Improving Battlefield 4: The Winter Update

DICE is committed to constantly improving Battlefield 4 to make your multiplayer experience as entertaining, intuitive, and reliable as possible. Based on great feedback from the community, the Winter Update is now here – filled with various improvements to Battlefield 4. Let’s dive right into the tweaks we’ve made. Get the Complete Patch Notes (PDF) Netcode Improvements Major improvements have been made to the Battlefield 4 network layer. Making the “Netcode” better allows for a more exact multiplayer experience for all participants, and this has been done in various ways. For instance, we’ve done long range network updates by adding a cone to the High Frequency Update (30hz), illustrated in the image below.

Other Netcode improvements we’ve done:

Network prioritization and filtering has been improved. This now prioritizes health/damage, enemy players and vehicles above all.
Vehicles now use a larger (front) hemi-sphere shape for collision improvements
Aiming down sights, or zooming in sitting in a vehicle or on foot, utilizes an even longer range cone for better target acquisition at a distance

Required bandwidth close to cut in half: Players with less stellar network connections should get a significant improvement, now able to use the High Frequency Update. Squad Obliteration game mode We’re adding a new competitive game mode called Squad Obliteration with the Winter Patch. In this mode the fast paced, objective based gameplay of the original Obliteration is scaled down to 5 vs 5 size – balanced and perfected for competitive play. Here are the major differences from the original Obliteration mode: Squad Obliteration/Obliteration differences

No vehicles, no parachute spawns
Secondary base spawns are made available
First team to destroy two out of three bases wins the round
Bomb carrier position is only known to the enemy team if spotted

Quickmatch Changes We want it to be a smooth and intelligent affair to jump straight into a Battlefield 4 match using Quickmatch. That’s why we’ve added new presets and servers to enable you to play it your way. Here’s what we’ve added to Quickmatch.

New player gating: New players can now matchmake into special servers until reaching rank 10, giving them a chance to learn playing Battlefield 4 against other new players.
Ranked Preset support: Players now have the added option to Quickmatch into Ranked servers as an addition to the Official preset available in the past.
Premium Playlists: Three new playlists are added catering to various play styles and including maps from all expansions and base game combined.

We believe these updates and changes will make Battlefield 4 even more enjoyable in multiplayer, and we’d like to thank you once again for suggesting these tweaks to us. Keep the feedback coming, whether it’s for these updates or anything else, and thanks for reading.