Community Disappointment Environment

The developers behind Battlefield 4, DICE, have put out this video titled Create Your Own Battlefield 4 Map

Watch it and if you haven’t had your coffee yet this morning you might miss that at no point do they mention players getting access to a map editor. Okay, well, the video description links to a blog post maybe they’ll mention it there:

Ok. This is something we’ve never done before. There’s a piece of content coming in 2015 that we’re really excited about. We will build a Battlefield 4 map together with you — the community. Together with our development team, you will get to shape a playable map based on your input and expertise on what makes a fun multiplayer level. This map will then be tested and tweaked in the CTE (Community Test Environment), available for Battlefield 4 Premium members.

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As part of this CTE testing you will be providing feedback* on the map, and creating the final thing together with us. During this process we’ll be sharing behind-the-scenes details of what the development process for making a multiplayer map looks like.

As a thank you to the Battlefield community for sticking to your Battlefield 4 guns and giving excellent feedback to improve the game, we want to show our appreciation by releasing the “Community Map” on all platforms.

All that players get to do is provide feedback on the map that DICE designs.

While it would be a huge hurdle at this point for DICE to shoe-horn a public map editor into the game along with a method for players to get access to player-created levels, and it is difficult to summarize a DICE-developed-with-community-feedback-map into a video title, Create Your Own Battlefield 4 Map isn’t accurate. No players watching that video at home will have access to the tools to do so. Disappointing.