In Battlefield 4 multiplayer, you play a specific role as a part of a team and if you can perform well together, you are rewarded.

Lead Multiplayer Designer Thomas “Tompen” Andersson writes in the latest Battlefield blog update, “The way we’re going about it in Battlefield 4 is to highly encourage team play – but never force it. We want to promote team play by creating great gameplay mechanics such as Field Upgrades, Commander Mode, and a new range of gadgets specifically designed to expand co-operation in the field.”

Like Battlefield 4, four kits – or classes – will be returning to the multiplayer: The Engineer, Recon, Support, and Assault. However, Andersson adds that “while keeping these core kits intact, we are increasing the ability for players to more strongly specialize their combat role while also increasing flexibility and catering to different play styles.”

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As for being rewarded for playing as a team, Andersson explained that the studio has “this new concept called Field Upgrades.” He said that, “if you’re a long term fan that played Battlefield 2142, you will already have an idea what these are, but we have tweaked them for Battlefield 4. In short, Field Upgrades are chained boosts that can affect a number of gameplay mechanics for your player. Similar to the specializations in Battlefield 3, these can for example provide you with faster sprint speed, stronger personal armor, or expanded ammo capacity.”

“The idea behind Field Upgrades is to give individual rewards for squad based team play performance. You earn them through squad scoring such as squad healing, completing objectives with your squad members, squad resupplies, squad repairs, and other squad actions. Instead of one single specialization like in Battlefield 3, you can now pick from different upgrades paths, each containing four specializations. Keep the squad alive, and you will move through the accumulative upgrade path. But watch out! If your entire squad is eliminated, you will lose some of your progress.”

According to Andersson, we’ll learn more about how the upgrade paths work next week, where we’ll also get a peek at some brand new specializations that the team is adding to Battlefield 4 multiplayer.

So, we want to ask you, what class are you most looking forward to playing in Battlefield 4? Or, do you like to mix it up often?

Developers DICE are building a better Battlefield experience than ever before with Battlefield 4. That means more vehicles, more weapons, and more customization, among many other things.

Speaking to Battlefield.no, DICE executive producer Patrick Bach talked about some of the new features making it into Battlefield 4 when it releases on multiple platforms this October 29.

“There is a lot of stuff, really,” Bach mentioned. But what caught our attention was how DICE is now able to include more weapons and vehicles, thanks to some streaming improvements. “We have tried to look at the game from all angles. We have replaced streaming systems so we can give you more weapons, more vehicles.”

Another feature that DICE has been somewhat tight-lipped about until now is the ability to customize factions on the Battlefield. “One feature we have not talked about is ‘any army on any side on any map,’ which gives you the possibility to choose what factions start at what side, and that’s on any map as well,” he said. “So that will be interesting and might create some cool results. It’s a feature we haven’t discussed openly, but I think it’s something interesting.”

As you may already know, Battlefield 4 will allow you to play as either American, Russian, or Chinese factions, who will each introduce their own unique weapons and vehicles to the game’s multiplayer.

Update

Bach also spoke about customizable UI and HUD elements on the PC version of Battlefield 4, saying, “on PC, you will get custom UI and HUD, and you can scale those so you can customize more to your liking.”

Despite having one of “the best netcodes on the market,” according to Bach, players will also be able to customize their experience when it comes to latency or “lag.” Everyone’s internet situation is different, so DICE is implementing an option that will allow players to compensate for a better or slower internet connection. “We will of course tweak this so you less often will experience these kinds of [latency] problems,” he confirmed. “We have put a slider into the game which compensates for such events, and if you have a very good connection, you might want to turn that down and get a cleaner netcode.

Lastly, Bach confirmed that there will be no day and night cycles in Battlefield 4 but that patching and updating will be a lot faster and more regular thanks to the brand new Frostbite 3 engine.

If you missed it, be sure to check out some of the latest Battlefield 4 multiplayer gameplay, showing off the game’s new spectator mode running at Ultra settings.

Thanks, James, for the tip.