Part 22: Operation Wavebreaker and Carrier Assault

Operation Wavebreaker and Carrier Assault Game Mode

This video is why I held off on closing the thread for a bit. I really wanted to play and show off Carrier Assault, a game mode that came to Battlefield 4 a couple weeks ago and was pitched as a re-imagining of Titan Mode from Battlefield 2142. In the futuristic 2142 you had to capture flags to bring the shields of the enemy Titan down low enough that you could use certain vehicles to land on the deck of the Titan and then go complete objectives to bring down the Titan. If you won you got a Titanfall (love the word titan today) style escape sequence where you had to get out of the ship before it blew up. Battlefield 4 is constrained on a couple sides when trying to re-create this. For one, Titans flew in 2142, or at least hovered when DICE realized that moving them made the servers have conniption fits. Second: you launched up into the thing using vehicles or drop pods or had someone fly you there. Those methods don't exist in BF4, so instead you get paradrops directly on to the carrier. These feel like they break the game because an entire team can spawn on your carrier and overwhelm it in seconds if you aren't all playing tough defense at that point. Finally; the larger player size of a BF4 server vs. a 2142 server is such that you don't have to make a decision between capturing points on the mainland and assaulting the carrier, you have enough to do both or brute force just one. Restricting the game mode to 32-48 total players would have gone a long way in making it a more viable option.


Here's Wavebreaker at the start of a round. All the Naval Strike maps are island chains of some nature, though none are simple Paracel Storm ripoffs. Generally they feature a center island with smaller islands around it containing points while a center point sits at the middle of the biggest island. We see Wavebreaker's central point late in the video, it's a submarine pen where you can knock the sub down onto unsuspecting players. Pretty fun area, actually. Worth mentioning that the carriers aren't off limits to the enemy team in Carrier Assault ever. If someone from the other team got dropped off on the deck of the carrier they could stay there and steal vehicles from you all day if they wanted to, or an enemy boat could sit behind where your boats spawn and just destroy them before they could do anything. Obliteration is similar in that you can do much the same on several maps. This was a really dumb decision and the carrier should have a spawn protection area around it until it can be invaded.

You can see on the left that there is a new status board. It displays the health of the ships and who has which points. Not a huge difference from conquest.


The red boxes here are around the carriers. The yellow line indicates the path you can take through the interior of the island to get from D to E to F. Though it doesn't spawn vehicles, E is a great point to have so you can assault two other points if you have the people for it


Once you've breached the enemy carrier you can paradrop in and attempt to take the two positions in the ship. The first point is pretty easy, the second point is generally more difficult for both sides.


Here I've highlighted the paradrop point and the position of the MComm you need to blow up. It is worth noting that the run to the point is still pretty long and helicopters and other players can pick you off pretty easily on the deck, so be mindful of the fact you are in hostile territory. If you clear the first objective you don't have to drop back down, you can simply spawn inside the cargo bay that had the old MComm, which is great for the attackers, but the defenders are going to be stuck trying to push a pretty strong team out of your basement.

Also worth noting are the TF2 style doors that open if you get near them and prevent the enemy from getting into your spawn area. Nice in theory, but in practice the doors end up being a death trap for the defenders rather than something that lets them survive. This alone makes it difficult to turn a carrier assault game around.