DICE has revealed some new information regarding sniper rifles and how they will be tweaked, weapon damage, and HD textures!
When it comes to balancing, sniper rifles have always been a controversial issue in FPS multiplayer. According to many FPS forums, they’re either under-powered, over-powered, useless at close range, or too effective at “quick-scoping.” Many Battlefield fans have already shown concern towards DICE’s decision to make bolt-action rifles only a one-shot kill when striking to the head. You can read more about these concerns here. This would seemingly give too much power to the semi-auto sniper rifles (which only needed two body shots to kill an enemy, as with the bolt-actions) that tended to dominate during the Beta. However, Alan Kertz recently clarified that the semi-autos are, indeed, being tweaked. When one fan for Kertz’s thoughts on their ability to take down enemies in two shots being over-powered, he responded, “the two shot kill range was a bit too long. They can still 2 shot up close to be competitive.” So, it seems that while they will still be able to two-shot an enemy in the final build, the distance at which that can do this will be shortened. Do you feel this is fair?
Speaking of weapon damage, DICE has announced that they will be doing some tweaking before the final release, which you can read about here. However, many fans assumed that they would be changing the damage models for each weapon which is not the case. Again, balance is more of a concern here. Kertz stated that the “base damage is the same. Some weapon balance tweaks, and some bug fixes [have been applied].”
It has recently been announced that both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 will have the ability to install a high-definition texture package that will be streamed from the HDD in order provide better textured in game (this is an optional install found in the second disk included in the Xbox 360 version of Battlefield 3 to accomodate for those that do not have an HDD). Some fans have been asking why this simply wasn’t included on disk? Kertz clarified that the “optical drives [in the consoles] are too slow for our streaming needs.”
In other news, fans have also been asking if any improvements will be made to the mini-map, to which Kertz answered, “yes, the clarity has been greatly enhanced.”
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