As many of you remember, we ended last year with a poll in which we asked you, the community, which maps you would prefer to be remade in Battlefield 4.

We never previously talked about the results of that poll, but that changes today!

Before we published the poll, we had a hunch a majority of you would want us to remake Battlefield 3 maps – which proved to be correct looking at the results:

Open Classic Map Poll Results

The results of this poll was invaluable, but not the only parameter we considered our pick…



PICKING A CLASSIC MAP
With the Community Map Project catering to the wills of the majority (which tend to like predominately infantry based play) - we wanted to make sure the classic map project would cater to our equally important veteran & vehicle-players!


The team looking at vote results from both the Community map and the Classic map polls.

With this in mind, this is how we made our pick:

A map not re-imagined before
We removed previously re-imagined maps like Strike at Karkand and Wake Island in favor for something fresh.
A truly classic map
We filtered out maps from Battlefield 3, Bad Company 2 and Bad Company 2: Vietnam respectively as we wanted to step further back in our catalog than that to reach the really classic content
A large vehicle based map
When we think “classic Battlefield” - we think lots of vehicles, which meant skipping some Battlefield maps like Omaha Beach, Berlin and Mashtuur City based on size and vehicle density.
Most importantly – Dev-Team weigh in
The final pick was also heavily influenced by which maps on the list we could truly take to the next level both visually and gameplay-wise, and which would be lots of fun to make and play of course!

Taking all this in consideration we picked Dragon Valley! (from Battlefield 2)


This is what Dragon Valley looked like in Battlefield 2 back in the day

RE-IMAGINING GAMEPLAY
We spent some time playing all the maps at the top of the poll results to get refreshed on just how these maps felt in-game as well as what they looked like.

We were not only looking to just re-imagine the maps visually – we also would like the gameplay of the map to be similar to the old version. You should get that same feel for the game as you did back then.

One issue with our Dragon Valley pick was Battlefield 2’s really limited draw distance & fog, which enabled players to sneak around and get that “classic” conquest flag cap rotation in a relatively narrow map. This posed some problems to us as our draw distance in Battlefield 4 more or less covers the full map.

We were able to address this through the use of more foliage, a cloud layer and a taller, more fitting terrain.


This is what our re-imagined Dragon Valley Prototype looks like currently!

Another important aspect of gameplay in the original was repairable bridges – something we are very happy to be able to include in the re-imagined map as well!


You can destroy and repair bridges like in the original!


CTE PROTOTYPE RELEASE – LIMITED TIME!
Today our Dragon Valley prototype will be made playable on the CTE in Conquest Large!

The plan is to get feedback on this prototype for a limited time and then get back to the Community Map Project.

As we want to focus your feedback on our classic map for the coming two weeks, we will switch the Community Map Project servers OFF during this period.

After these two weeks of feedback and testing on the CTE – we will go back to focusing on the Community Map Project again!



RELEASE NOTES
This is the changes added in this release:

Classic Map Prototype playable
Conquest Large available for initial feedback.
Classic Map Known issues
RU vs US – will be swapped to CH vs US at later stage
Using LOW settings will result in crash (run out of memory) – also applies if you have too little GPU memory on MED/HIGH
Some objects have incorrect destruction settings and are destructible by rifle fire
Night map lights on vehicles are on still (these will be removed)
UI for repairing bridges does not show up yet (it supposed to show the vehicle repair UI when close by with a repair tool)
Since Dragon Valley has more flags than any BF4 map to date, the UI ontop of the minimap is not displaying this correctly – and overflowing the box
Weapon updates
Removed “onCollision” explosion logic. Reduced time to live from 10 seconds to 1.5 seconds. This prevents players from throwing flashbangs off of tall rooftops at enemies. Reduced friendly flash duration to 0.6s. Reduced effective angle to 145°.
Stat and balancing fixes for weapons and vehicles – Symthic.com will be the best place to get details on this change!
Adjust Mare’s Leg stats. Increases minimum spread to .2. Adding a heavy barrel that reduces minimum spread to .1.
Fix to remove extended barrel when using Heavy Barrel on PDWs. Affects MX4, P90, UMP45, and UMP9.
Fix for lock-on missile turning radius. Brought the radius tighter to prevent it from spinning around target. Was 3600 max angle, now 360.
Reintroducing AN94 bipod. It will be unlocked by default.
Tracer polish. Lowered brightness, thickness and length.
High Tickrate Changes
Added vehicle joystick sensitivity slider in the options.
Did a pass on the vehicle joystick curves to exclude the extra dead zone
Fixed the Venom helicopter gunner turrets to properly use the player current zoom toggle mode
Updated the network connection HUD icons (new graphics), tweaked the high tickrate icon on the loading screen.
Vehicle turrets retune, please retest the turrets now and let us know if any turrets are not appropriately moving as you’d expect!
Added the final network connection icon: Latency Variation warning & severe.
Team Balancer Changes
Now correctly reports CN for China, RU for Russia and US for United States team swaps.
Zavod Graveyard Shift Updates
Fixing a couple more lights for destruction that was missing
Made a non-destructible light for under the grate in tunnel for better visibility
Made non-destructible lights for GEN3 version of bunker/base (flag A)
Rebaked with new lights (because they now use radiosity)
Adjusted fog
Rotated trees to be more random
Checked interior fog and adjusted where needed
Toned down minimap color
Worked in lights for minimap
Tweaked lighting in general
Fixed a floating light (levelution related)
Helicopters now have interior lights for the cockpit

Quelle : Battlelog