DICE have really hit the money with their FPS Battlefield 1. It topped sales charts for the first two weeks after its release, and sees thousands of players online every day across all the major platforms. Today marks the start of what the developers have named “The Road Ahead” and sees the servers for the game switched off for a short time while the Fall Update patch is implemented.
The first of the Road Ahead additions will be a large number of gameplay tweaks, and changes surrounding Operations and the Suez Conquest map. In the case of Operations, “Going forward we are addressing the balance issues with the Operations game mode. It’s clear that attackers need a boost. To increase the effectiveness of the attacking team, we are increasing the overall tickets for both Operations & Grand Operations. In addition, we are also making it somewhat easier to capture sectors as an attacker by reducing the amount of time it takes to capture a flags,” the DICE explains. Meanwhile, as seen in the picture below, Suez will now feature five flags instead of only three.
The developers have clearly been listening to Battlefield 1 fans as new additions, like a quit button between rounds and squad leader demotions for not issuing orders, were much requested from the community. DICE has just released the full patch notes of what is in store for the game this time around. Though the complete list of changes is exhaustive, some of the highlights include:
- You can customize your soldier from within the UI by selecting either the icon on Home or on Soldier
- If the squad leader ignores requests for orders the leadership is transferred to another member of the squad.
- When a squad member requests an order (and there is no active squad order), the requesting player is added to the want-to-be-leader queue for that squad and a 60 seconds timer starts (the timer is not reset if there are other squad members waiting in the queue already).
- When the 60 seconds pass, the first member in the squad queue (the one who requested order earliest) is promoted as a squad leader. If there are other members in the queue after him, the timer is automatically reset to 60 seconds and if the new leader doesn’t give orders over that period either, then the next waiting in line is promoted and so on.
- If the current squad leader issues an order, then the queue for the squad is cleared.
- Two new tabs have been added to the store: RSP and Battlepacks
- You can rent a server via the RSP tab
- You can join Custom Games from Multiplayer
- The Quit button is now available at any given time when in the End of Round
Additionally, the Road Ahead page confirms that Battlefest will begin on November 16th. This will see Battlefield 1 players take part in a week long celebration that will include log-in rewards, a battlepack revision and community events among other things.
Further updates are expected in the near future, including a free new map dubbed “Giant’s Shadow” due for release in December.