There’s been a lot of talk about tablets and other handhelds drawing gamers away from traditional platforms. Well, with Battlefield 4, it looks like EA DICE wants tablets to contribute to the traditional experience. As Polygon reports, Battlefield 4 will let you use a tablet as a "second screen" to fiddle with the game map, change your equipment loadout, or find a new server.
Here’s a demonstration of the functionality by Jesper Nielsen and Oskar Gabrielson, the EA DICE folks in charge of the Battlelog interface:
I kind of like the concept. A lot of us have a tablet sitting idle during our gaming sessions, so making use of the extra screen to speed up in-game actions make plenty of sense.
The demo video shows the console version of the game, so I’m not sure if the "second screen" feature will work with the PC version. I hope it will. Of course, with a PC, you hardly need a tablet to provide extra screen real estate—there’s always the option of plugging in an extra monitor… or five. It would be nice if more games let you use auxiliary displays as more than mere extensions of the main viewport.
Update: The video has been pulled from YouTube, apparently because of a "copyright claim by EA." I guess the company wasn’t quite ready to show the second-screen feature in action.
Update 2: EA has posted an official version of the video.