Battlefield 4's Game-Breaking "Death Shield" Bug Discovered

[Steven Bogos]

Battlefield 4's Game-Breaking "Death Shield" Bug Discovered

The bug, which has remained undiscovered since launch, may explain some of BF4's "odd" behavior.

Have you ever been playing Battlefield 4, had a tank shot perfectly lined up, and then just had it miss for no reason? How about having your under-slung grenades flung back at you despite shooting them into open space? What most people previously attributed to lag may actually be due to the newly discovered "death shield" bug.

Basically, when a player "dies", there is a short window of time in which he can be revived by a medic. These downed soldiers extend a sort of invisible wall from their "corpses", which blocks, and reflects all incoming projectiles. That means, say, if you kill someone with a tank, and try to shoot at something directly behind him, your tank shot will always miss.

When a player is fully dead (as in, the revive window has closed), explosives and projections will pass over them fine, but in this pre-death downed state, it seems the game is misreporting hit boxes, causing the invisible wall. This bug is most noticeable in the closed-quarters maps of Operation Metro and Operation Locker.

This bug is quite a large, game-breaking one, and it's a shock that it has remained undiscovered until now. EA and DICE have had their hands full with introduce more bugs than they fixed [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/129267-These-Are-The-Battlefield-4-Bugs-DICE-is-Working-On]...)

Despite these glaring issues with the game, EA still insists that the game "was ready" when it launched last year [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/131770-EA-Speaks-Out-on-Battlefield-4-Post-Launch-Issues].

At least now I have something to blame for my abyssal accuracy ratio.

Source: PC Gamer [http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/04/14/battlefield-4-death-shield-bug-discovered-causes-projectiles-to-bounce-off-invisible-walls/]

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[NLS]

This bug is quite a large, game-breaking one, and it's a shock that it has remained undiscovered until now.

Never noticed this bug, and frankly, if nooone else did and still played the game with it, then everyone has been on equal footing? Sure, now that we KNOW it's there, people are gonna be pissed, and some might even start abusing this until DICE patches it, but until then, this hasn't felt game-breaking for me.

 

[Therumancer]

This bug is quite a large, game-breaking one, and it's a shock that it has remained undiscovered until now.

Never noticed this bug, and frankly, if nooone else did and still played the game with it, then everyone has been on equal footing? Sure, now that we KNOW it's there, people are gonna be pissed, and some might even start abusing this until DICE patches it, but until then, this hasn't felt game-breaking for me.

Well I'm guessing the thing is that people did notice, and started exploiting it, and we've now hit the point where enough people are exploiting it that he general player base (or enough of it) and the company have taken notice. I'm guessing half the problem is people using suicide tactics to exploit the shields and building team based strategies about it. Since Battlefield 4 is trying to be a competitive game, it thus becomes a problem.

To be honest I'm sort of surprised they didn't say this bug was a feature, and working as intended since nobody complained until recently.

 

[Steven Bogos]

This bug is quite a large, game-breaking one, and it's a shock that it has remained undiscovered until now.

Never noticed this bug, and frankly, if nooone else did and still played the game with it, then everyone has been on equal footing? Sure, now that we KNOW it's there, people are gonna be pissed, and some might even start abusing this until DICE patches it, but until then, this hasn't felt game-breaking for me.

Well I'm guessing the thing is that people did notice, and started exploiting it, and we've now hit the point where enough people are exploiting it that he general player base (or enough of it) and the company have taken notice. I'm guessing half the problem is people using suicide tactics to exploit the shields and building team based strategies about it. Since Battlefield 4 is trying to be a competitive game, it thus becomes a problem.

To be honest I'm sort of surprised they didn't say this bug was a feature, and working as intended since nobody complained until recently.

I think a big reason that the bug remained undiscovered for so long, was that the symptoms, when taken individually, didn't seem to strange, and could simply have been attributed to lag or poor netcode. It took someone to really break down what was happening to find the bug.

 

[Strazdas]

looksl ike the hitzone model wasnt dropping on the ground when the "wounded" soldier was, causing it to conenct and since its already at 0 health, reflect any bullet. this one... i wonder how it wasnt found out sooner. i guess there wasnt enough lemming trains running in the game.

 

[CpT_x_Killsteal]

This is what happens when you don't bug test your bloody game before you release it. (Well, this and the other 99 bugs glitches and general problems).

 

[Caiphus]

This is what happens when you don't bug test your bloody game before you release it. (Well, this and the other 99 bugs glitches and general problems).

To be fair, if they haven't found this bug after tens of thousands of people have been playing the game for months, it would probably have been difficult to find during internal bug testing.

Those 99 other bugs, though. That's not so good.

 

[Isalan]

Corpses now provide better cover than walls?

Time to dig up the patio again......

OT: This must have caused an absurd number of WTF moments. Imagine gunning down 2 guys walking through a doorway, and the first one drops, and the second one just stands there looking at you as you fail to shoot him from 4 feet. Then he nades you, but suicides, despite the nade at your feet.

 

[CpT_x_Killsteal]

This is what happens when you don't bug test your bloody game before you release it. (Well, this and the other 99 bugs glitches and general problems).

To be fair, if they haven't found this bug after tens of thousands of people have been playing the game for months, it would probably have been difficult to find during internal bug testing.

Those 99 other bugs, though. That's not so good.

I'm not gonna pretend to have any sort of Game coding/creating/designing/whatever know how, but wouldn't there have been some way to see the invisible hitbox? Like turn it on or highlight it during development or something?

 

[Caiphus]

I'm not gonna pretend to have any sort of Game coding/creating/designing/whatever know how, but wouldn't there have been some way to see the invisible hitbox? Like turn it on or highlight it during development or something?

I also have no idea, I'm afraid. From my limited experience[footnote]Very, very limited. A friend's uncle owned a software company, and needed high school students to bug test some accounting software over the summer. It wasn't pretty.[/footnote] with actual quality assurance (where they just stick people like us in a room, pay them not much, and get them to poke things until something breaks), they wouldn't have that know-how. I have no idea how easy it would be for a developer examining the code to find a bug like this.

Of course, none of this takes away from the very poor state in which the game released (and the large number of bugs that could have been found through simple quality assurance). Indeed, it sounds like those preventable bugs were partly to blame for this one staying hidden for so long, since people would have assumed it was just bad netcode, buggy hit detection, etc.

But yeah, this one might have just been tricky to find. *shrug*

Edit: So actually, if you think about it, your first statement was correct. If they'd bug tested properly before release, chances are this one would have been found sooner.

 

[XDSkyFreak]

To answer a question about hitboxes: I distinctly remember beeing able to turn on hitboxes when trying to test a sequence I made in UDK a while back and I had a friend who moded shooters and RPG's and again he was able to overlay the hitboxes over the ingame models to see how the reacted and make sure everything was working as intended. IDK bout battlefield 4, but displaying the hitbox over the ingame model is one of the primary methods for bug-testing hit detection and hitbox interaction in your game. Translation: this bug should have been spoted centuries before the game was released ...
And these are the people making Battlefront 3 ... well at least I know not to expect anything.

 

[Thatguyky]

As someone who probably has played way to much Battlefield 4... this seriously explains SO many moments. I'm really glad that somebody actually found this bug, and it's been made public. On the other hand it just makes me ever more disappointed in EA/Dice. I keep thinking that eventually this game will be solid, but at this point I'm ready to trade it back in :/

 

[RoonMian]

I somehow feel that it takes such a long time to even discover such a huge flaw in a game is the biggest testament to how broken it is. You don't notice how the game constantly fucks up because it fucks up so much that even huge fuck ups like this just don't stand out.

Audacious, really... A case for consumer protection agencies.

 

[EvilestDeath]

So I got BF4 at launch, sold it after a week because it didn't really work.

Was given a copy at Christmas instead of CoD Ghosts and was happy knowing months had passed since my experience...I booted it up after buying premium because you know it was awesome for BF3, updated with a 200+mb update prolly the 3rd or 4th one by then and noticed jack had changed about the game.

Months later Second Assault is ready to be released but delayed to fix the game. This delay for content due out in December causes some people including myself to demand refunds for Premium for content not being delivered months after its schedualed out.

Second map pack is released and the runways are too short for air crafts to take off, something literally anyone could notice just by trying out any of the jets in these revamped maps. Something you think would be critical to make sure to test just to be sure the vehicles work well on the maps let alone can get out of where they spawn.

Third Map pack is released with one studio throwing in the towel saying "Here's your megaladon, were done with this mess, peace" so DICE LA can be blamed for the rest of the games issues eventhough they are just in charge of DLC from this point.

Now we have dead players causing issues something that just shows a lack of play testing on DICE's part. A forgivable bug if fixed extremely quickly due to how much it can harm the experience but we will probably just have to deal with this until the next maps come out for a proper update.

If you haven't yet don't bother buying Battlefield 4 please. Don't support this crap like I was suckered into thinking this game would work as well or better then the last entree. I'd say get Battlefield 3 since it functions but then you may still support those who are currently making this mess of a title.

 

[mrgerry123]

I've seen 99 bugs but this glitch ain't one.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

oh dear...EA wont be able to release all that juicy overpriced dlc for some time. What a pity. Shouldnt have been greedy and rushed it for early release. I wouldnt call this triple a at all. Can someone find DICE a different publisher please? Id do it my bloody well self if i could, but, ya know...

 

[Akisa]

Reported it during beta, and wasn't fixed. I'm not holding my breath.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Never noticed this bug, and frankly, if nooone else did and still played the game with it, then everyone has been on equal footing? Sure, now that we KNOW it's there, people are gonna be pissed, and some might even start abusing this until DICE patches it, but until then, this hasn't felt game-breaking for me.

I can't say I noticed this one specifically, but then there are so many other issues that cause you to miss shots that it's hardly surprising.

This bug's just another one, it's a big deal because it's another demonstration of how awful BF4's coding is. I've gone back to playing BF3 and I'm having a whale of a time being able to use precision weapons like Shotgun Slugs and the Crossbow effectively.

If BF4 and it's expansions represent how DICE is going to do things in future then it's persuaded me I'm not interested in BF5, or Battlefront and probably not Mirror's Edge 2 as well, which is a bigger deal than a few bugs in bf4.