Battlefield 1 & 4 serve up free Russian winter DLC today
Tsar Wars
Battlefield V is practically upon us already, but its two immediate predecessors are still very well populated games. Still, thanks to their old focus on season passes, many players just stuck with the base games, a problem which EA have been rectifying lately with giveaways. Today, owners of Battlefield 1 can snag the In The Name Of The Tsar expansion for the game, while Battlefield 4 folks can get the Final Stand expansion, both completely free. Summer is coming, and looking at the frozen wastelands on offer, a trip to the Urals seems awfully tempting.
Battlefield 1's In The Name Of The Tsar DLC is largely what you'd expect: Frostbitten plains, deadly Hussar cavalry charges into machinegun fire, new factions to play as, and generally a lot of frozen bloody mud. It's surprisingly beefy for Battlefield DLC, too, weighing in at six new maps, all of them cold and snowy, but offering a broad range of combat styles. Whether you feel at most at home with vehicle-heavy open plains fighting (watch out for those new Russian bombers) or urban close combat, you'll probably find something to your taste.
Battlefield 4's Final Stand DLC is somewhat more fancifully bombastic. Centered around a raid on a Russian superweapon research facility, the luckiest of players will get to take a fully-functional hovertank for a joyride. So long as you can keep it in one piece, it can dominate a match, with it being fast and agile enough to scale just about any hill, strafes quickly out of the way of incoming fire, and can turn to protect its flanks in an instant. It's borderline cheating, to be honest, but at least it's a one-of-a-kind prototype.
In total, Final Stand adds four new maps, each of which comes in several size variants depending on playmode, and a bunch of additional future-tech toys and weaponry to use. Among the new guns are a man-portable railgun, and a remote-operated LMG drone for when you'd rather let poor, innocent robots do the fighting for you. There's a few new gadgets that'll help out too, like a target detecting gunsight that'll highlight moving enemies, and a decoy system that'll flood enemy mini-maps with false positives, for when you need to be extra subtle.
And now, if you'll allow me some wild speculation: Battlefield 1 + Battlefield 4, both offering Russian winter themed content the day before the next game's full unveiling? Could it be that EA are soon to announce Battlefield 14, set on the harsh battlefields of parallel earth's deadliest continent: Double Russia? Probably not, but this is either confirmation that the Pee Tape is real, or that Half-Life 3 is coming.
Seriously though, the Russian front seems like a plausible focus, given that it seems likely that Battlefield V is bringing us back to World War 2. You can grab the Battlefield 1 expansion here, and the Battlefield 4 goodies here.