14 DAY TRIAL // Video game developer DICE says that it has plans to introduce a ballistic shield to its Battlefield 4 first-person shooter in the upcoming Dragon’s Teeth expansion, allowing gamers to actively stay protected and use a variety of handguns to shoot at their enemies.
The new feature has been planned for a long time by the company, but so far the team was unable to free up resources, especially RAM, on current-gen consoles in order to actually implement it.
Ryan Duffin, who is a senior animator at DICE, says that the concept first appeared during the development process of the core Battlefield 4 experience, but the team has more pressing priorities.
According to Polygon, the studio explains, “It turns out that stopping bullets in a first-person shooter is a ton of fun. We didn't have enough memory. It added about a megabyte, but a megabyte on a 2006 console is a lot, so it didn't work out.”
The information was offered during the Using the Power of Layered Animation to Expand Premium Content in Battlefield 4 talk given during the 2014 edition of the Game Developers Conference.
DICE has come to understand that the best way to implement the new feature would be to create a bullet-stopping shield that would occupy both hands of the player-character and provide moveable cover.
The company has worked hard to optimize the Battlefield 4 experience and now has the memory required to actually make the feature a reality.
Duffin adds, “There was a lot of resistance at first. But the more we assessed it, the more we realized it was a better feature.”
The introduction of the ballistic shield will mean that gamers need to work together, with at least one of them sacrificing firepower in order to offer protection to their comrades.
Dragon’s Teeth for Battlefield 4 is expected to arrive at some point during the summer, and DICE has not offered any other information on the kind of content that will be added to the shooter.
Development is being handled by the studio in Los Angeles and not by the core team in Stockholm, which is rumored to be working on an entirely new title linked to the Bad Company continuity.
At the moment, the player community for Battlefield 4 is awaiting the launch of the Naval Strike DLC, which is designed to add four more maps set in the South East China sea and a new mode that’s inspired by Battlefield 2142.