DICE overhauled the controls to place more emphasis on team play.
If you booted up the Battlefield 4 beta, the first thing you likely noticed were the shiny, new graphics. The second thing were the different controls. Some of the changes are a bit more jarring than others. According to DICE, the controls changed to place more emphasis on teamplay and to make an overall more intuitive control scheme.
“When we looked at controls in Battlefield 4 we placed the teamplay aspect of our controls as the highest priority,” Battlefield 4 executive producer Patrick Bach told Game Informer. “We wanted players to be familiar with using spotting and the communication rose in multiplayer as well as the engage and tactical visor in single player. To accomplish this we needed a button that allowed players quick access while also enabling the player to still perform all the necessary functions of Battlefield, like shooting, aiming, moving, and melee… With this in mind, we moved our teamplay functions to a bumper button, which required us to make additional changes, all to highlight one of Battlefield‘s key strengths.”
Moving all the vehicle controls to the left analog stick is the change that’s mostly likely to throw returning players for a loop. According to Bach, the change was for consistency. “We wanted to have a more intuitive control scheme as the default for Battlefield 4,” he said. “Since you are moving your character with the analog stick it made sense to have similar controls for vehicles. If you prefer to use the triggers for acceleration and breaking you can change to that layout in the options menu.”
Don’t like the changes? Well, you’ll just have to adapt, because according to Bach, there’s just no easy way to keep the old controls. ” We continue to see teamplay as a key area for Battlefield, and that meant that we could not purely duplicate the old setup.”
Battlefield 4 charges forth on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC on October 29th, with Xbox One and Playstation 4 versions coming later this year.
Source: Game Informer
