Battlefield 4 Beta Adds Obliteration Mode

The open beta for Battlefield 4 will be adding a new mode today. Soon Players will be able to play Obliteration, a new game type making its debut in BF4.

Obliteration is a 24-32 player match that centers around a bomb that randomly spawns near the middle of the map. Both teams will try to take the bomb and plant it on a base owned by the other team. If the bomb detonates and destroys the other base, a new bomb will spawn. The match continues until one team has blown up the other team's three bases.

"Compared to Conquest, the action in Obliteration tends to be heavily focused on wherever the bomb is located," said DICE of the new mode last month. "Since there’s only one bomb at a time, you will often find yourself going from attacker to defender in the blink of an eye. You need to be able to predict enemy movement to defend at the right place at the right time and reclaim the offensive – or intercept the enemy to reclaim possession of the bomb. The constantly shifting playing field from offense to defense is partly inspired by American football – with the detonation of an enemy installation being the Battlefield equivalent of scoring a touchdown."

The mode sounds like it marries the focused action of Rush with the large-scale vehicle battles of Conquest. I'm excited to try it out. Like Ryan, I'm a bit underwhelmed by the beta so far because it's mostly showing us features we've already seen before. It'll be nice to see something really new from DICE besides that collapsing skyscraper.

Obliteration is one of two new modes being introduced in BF4. The other is the similarly themed Defuse mode. In Defuse, two teams of five compete to detonate a bomb on each other's objective. Players can't respawn until the end of the round so it's a much tighter, faster experience than the other BF4 modes.

The BF4 beta was opened up to all PS3, Xbox 360 and PC players on Friday. It allows players to fight it out in Conquest and Domination modes on the "Siege of Shanghai" map. "Siege" is one of ten multiplayer maps that will ship with the game when it launches later this month.