Rarely does a video game stay in my regular rotation as often as this one, so I thought I'd take some time today to remember its anniversary. Even long-tail multiplayer offerings that are supported for ages typically lose my attention after a couple of years, but there's something about DICE's debut Xbox One title that's still incredibly fun to this day. Yep, 2013's Battlefield 4 just turned 10 (at least the Xbox 360/PC/PS3 version did) over the weekend - and I'm here to remind y'all that it's still well-populated and very good fun in 2023.
This was the Swedish developer's first foray into full-scale Battlefield on console, and boy did they knock it out of the park. Yes, it suffered from a buggy launch and yes, it probably should have been delayed due to the amount of platforms it had to release on in late 2013, but the core of the game was always fantastic and the team managed to turn things around in a big way post-launch.
Truth be told, I'd always been pretty jealous of the PC Battlefield 3 experience a couple of years prior in 2011 - the 360 version of that game was okay but it just didn't compare to the full 64-player experience. We finally got that with BF4 when it made its Xbox One debut shortly after the initial launch, and despite those early issues I mentioned, I've still been playing this game on the regular ever since.
The game's gunplay is fantastic; the interplay between infantry classes, vehicular combat, gadgets, environmental destruction and all the rest of it is largely unmatched to this day. A few of the Battlefield titles that arrived later last generation got some of these elements right - but things never came together the way they did with Battlefield 4. Call of Duty has done its best to go large-scale in recent years as well, and while that's been fun in its own right, Battlefield's vehicular gameplay and destruction elements play a big role in what makes BF4 so special.