Hello, folks! H. Ack Shillintop here, bringing you the best PR disguised as news on the net! Today we have some announcements from the good folk from DICE, the developers behind the best infantry and vehicles FPS "Battlefield", who are hard at work on making the fourth instalment as close to Call of D... er, as good as possible. The fair masters have announced, in a pair of blog posts, which maps and game modes we will be seeing in the game.

First off, the maps! The list is as follows:

- Siege of Shanghai

- Paracel Storm

- Zavod 311

- Lancang Dam

- Flood Zone

- Rogue Transmission

- Hainan Resort

- Dawnbreaker

- Operation Locker

- Golmud Railway

We're tired of the first two and basically know next to nothing of the others (except for the fact that Flood Zone is the big Levolution Map where you flood a city and Golmund is probably an ugly, End Game-like forested map). Zavod 311, as stated in post, will be an abandoned Russian tank building plant that nature all but reclaimed. Fun fact: "Ural Vagon Zavod" literally means "Ural Train Car Manufacturing Plant" and according to Wiki, is the biggest main battle tank producer in the world, cranking out T-90s among other things (į.e. Train cars)

I'm tired of saying that I'm already bored of Shanghai and Paracel, and I'm damn sure that one of the others is the extremely linear mountain prison map that you can see on YouTube. Battlefield without vehicles is what we wanted, right?

Hell yeah, at least looking at the gamut of game modes promised.

The game modes.

Conquest is good old Battlefield, fighting for the flags with footsloggers, tanks, jets and all other good stuff. Designed for 64 players on PC, significantly less on the peasant machines, it's the mode that you play if your mom didn't drop you down the stairs at birth.

Domination – which the blog claims comes from the worst Battlefield 3 add-on, Close Quarters – is like conquest, only probably without vehicles, since it's "designed" for 20 people. You catch flags faster, but bleed tickets slower, thus making kills more worthwhile. It probably has smaller maps, thus sucks.

Obliteration (32 random assholes) has you fighting for a randomly spawned bomb that you try to carry to the enemy objective so you can blow it up (the enemy trying to do the same in reverse). We already saw some of that action in the incessant trailers with Parasol. Already looks like it's some hack attempt to say "out CTF is different, u gyz!"

Diffuse is Battlefield: Counter Strike. Each player (in 5 vs. 5) teams is given one life (one revive?) and their task is to either blow an MCOM or something (maps already smell like they have "de" at the beginning) or kill the other team. This is so un-Battlefield, I don't even.

Team Deathmatch is built around 20 players and if you don't know what is it about, you probably started playing games yesterday (hint: it's about two teams trying to kill each other a set amount of times to win).

Rush (32 players) returns, the horrible choke point camping grenade spamming monster that it is. Probably the least fun of the Battlefield 3 play modes, it pits you either as the Attacking team with limited respawns or unlimited lives Defenders team that has to defend MCOMM stations from the attackers. As two of those are destroyed, the map shifts. The game ends either as one team runs out of respawns or all MCOMM are blown to bits. Nobody is left satisfied as this mode sucks.

Squad Deathmatch (20 players) has four squads gunning for the required amount of kills. Say what you want about competitiveness, but this still isn't Battlefield and sounds highly boring.

I also like how the much touted commander mode (that works on tablets, no less) is optional to only three modes (Conquest, Obliteration, Rush) and is totally forgotten in the others – the ones that probably won't have you driving tanks and navigating big battlefields, the kind of think you'd expect from bloody Battlefield.

This seems like a turd sandwich, but hopefully the beta will prove that you needn't ever leave the Conquest mode.