A short while ago EA promised they would be releasing one large update for Battlefield 1 each month, starting with May. With the end of May just around the corner EA has now finally released the very first of these monthly updates, bringing with it a variety of balance and gameplay changes.

There is a ridiculous amount of vehicle and airplane changes to go over, so if you're just interested in those I would recommend visiting the official website. On the other hand, if you're interested in the highlights and some of the general changes, here they are:

VEHICLES

• Tweaked self-repair for A7V, FT17, St. Chamond, and Pierce Arrow.

• Reduced health gained per self-repair cycle from 320 to 200.

• Reduced time taken to complete a self-repair cycle from 8s to 5s.

- This makes these vehicles' self-repair equivalent to the self-repair of the MkV Landship.

• Doubled the health of Field Gun and Stationary AA. Made Field Gun and Stationary AA repairable. Field Gun and Stationary AA will now enter a disabled state at 50% health where they become unusable. To use the weapons again they must be repaired back to 100% with the repair tool.

• Increased time that the shell camera is active on the MkV mortar landship from 3.5s to 4.5s. This better suits the increased flight time of the new heavy shell.

• Changed how max range for AA is applied. Max range now varies depending on the pitch of the gun. Shells can travel a maximum horizontal distance of 300m, and a maximum vertical distance of 450m. This applies to both the stationary AA and the AA truck. Previously AA shells timed out at the same max distance from the gun regardless of direction, resulting in a roughly spherical volume covered by the gun. This means horizontal range was as large as the max height the shells could reach, and that at very high altitudes the AA could cover very little area, even if its range was technically large. The new AA shells will have slightly less horizontal range than before at low altitudes, but they will retain that range all the way to the flight ceiling. This will make AA much more effective against high altitude aircraft without making it able to reach distant, low flying ones as well.

• Extended Fighter and Attack Plane elevator flap scaling curves to better cover the entire speed range.

• Reduced cooldown of speed boost ability from 30s to 15s for both the Dogfighter and Airship Buster Attack Plane.

• Set up rear view on all planes: Albatros, Fokker, Spad, Sopwith, Rumpler, Halberstadt, Salmson, Bristol, Gotha, Caproni. To activate: Hold freelook while in third person to use rear view.

• Attack Plane Changes:

- Retuned attack plane elevator flap scaling curve. Attack Plane turning will now be much closer to that of Fighters, but still slightly worse.

• Improved Underused Attack Plane Variants:

- Increased damage of the Airship Buster variant's primary MG from 32 to 40. This puts its AA DPS on par with Fighter MGs.

- With its speed boost active, the new flap scaling curves will allow this variant to achieve a higher turn rate than the Fighter for a short time. The reduced cooldown on speed boost will allow this advantage to be used more often.

- Together these changes should make the Airship Buster more competitive with Fighters in its air to air role.

- Increased velocity of tank hunter 37mm from 222m/s to 267m/s and reduced drag from 0.005 to 0.003. These changes should make the 37mm slightly easier to land hits with, especially against moving or distant targets.

WEAPONS & GADGETS

• Changes to bayonet charge:

- Activated aiming speed modifier during prepare state as well as charge state. This means a player can rotate a maximum of 50 degrees during the prepare state. Also added an input modifier disabling strafe while charging.

- Adding subtle boost to third person footsteps when bayonet charging to increase threat awareness. Boosted volume of Enemy VO for Bayonet Charge when close to player.

- Slightly reduced maximum turn rate while charging.

- Removed damage reduction while in charge. Weapons will now hit charging players for normal damage.

• Fixed bug where Bipod Audio could persist when switching to secondary weapon.

• Tweaked criteria for cross-class medal to require single shot rifles.

• Added UI for grenade resupply.

• Reduced the occluder size for the scope glint from 0.25m to 0.15m to hide it behind walls better.

GAMEPLAY

• Added a camera shake advanced gameplay option to adjust the amount of camera shake caused by explosions, etc.

• Added missing spotting animation when spotting a downed allied soldier as a medic with the Medical Syringe.

• Automatically show low on ammo icons on friendly soldiers.

CONTROLS

• Players using controllers can now do custom button/stick mappings.

• Fixed “Select Operation” button not properly appearing when using the joypad or on console.

UI

• Moved ping widget to be below the kill log.

• Fixed an issue in the squad select screen where no squad would be automatically selected for player not part of a squad. The first squad in the list will now be selected by default. Also added support on PC for pressing the space bar to join/leave a squad.

• Fixed issue with the flag icons and world icons ghosting when going in and out of the customize screen from the deploy screen.

• Added ability to disable UGC 

NETCODE

• Implemented per region threshold settings for server side hit detection: 130ms for US + Europe, 200ms elsewhere.

• Fixed server side hit registration interpolation.

• Leading shot only necessary by the margin above the threshold, e.g. For US @ 150ms ping, you have to lead by 20ms.

• Fixed latency display for server which is also responsible for decision if to perform client or server side hit registration.

• Fixed input offsets for server side hit registration to match client side.

• Fixed wrong hit indicator display when dying.

The May Update is already live, so make sure to jump in and give the changes a try for yourself. Have fun!