Battlefield 5 Gets Its First Post-Release TTK Changes

At the end of November, DICE announced its intentions to adjust Battlefield 5‘s Time to Kill (TTK) values in response to what the company perceived as players dying “too quickly” on the battlefield. While this announcement was met with resistance by a vocal portion of the player base, DICE has continued forward with its plans, and the game’s first post-release TTK changes arrive today.

TTK values are a defining characteristic of all first-person shooters, determining the speed of a game’s action and establishing how skilled a player needs to be in order to compete. Changes to TTK can have a major impact on gameplay, and DICE has made its reasons for making these alterations in Battlefield 5 very clear:

Although not extremely vocal within our deeply engaged community, we see from our game data that the wider player base is dying too fast leading to faster churn – meaning players may be getting frustrated with dying too fast that they choose not to log back in and learn how to become more proficient at Battlefield 5.

This first set of changes focuses on decreasing the amount of damage weapons do when they hit body parts aside from an opponent’s head. For example, players using assault rifles, machine guns, and semi-automatic rifles will notice that body shots are dealing less damage overall.

In general, players should expect a kill from one of the changed weapon to take one additional bullet, and DICE has provided the following chart that outlines the new weapon damage multipliers. The numbers in red indicate the damage multipliers prior to today’s update.

Furthermore, the distance between players has always had an impact on how many bullets are required to kill an opponent in Battlefield 5. However, today’s update decreases the distance at which this phenomenon starts to take effect. That is, a weapon that may have been able to kill an opponent with four bullets within 50 meters will now need to be within 28 meters to do the same.

DICE has specified these Bullets to Kill alterations in today’s TTK change list.

As stated, many players were initially opposed to DICE’s intentions to alter TTK values, and it may take some time for the dust to settle on today’s shake-up. Fortunately, the company has implemented a new playlist called “Conquest Core” that keeps the old TTK values in tact — the “first step toward a traditional Battlefield ‘Hardcore’ experience.”