14 DAY TRIAL // In case you're curious what the scoop on the massive changes introduced to Battlefield 4 in the September update is, you're in luck, as a video neatly enumerating the tweaks has popped up on the Internet.
The video comes from Battlefield veteran Westie, who outlines the controversial and abundant changes made to the military first-person shooter in the latest patch from developer DICE.
The patch notes are extensive, and among many other tweaks, a reduction to both the minimum and maximum damage of most weapons, and a reduction to visual recoil were introduced, which are pretty much the most impactful alterations.
The September patch is pretty big
The update released at the end of last month contained all the changes tested over the course of the last few months on the PC-only Community Test Environment, a feature which the dev introduced in order to improve and streamline the balancing and updating process.
After being exhaustively tested on the CTE, the changes were deemed ready to go live, and many players who haven't been paying attention to the game lately might be at a loss when it comes to what to expect from the massive update.
In case you don't feel like going through the patch notes, which is totally understandable, you can glean a better understanding of what the game feels like now by watching the video and hearing Westie's commentary, breaking down the most important changes.
What this means
In a nutshell, you'll be killing people a little bit slower with most weapons, but the changes are far from being radical.
The damage model for the majority of automated weapons has been altered, with a reduction of around 1 health point across the board, which means that if your favorite assault rifle used to cause 25 points of damage pre-patch, it will now do 24.
This means that you'll need to put an extra bullet into people you're trying to shoot at pretty much every range you're firing from, reducing the speed at which you get gunned down or requiring more skillful aiming.
The visual recoil fix is also a change that will impact the way you experience the game in a major way. While at first it may seem that weapons have no more recoil, the truth is that all the extra artistic movement that was displayed on screen for the purpose of feedback was erroneous and made it more difficult to compensate for the weapons' actual recoil while firing.
All weapons still shoot the same, as no modifications to the actual mechanics have been made. The exaggerated visual recoil was initially added to provide an extra layer of immersion and make it feel as if the weapons were more powerful. So now you'll get to experience what the guns really fire like.
