Battlefield 4 System Requirements, Release Date and Beta Access

It´s not a secret that the developer DICE and publisher EA are working on Battlefield 4. I wrote about the leaked BF 4 information in July 2012 and October 2012, DICE stated on Twitter that the beta for Battlefield 4 will start in Fall 2013. According to EA´s release politic, this means that the game will come out soon after the beta. Several news magazines state that the beta will start October and that the release date will be probably in November 2013.

The latest news is now that DICE and EA did show the game already to several store managers of GameStop. EA labels president Frank Gibeau said “At a GameStop company meeting earlier this week, we gave 500 store managers a sneak peek at Battlefield 4.”. GameStop CEO J Paul Raines wrote on Twitter “Got to see Battlefield 4 today and all I can say is WOW! Thanks @EA for the sneak peek. Can’t wait for you all to see it.”. The tweet has then been retweeted by EA’s own Battlefield account which means it is not a rumor.

That all means the game is already in an advanced state. And this makes several people already ask for the system requirements of Battlefield 4. EA labels president Frank Gibeau confirmed that Battlefield 4 will be apart from the PC platform also released on the next-gen consoles PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720. But people already assumed that. For the PC player this means, BF4 will be again just a cross-platform game, like Battlefield 3 has been. And don’t let´s talk about which direction the port will be accomplished. Cross platform is cross-platform and regardless in wich direction, the modern PC hardware probably again wont be utilized like if it would be as a PC only game. Anyway there will be still the problem that the PC gamer must again acclimate with the console community style gameplay like too small smalls maps, decreased flag density for console action, bad engine responsiveness also called character responsiveness and different other drawbacks we know from cross-platform games. It might be again Call of Duty adjusted uncomplex fast food.

But lately there are rumors if Battlefield comes up with 64-bit OS support as minimum system requirements. That would mean the game could utilize more memory but that would not really mean yet that the game will need so much more memory. It is not revealed yet if Battlefield 4 will come up with an engine based on Frostbyte 2 or if it will come out with Frostbyte 3 engine. But you can assume it will be rather an improved Frostbye 2 engine.

So here is what I do think will be the system requirements for Battlefield 4…

(EDIT: Battlefield 4 System Requirements have been officially announced)

Minimum System Requirements for Battlefield 4:

CPU: 2.4 GHz Dual Core Processor

Memory: 2gb

Graphics: DirectX 10 compatible card with 256 MB of memory, Nvidia 8000 series or AMD Radeon 3000 series

Sound: DirectX compatible sound card

Hard Drive: 15 GB for disc version or 10 GB for digital version

OS: Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8 (maybe 64-bit only)

Recommended System Requirements for Battlefield 4:

CPU: Quad-core Intel or AMD CPU, 3 GHz upwards

Memory: 4gb

Graphics: DirectX 11 compatible card, Nvidia GeForce GTX 500 series or ATI Radeon 6000 series with 1GB of video memory

Sound: DirectX compatible sound card

Hard Drive: 15 GB for disc version or 10 GB for digital version

OS: Windows 7 or Windows 8 (maybe 64-bit only)

Note: Some parts of this blog post are filled with my opinions and assumptions. I will write again about the topic if there are some more facts. I also will apply for the open beta in the future. But I bet EA and DICE will have a hard time to convince me. I simply dislike cross-platform games as I do see them as a downgrade compared to pc only games like Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142 from the past (as mentioned above). Feel free to see this blog post also as a rant. But me and some friends are bored of those “new” games and how the game industry changed 🙂