The new update introduces the impressive High Frequency Bubble mechanic

Jun 4, 2014 06:52 GMT  ·  By

A brand new update for Battlefield 4 has just been released on the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 platforms and will soon debut on the PS4 and Xbox One to finally fix some of the netcode issues that have been plaguing the multiplayer mode for quite some time and introduce a special High Frequency Bubble feature.

Battlefield 4 came out last year and delivered a gorgeous first-person shooter experience but, unfortunately for fans who got the game across its many platforms, the title was plagued by a huge amount of technical issues and problems that impacted the single-player story mode, the multiplayer competitive one, and a lot of core mechanics.

Despite lots of patches, the game still had problems on most platforms, and now DICE has brought forth one of its biggest updates yet, confirming that it's finally found solutions for the different issues with the game's netcode, which in turn affected multiplayer performance.

According to the official blog post, all these changes come after user feedback from the Battlefield 4 Community Test Environment on the PC platform, where developer DICE has been trying out different solutions alongside fans.

Chief among the new features in this latest Battlefield 4 patch is the High Frequency Bubble option that's present on the PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

In simple terms, there will be an invisible bubble around the player in which the game requests and displays more information than what's happening outside it, resulting in less lag or latency problems.

"Within a certain radius of the player, we add the possibility to update the clients at a higher rate from the server. What this essentially means is that the server will update the client on what is happening more often than before. This normally results in a smoother, more 'correct' player experience."

By default, the High Frequency update option is turned off, so you have to enable it from the settings menu. It has three different levels, in the form of low, medium, and high. Players with connections faster than 1Mbit should have no problems running on high, according to DICE, but if you experience issues, try lowering the setting or turning it off.

On the PS4 and Xbox One servers, the High Frequency mode will be supported on all 48-player servers and on a small number of 64-player machines. If things perform well, then DICE is going to enable it for all to use.

All PC servers should see the new mode supported in around 24 hours, according to the studio.

In order to show off the differences between this High Frequency bubble and the standard game, a special video comparison has also been revealed by DICE, which demonstrates an improvement of around 50% when the new option is enabled.

You can download the new Battlefield 4 patch on PC, PS3, Xbox 360 right now. The PS4 and Xbox One updates will debut later this week.