Regardless of your feelings toward shooters or Electronic Arts, Battlefield 4 has looked mighty impressive every time it’s been shown off. The E3 Microsoft Xbox One keynote may have tricked you into thinking BF4 was a first-person boat shooter, but this spotlight trailer for the Frostbite 3 engine shows you that, yes, while there is plenty of FPBS to go around, the game can handle much more than that.
Among Frostbite 3’s impressive features — networked water simulation, which essentially creates the same body of water for every player to see. If a wave is moving in a certain pattern, it’s moving that way for everyone on the map, and at the exact same time. Rather than just be pretty tech, though, the networked water sim provides the boat-heavy combat with a dynamic environment in which players can use to their advantage — be it via using a wave for cover, or battling a current while swimming.
Frostbite 3 doesn’t just up the water ante, though, as it attempts to upgrade character emotions in order to help games convey better narratives. The eyes are portals to one’s soul, but in the land of video games, the eyes are one of the main determining factors as to whether or not a character can climb out of the uncanny valley. Nothing is more disruptive to a narrative than jarring characters, and Frostbite 3 has a focus on characters’ eyes in order to soften that uncanny valley blow — complete with parallax animation in the iris. No longer will parallax animation be confined to grassy backgrounds in old Sega side-scroller beat-em-ups.
If pretty eyes and using dynamic waves as ocean-based cover isn’t impressive, Frostbite 3 is why huge buildings can crumble to the ground in the middle of a BF4 match.
Battlefield 4 will release in North America on October 29 of this year, so watch the above video, get pumped for first-person boat shooting, and then find something else to do for four months while you wait, we guess.