A DICE animator at GDC has revealed during a talk that Battlefield 4 will be receiving a ballistic shield pickup. The team behind the game originally wanted to include a ballistic shield, but they opted to keep it out after their approach was impractical and wouldn't work with the game on last generation hardware.
With the release of the Battlefield 4 Dragon's Teeth expansion pack, DICE will be adding the shield as a two-handed pickup. According to senior animator Ryan Duffin, the shield was originally going to feature shooting from cover with a variety of handguns. The studio's reasoning for going two-handed was due to memory constraints and careful consideration of how the shield would work in combat.
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"We didn't have enough memory," Duffin said. "It added about a megabyte, but a megabyte on a 2006 console is a lot, so it didn't work out."
The ballistic shield's functionality apparently went through three changes until DICE settled on making it a moveable piece of cover, sans offensive fire via a handgun, and allowing a melee strike from up to one meter away from a target.
"There was a lot of resistance at first," Duffin continued. "But the more we assessed it, the more we realized it was a better feature."
Duffin and the DICE team may have had to add the shield in a means not originally intended, but Polygon says that the studio believes their end result was best for the game and its squad-based gameplay.
"We're confident that it will create a new dynamic for the game,” concluded Duffin.
Battlefield 4's Dragon Teeth expansion DLC is expected to release in the summer. Naval Strike will be released later this month.
