns, which could result in a out-of-memory crash in longer play sessions
- Additional fix for the "sound loop" deadlock when running High/Ultra graphics settings
- Added a warning for using Legacy AMD drivers that were out of date
- Fixed a player feedback timing issue where blood was appearing before other damage indicators, and before damage was actually done
- Fixed a bug where players' rank icons on the scoreboard would not be updated
- Fix for Asian users unable to start Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 on Windows 8.1
- Normalized repair rates across all vehicles.
- Fixed problem with killer health in kill card not being correctly updated (showing 100% health even though the soldier was hurt)
- Fix for friendly marker not always showing when needed to, resulting in players shooting team members
- Fixed a bug where a Main Battle Tank Coaxial HMG ammo box was occasionally blocking the driver's camera
- Increased damage by 25% for the Stealth Jet 20mm cannons.
- Stealth Jets now have more similar handling attributes to each other. F35 & J-20 are slightly more agile, Su-50 is less agile.
- Attack Jets now have more similar handling attributes to each other, and all 3 are now slightly less agile than earlier
- Fixed camera glitch when switching weapons while moving in crouch
- Fixed an occasional bug where players could experience intermittent engine sound dropouts when driving wheeled IFVs
- Fix for player spawning under the map when deploying on Lancang Dam
- Fixed flickering in map and minimap on Rogue Transmission and Operation Locker
Shortly after that patch went live, DICE also released their eighteenth server-side update. Here's what it did:
- Compatibility updates for the Jan 13 PC game update
- Enabled Live Scoreboard for all game servers
- Changed Air Superiority default tickets from 100 to 200
- Fixes for five server crashes
Currently then, the game's " Top Issue Tracker " thread is empty. I suspect that doesn't mean Battlefield 4 is in tip-top condition just yet, but hopefully we'll soon be able to play the game as close to bug free as can be expected.
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