As many of you know by now, in a few of Battlefield 4‘s maps weather changes based on the Levolution event triggered, but DICE CEO Patrick Soderlund suggested that the company might use real-time weather data to feed into the servers without major efforts, at some point.
I sit the floor above the Battlefield development team and there is no lack of ideas down there. It’s just a matter of, how many of them are feasible and how many can we do.
One of the things I think is cool in Battlefield 4 is the geo-leaderboard – you can find out who in your neighbourhood is, say, the best best assault player. That’s cool. And so let’s take that a step further and say, what if we had servers where it pulls in just things as simple as weather and day time from the local area.
If the server is in Stockholm and it’s sunny, what if the map is sunny, too? What if it’s snowing and dark in Moscow? Okay, let’s have the servers there playing snowy and dark maps. You look at the possibilities and realise you can do so many more things in the cloud-enabled world than we couldn’t do before. That’s frankly one dumb idea from me, but it’s kind of cool
Their geo-based leaderboard is admittedly very nice, and I’ve been personally waiting for truly dynamic weather to shake up the maps of first-person shooters for a while now. Playing on a sunny day is very different than playing during a cloudy night, and may even require a different tactical approach altogether. If they can truly pull it off, that could be a fairly major longevity boost. What do you think?
