The Promised Battlefield 4 Xbox One Demo at PAX Is Just a Nerfed PC Version With a Controller
Just four days ago Microsoft’s Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb promised a juicy Xbox One demo of Battlefield 4 at PAX Prime 2013 on his blog.
As you head to the Washington State Convention this week for PAX Prime 2013, be sure and stop by the Xbox Booths at #412, #422 and #432 for an great lineup of the latest and greatest games only Xbox One can offer.
Battlefield 4: Known for their world-class multiplayer, DICE is bringing Battlefield 4’s epic 64-player battles, vehicular combat and all-out warfare to North American fans this week. Gamers will have a chance to go hands-on with the “Siege of Shanghai” beta launching in early October. With the release of Battlefield 4 this holiday, players will experience an all-new level of destruction and dynamic environments with a game-changing concept called Levolution, and for the first time for Battlefield console gamers, 64-players running at 60 frames-per-second on Xbox One.
Unfortunately things are not as exciting as Hryb described, at least according to the report by veteran NeoGaf user GrizzNKev, that tried the demo and came out less than impressed.
According to GrizzNKev the demo was running on twenty demo stations at the Xbox booth, some of which were inactive, with boxes hiding Windows 8-based PCs with Xbox One controllers attached.
Pausing the game shown the mouse cursor and the UI displayed keyboard keys. The game crashed to Windows 8 screens and upon death it shown a “Battlefield 4 at E3” splash screen, indicating that the demo is possibly just the E3 pre-alpha version retooled. The demo was also limited to 8 vs 8 players, which on the full sized map ended up being rather unimpressive.
YouTube personality TotalBiscuit also confirmed that the demo was running on high end PCs (including the detail about keyboard keys on the UI). You can check out his own video at the 3:36 mark. He also mentioned that the frame rate was a bit spotty.
At the bottom of the post you can see two very telling pictures taken by Reddit user DanTMWTMP.
Mind you, this definitely isn’t the first time that a “console version” of a next gen game is caught running on PC with controllers attached. Just to bring an example the “PS4 version” of Watch_Dogs was running in the same way at the Ubisoft booth at Gamescom, as I could personally verify, but at least in that case Sony or Ubisoft didn’t make much of a big deal of it, nor hid the keyboards, that were in plain sight.
