Tag: battlefield

News

Battlefield 1’s tiny handgun is here to humiliate you

Picture this: you’re in the Battlefield 1 open beta. Chaos is happening all around you. Buildings are falling, gunshots are whizzing past your ear, narrowly missing. The fear of an airstrike or mustard gas bombing always looms in the background. As the action crescendos, an enemy jumps out of a bush, and kills you with a gun no bigger than a credit card. A fucking Kolibri. The 2mm Kolibri is a very real, very tiny handgun—first manufactured in 1910, it remains the world’s smallest centerfire cartridge. The name Kolibri literally means hummingbird, although I would argue here that the gun’s…
Feature

Virtual war zones and the failure of the military shooter

In October 2008, chaos gripped Mumbai for four days as a series of coordinated bombings and shootings killed 164 people and injured hundreds more. All 10 attackers were highly trained and linked to a command center in Pakistan via VOIP technology. The command center, using TV and social media feeds as intelligence sources, gave the attackers a sixth sense in predicting security force’s movements and reactions. It was a grim portent of where we find ourselves in 2016—a place where the deliberate disruption and destruction of public spaces and networks is the latest tactic in modern warfare, a place videogames…
Article

The Joy of Nature

Right now, Paris is hosting the United Nations conference on climate change. It’s the 21st session to be held since these events started, and the 11th meeting since the Kyoto Protocol was agreed in 1997. These events tend to be underwhelming—a smattering of watery half-promises and spurious statistics—but this year there’s increased scrutiny following the global protests of last September. Three hundred thousand people took to the streets of New York while concurrent marches were being held across cities such as Berlin, Lagos, Johannesburg, Seoul, and London. And this November, the United Nations weather agency warned of the new “permanent…
News

Looks like you’ll still be punching plenty of dudes in Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst

“Don’t get into any scraps,” a voice tells Faith over her comm about a minute into the latest trailer for Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst. Yet, by now, we’ve already seen Faith take out three guards, with more to come. Though most of the trailer is focused on the series’ signature parkour, it does bookend itself with combat sections, opening and closing on notes of violence. It’s all thrilling enough to look at, but also a little dispiriting, at least for some of us. The first Mirror’s Edge was an exciting departure for DICE, most well-known for the Battlefield series, as it…
News

Show us the bloody leg! Why Battlefield 4 isn’t yet counting the costs of war

“Technology has helped us become better story-tellers.” Thus sayeth Patrick Söderlund, executive VP of EA’s Games Label and one-half of dashing duo that graced the stage of Metreon last night. I was sitting towards the back of a movie theatre with a gaggle of other game journalists and apparently professional football players (!) who had lined up for the announcement of EA’s newest shooter Battlefield 4. So would this statement ring true? – – – I find game announcements curious simply because we are being exhibited a release of an interactive experience and the “showing” of real gameplay footage at…