Battlefield 5 Open Beta — First Review

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Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read
Battlefield 5 logo

On September 4th, the Early Access to the Open Beta was opened. As I played hours of grand operations on Narvik and conquest on Rotterdam, I was heavily impressed at how the game plays and how it looks. The music that was written by Han Zimmer, excellently complicated the gameplay. Gun play was revamped heavily, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Even with a rough start, the developers at Electronic Arts quickly fixed issues in under a day — and the next day of early access was completely smooth.


Ambient Occlusion and Anti Aliasing

The new graphical options in the menu such as the auto configurations, were excellent but inaccurate. However, this should be completely fixed by the release of the game due to bugs with the newly released drivers, ambient occlusion, and anti aliasing.

However, the main issue is that ambient occlusion creates massive lag with very minor visual improvements — same goes for anti aliasing, but TAA Low seems to be well optimized like Battlefront 2. In order to simulate release performance that is recommended to you with the high fidelity configuration, you have to disable ambient occlusion. This seems to be an issue on the new RTX cards, as even the 2080 Ti lacks the ability to use the new ray tracing technology at 4k on Battlefield 5, however I have no evidence to support this claim.


Class and Gunplay Revamps

One of the changes that I instantly noticed is how classes worked and how each class has a different type of weapon. One of my favorite new weapons is the Lee Enfield and the STG, as they have quick kills, insanely accurate at semi-long ranges with satisfying recoil and audio. However, if played correctly, the medic class is extremely overpowered with their new super fast SMGs, which may return the meta from Battlefield 3.

The supply class is extremely satisfying to use to fortify positions, and with the incendiary grenade blocking off entrances. However, gun play with the class is severely lacking and the weapon handling feels a bit off — compared to other classes. Even when defending one way positions, the supply class weaponry has heavy recoil which will make bullets fly past the enemy when firing in a stand still. Hopefully, this issue is only with the gun that I am using — further experimentation is required.

The recon class was heavily improved and I felt more satisfaction at sniping enemies from long and short ranges with the new attachment and attrition system, and I feel that the recon class is currently perfect as it is.


Random gender switching during the match

I assume this is a glitch with the game, but if you die and you start to bleed out — sometimes you might change voice when you scream for help, get revived, scream instructions or something and bleed out again.

UI scaling and Framerate inconsistency

Even with medium UI scaling, the main menu doesn’t have smooth transitions or animations between each view. However, inside of the game — the UI is extremely responsive and handles transitions extremely well. Hope this is fixed soon.


Thanks for reading, and I’ll be posting another review when the beta is ending.

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