If you thought that DICE and EA would cut Battlefield 4 off from support as soon as the last pieces of the Premium DLC season pass were released, then you had another thing coming at the start of the year, as they instead announced that, if anything, support for the game would be expanding.
This included console versions of the Community Testing Environment, which had first appeared on PC during some of the game’s darkest hours, and it’s within the CTE that DICE were able to test March’s Winter update, and have since moved on to test additions to the game, and not just tweaks and fixes.
The best part about all of this is that, as BF4 Central reported, DICE’s David Surland has stated that any new content will be made free to both Premium users and those with just the standard game. That means that the Community Map Project to the CTE soon with a jungle-like setting will be free, and so too will the night time renditions of Siege of Shanghai, Zavod 311, and Golmud Railway.
But you’ll have to wait for the Summer update for those maps to be added, at the very earliest. The Spring update will instead include a selection of five new weapons – the Russian AN-94 and OTs-14 “Groza” have been confirmed – as well as a new 60Hz server mode and hit detection fixes.
That DICE are continuing to tinker with BF4 is a great thing for everyone involved, I think. Not only does it continue to fix issues and keep things fresh for users with new content, but it also allows DICE to refine their tech for upcoming games. Battlefield: Hardline’s launch was much smoother than BF4’s was, thanks to prior fixes, and you can imagine that the testing and addition of night time maps is allowing DICE to experiment with this change in setting and its gameplay ramifications for future games such as Star Wars: Battlefront and the inevitable Battlefield 5.