Community AdminWelcome to the Battlefield 1 December Update. We’re excited to share with you all the changes that we are bringing to the table, headlined by the new map Giant’s Shadow. We’re also bringing a ton of important balance changes and fixes, as well as an exciting new Custom Game setting with Standard Issue Rifles that we can’t wait to try out together with the community. Finally, we’re happy to announce that our new Spectator Mode is available in this update, and we are all really excited to see what the community will do with it.
So sit back, grab a hot beverage, and enjoy reading about all the changes in detail below or here. Changes include all platforms unless specifically noted.
See you on the Battlefield!
Alexander “Striterax” Hassoon
Erik “TheHelgon” Ortman
Alan ”Demize99” Kertz
Steve “whitewalrus” Lin
Randy “SonicFrequency” Stanton
Introducing Giant’s Shadow*
With a massive crashed airship casting its shadow onto the battlefield, Giant’s Shadow brings fierce combat on the open ground and river banks alongside the Cateau-Wassigny railway.
Fight in the shadow of a crashed giant
The Battle of the Selle, 1918. Cold autumn. British forces have broken through the Hindenburg line and are heading towards a strategic railway center. The outcome is uncertain. An armored train can still turn the tide.
*Available December 13, 2016 for pre-order and Premium Pass customers. Giant’s Shadow will drop for all Battlefield 1 players on December 20, 2016 as a free map pack. BATTLEFIELD 1 ON APPLICABLE PLATFORM (SOLD SEPARATELY) AND ALL GAME UPDATES, INTERNET CONNECTION, EA ACCOUNT, AND (FOR CONSOLE PLAYERS) AN XBOX LIVE GOLD OR PLAYSTATION PLUS ACCOUNT REQUIRED FOR GIANT’S SHADOW. Retail preorder customers will need to enter their code on the PlayStation®Store/Xbox Store/Origin Store to download the Giant’s Map content starting on December 13, 2016. Early access ends December 20, 2016.
Spectator Mode
With great pleasure, we would like to introduce everyone to the new Spectator mode. In Spectator, players will be able to join a live BF1 match as an observer. From there, observers can switch between first-person and third-person camera views of all the players on the battlefield through our Player View mode, get an overhead bird’s eye view of the battlefield in Table Top mode, or fly a camera through the world using Free Cam mode.
Our goal was to improve Spectator from previous versions of Battlefield. We gathered feedback from the community and focused much of our efforts on improving the usability and flow moving from player-to-player and switching between the different view modes (Table Top, Player View, and Free Cam). Another key design emphasis for us was to make Spectator a viable tool for the community to create content which includes a moveable third-person camera, depth of field, and camera filters.
New Custom Game setting – Standard Issue Rifles
A new Custom Game option has been added: Standard Issue Rifles. In SIR all kits are granted access to their faction’s standard issue rifle. For example, the British are granted the SMLE MKIII. These rifles are not equipped with optics, and are intended to provide players with gameplay inspired by the WW1 trenches. As a Custom Game option, this can be enabled or disabled with other weapon types to create a variety of experiences. SIR is not available as part of the base game experience. We feel that the ability to equip SIR in vanilla would negatively impact the combat roles of the classes. As a clear WW1 fantasy, we hope that SIR scratches an itch for our broad and diverse player base.
Soldier
Movement
We’ve made several fixes and tweaks to the controls and input handling for the soldier experience. Most of these are bug fixes that should generally ensure a higher response level for players. This includes fixing the inability to sprint out of crouch and prone in certain situations and fixing issues with toggle zoom. While we are confident we have improved the situation, we are eager to hear the community’s feedback to see if there are any outstanding or new issues that can be discovered.
Aim Assist
An update has also been made to the controller Aim Assist system in BF1. We now require the player to be actively giving aim input in order to get aim assistance. It was possible in some previous cases to get help on a target when simply strafing past them, which was unintentional. We’ve also exposed additional control options on console, including the ability to tweak the central dead zone. Please note that setting the dead zone too small may introduce unintentional aim movement. We have not made any adjustments to the snap-to-target feature of our Aim Assist. While we are aware there are players who are actively petitioning for the reduction or removal of Aim Assist, we feel that this would be to the detriment of the global player community. As this is an area of high passions, we expect additional feedback on our Aim Assist systems to surface, and we are open to that feedback. We are especially interested in appealing to those players who wish to play without assists, and are sensitive to their needs.
Vehicles
Vehicle Deployment
This update includes some new additional logic to address the problem of spawning as a Tanker, Pilot, or Cavalry soldier without your mount. We have also made some fixes that should prevent the player from getting the incorrect kit when spawning into a vehicle, for example spawning as a Cavalry soldier when spawning into a Tank. In some extreme cases, the player may be blocked from spawning if a vehicle cannot be spawned. This can happen due to positioning of other soldiers and vehicles in the world, and should be rare. Previously the player would be spawned without the vehicle; in the new case, the spawn flow will be aborted and the player given a “spawn not available” message.
Landship
Looking at the way the game is played, the Landship is underrepresented in gameplay. We wanted to enhance the role of the tank as a teamplay vehicle, as well as give additional incentives for tank drivers to pick up and play the Landship. The biggest change here is the ability to allow teammates to spawn into the Landship directly, like they do the Heavy Tank today. This will help keep the Landship full of teammates, in a way that makes it a far more effective vehicle. We've also applied buffs to the driver abilities and the armor of the Landship, making it as armored as the Heavy Tank. The shape of the Landship still makes it easier to knock out treads and weapons compared to the Heavy Tank.
Air Vehicles
Several adjustments have been made to the combat experience for Air Vehicles. We’ve removed an exploit that allowed instant killing of airplanes with the Ranken Darts; these are intended as ground attack weapons, not air to air weapons. Fighter airplanes now have slightly higher damage to their MGs overall and Bombers take more damage from MGs specifically. Rockets have also received a velocity boost to make their usage more consistent. Combined with some additional reductions in overheat, this should make Fighters more viable in the air to air role without having to resort to exploits or lucky rocket hits. We’ve also reduced the damage of rear gunners in airplanes, in order to prevent players from easily switching to the rear gun and killing pursuers. This tactic is, of course, still viable, but now is more difficult to perform, making it a skill move. The damage reduction should not be extreme enough to significantly decrease the intended teamplay benefit of having a full airplane.
Line of Sight
We’ve added a “Head Glitching” style fix to vehicles that prevents players from shooting over objects that block the weapon’s line of sight. This is most noticeable in 3P, and is intended to fix players being able to fire their tank at targets while remaining entirely behind cover. It is our intent to provide a balanced 1P and 3P vehicle experience, and this fix goes a long way towards ensuring 3P does not become the dominant play style.
Detailed Vehicle Changes
Weapons
Shotguns
Shotgun balance has been addressed in this update, with the primary goal of evening out the advantages and disadvantages of each type of shotgun. We noticed that some shotguns were unintentionally strong at certain distances, most obvious with the Model 10-A Hunter and Factory, which could kill a full health target at long range (for a shotgun). Players were naturally preferring these shotguns over others. To prevent this, we reduced the range for the buckshot variants of the M97 Trench Gun, Model 10-A and Sawed Off Shotgun, reducing the maximum one-hit kill distance. To make the M97 Trench gun more attractive we added an extra pellet to all variants and slightly improved the damage drop-off for the Sweeper variant. The Backbored shotgun variants had their range improved, as previously you took too big of a hit for the improved recoil. We increased the accuracy of the 12g Automatic to allow users to make use of its high rate of fire more effectively. Tweaked crosshairs will make it easier to land your damage consistently for all shotguns.
LMGs
Adjustments were made to have LMG performance much more consistent at close and medium range. We tweaked how much inaccuracy you get when you start firing an LMG while aimed. Previously, Optical configurations had a significant advantage over the rest unless a bipod was used. Now the accuracy of the second shot is the same for all variants of one LMG and just slightly above the level previously held by the Optical setups. Using a bipod will still give you a significant boost to your accuracy while firing. Additionally, we added a small bonus to horizontal recoil while aimed with Optical variants, improved reload timers to better match the animations, and made the Lewis Gun overheat slower.
Bayonets
Players may now bayonet charge while reloading or when out of ammo with their weapon. The reload will be aborted if the player still has rounds in the magazine. If the weapon is empty, the reload will restart automatically at the end of the charge.
Detailed Weapon Changes
Gadgets
Mortars
We’ve reduced some of the inaccuracy added by the last update. Mortars will be more accurate when placed, and slightly more accurate during sustained fire. The damage amounts remain unchanged. We felt that it had become too difficult to hit even large targets like tanks, and the inaccuracy in combination with the damage adjustments to the airburst mortar reduced mortar effectiveness more than intended. In addition, in Hardcore players will now get the Large Map for aiming indirect fire weapons. Spotted players will not show on the map unless Minimap Spotting is enabled in Custom Games.
Syringe
We’ve added a short cool down between syringe uses and added the ability to ignore the cooldown if near an ammo crate. Together a Medic and a Support can team up to quickly revive a large amount of soldiers. The cool down is minor, and is intended to only prevent the near instant revive of several soldiers in a very short time. Reviving a single soldier is unaffected. We feel this is a good balance to prevent “revive trains” from a single Medic, while not reducing the usefulness of revive, with a bonus of additional teamplay.
Ammo & Medical Crates
Medic and Support players should find it much more reliable and useful to deploy their Large Ammo and Medical crates. We’ve added additional healing and resupply power to those crates, so they serve more teammates before being depleted and being destroyed. Additionally, we’ve added a feature that will deploy the crates at the player’s feet if the space immediately in front is blocked by an object or slope. This should drastically reduce, but not entirely eliminate, the situation where a crate fails to deploy. It is still possible for the player to occupy a space where the crate cannot be deployed, for example a very tight corner or a steep slope.
Explosive Icons
We’ve updated the in-world icons for explosives to properly reflect their team, and to fully scale over distance so they don’t unnecessarily dominate the field of view, especially at close range. We’ve also identified an issue whereby it can be difficult to determine if a nearby grenade is in front or behind the player. This update does not include a fix for the issue, but we hope to address it in the future. Finally, we’ve implemented proper scaling on the large crates for both medic and support players, so their icons are not as obstructive at longer ranges.
Hardcore
Thanks to the Community for their feedback on Hardcore mode, we’ve introduced some additional changes in this Custom Game. A large map is now available, as in the base game. In Hardcore the map is will not show the position of objectives, players, etc. We intend for players in Hardcore to only have UI interfaces for things a real soldier could reliably know, for example: how many grenades he has left, but not how many bullets are left in his magazine. For this reason, we have decided to continue down the path without having kill confirmations or a kill log in Hardcore. However, we have added Team Kill confirmations as a nod to the need of accessibility and player learning. In BF1 we changed Hardcore from the reduced health of BF4 to increased bullet damage, in order to retain balanced explosion damage. In this update we’ve adjusted the damage amount in Hardcore from 200% to 125% damage. While on paper this looks like a huge change, 125% damage will still create far more lethal up close damage, for all kits, but will prevent bolt action rifles from being one hit kill at all ranges vs all body types. Other weapons will retain their intended ranges, while still being far more lethal than the base game. These changes help us steer Hardcore down the path of feeling like a faster, meaner, more realistic base game
Stability & Performance
Stability and performance is always critical to us, and in this patch we’ve done a number of improvements to ensure a solid gameplay experience. Below are some of the major changes.
General
Below you’ll find the list of general fixes not included in the things we’ve already covered above.
Gameplay
UI
Audio
