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DICE Team
DICE TeamCommunity Broadcast: Checking in before Chapter 6
Hey folks!
This week we have wrapped up Chapter 5, and now we’ll be taking a short break between our Chapters whilst we finish up work on our next Update. We’ll be filling this gap with some of our favorite maps and mode rotations until the start of Chapter 6, which started today with an extension to the Extreme Weather playlist ‘Cats and Dogs’ focusing on Breakthrough.
I also wanted to provide you with a quick update on what to expect over the next couple of weeks, and our next set of updates for Battlefield V.
First, a massive thanks to everyone for jumping in and playing War in the Pacific. This was a huge update for us, adding 3 new maps, 14 new Vehicles, 8 new Weapons, and everything else that goes along with establishing a new theater of war, and growing that Battlefield sandbox.
Alongside the new content that we’ve added during War in the Pacific, we’ve developed a multitude of changes and enhancements to the game across this 12 Week Chapter, including the option to run your own personal servers in Community Games. We’re going to continue expanding and improving the game in future updates so a big thanks to everyone who takes the time to share their feedback, and highlight the areas that we can enhance and further develop.
For many of you here, the biggest change of the Chapter came in the form of our recent Weapon Balancing. We improved the experience that players have when being engaged at long distances, and you’ve been active in sharing with us how these changes feel. Since we returned from the Winter Break, we’ve invested a great deal of time reviewing that feedback and measuring it against the behaviors that we’ve seen from Players in the game, and the safeguards that we set in place to determine if we were making a change that positively impacted the gameplay experience for all players.
In Update 6.2, we’ll be publishing a series of further changes designed to address the learning's based on your feedback and game data. Full details will be shared after we’ve launched Update 6.0, but in short, you’re going to find that in close quarters much of the same Recoil, and Rate of Fire that you’re previously accustomed to will return.
We will continue to operate a damage model that ensures that weapons that are designed to be lethal in close quarters will still do less damage beyond 30M than experienced in 5.0, however we’re making adjustments to the damage curves to ensure that the damage drop off doesn’t feel as instant or severe. Weapons that should be more effective at range such as the Semi Auto Rifles and Pistol Carbines will have their damage drop offs extended, ensuring that they regain a purpose closer to their design and perform significantly better at range. Similar changes are also being made across MG’s and AR’s, and I will keep you updated as we finalize the design, and move them into a shippable state.
What’s in Update 6.0?
Full details on our next update will be shared in the week leading up to its release. We won’t be updating to 6.0 next week, but I’ll be sharing that news with you all as soon as it’s fit to print.
Update 6.0 primarily focuses on providing you with all new content to set the scene for our next Chapter. A New Map, New Weapons, and New Gadgets.
In Chapter 6, we’ll continue to move Weapons and Gadgets out of Weekly Rewards and into Chapter Rank Rewards as we’ve seen a great response to that throughout War in the Pacific.
We’ve seen New Weapon ownership double thanks to this approach in Chapter 5, and so we’re keen to see how we will improve that across our next Chapter. We’ve also tweaked the earn rate of Chapter XP at End of Round to better reward players who place higher on the scoreboard, to ensure that your performance across the round is better rewarded.
There will otherwise be a handful of focused Vehicle Balancing changes performed in Update 6.0, as well as a small selection of fixes and changes to Maps that we were able to identify and develop solutions for at the end of last year.
Our 6.2 update is targeting a more expansive set of fixes and adjustments, so bear with us as we work through the issues that you’ve highlighted to us so far in 2020 - we’re on it, and we’ll keep you updated over on the Battlefield Trello as soon as we’re ready to kick off Chapter 6.
Speak to you next week!
