I've been having fun with it, but it certainly is a Beta. I certainly hope they correct or change some things before it comes out, namely the following:

1) Automatically go to fullscreen. Also, my computer crashes whenever I try to press Alt+Enter. I've informed them of that

2) During the first segment of the metro level, parts of the ground sink your character down and it makes it look like your camera is bobbing up and down very quickly. Also, a number of players have found ways to hide in the ground.

3) Please make Ctrl toggle crouch. Please. For the love of god. Please. Not X. Never X. X should never toggle anything, but especially NOT crouch.

I really like the look of the game, I really like how the weapons handle, and I've enjoyed what I've played. But man, this really is a Beta. If this game was 4 months out from being shipped, I wouldn't be worried. But it's about three weeks away, and it has quite a few bugs in it. Also the interface is terrible. Also, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE get rid of that crappy website lobby for the PC. It's awful. It's just awful. NO ONE wants to use a goddamn browser window to search for servers. No one. Only troglodytes from the far side of mars who do everything backwards and actually enjoy pain would want to use a goddamn browser window. This feels like something a marketer in a suit, who has never ever played a video game in his life, has persuaded DICE to go with - "Hey fellas, if we make them visit our crappy site for servers and stats, we can force them to see more advertisements and extrapolate on our market encapsulated bi-lateralindex point derivative revenue!" It's just the worst. No game designer with their head on straight would ever decide to make people visit a goddamn website to log in to a multiplayer server, if they could help it. What the hell was wrong with the BFBC2 system!?! That was great! You could customize your classes, look up friends, log into servers, look up stats - for what hellish, ghoulish reason would you throw away that PERFECTLY GOOD SYSTEM and go with this pile of garbage, DICE? Why? WHY!

I have enough respect for DICE to believe that it wasn't their decision to go with this crappy webpage login crap. I firmly believe a marketer, with his hair slicked back with a thousand litres of gel, with his armani suit and his ray-ban sunglasses and his faux-french accent was responsible for this travesty.

Yep, also thinking about that. The next few days and the response from DICE regarding issues will dictate if I keep the Origin pre-order.

I played it on 360, and even if I didn't have problems connecting and all that, the game just seems boring. Yeah, it IS like only 24 players and not 64, but the core gameplay just isn't exciting at all. Maybe it's time I call the modern shooter thing off for good. This just ain't for me anymore.

@ajamafalous: That's strange cuz I totally had either grenade or knife mapped to my thumb button on my mouse...

Edit: Yep, was grenade, had middle mouse button for the knife.

That is pretty fucking astonishing.

@N7 said:

Killzone 3 had the same problems. Everyone said, haha, stop being an idiot. It's a beta. Guerilla knows how to make a game.

Then it came out.

Many people were wrong that day.

I think that a lot of people are too forgiving when someone calls a game a beta; maybe they're confusing beta with alpha? The software engineering definition of beta is software that's feature-complete and is in the final stages of testing; basically it's the last step before release or a release candidate. A beta should just work for the most part; if you have major bugs left by the time a piece of software leaves the alpha stage, then that's a pretty bad sign. If a game is broken in beta or just isn't fun then don't expect it to get much better when it actually releases.

This is a little bit tangential, but I have to ask: who dared accuse Guerrilla of knowing how to make a game?

@rebgav said:

I, for one, am shocked to the core that a DICE game isn't polished to perfection while running a three-platform beta. It's almost as if the game isn't ready yet.

You know what, it probably won't be airtight on day one either. If you're thinking about canceling pre-orders over a beta you should probably walk away and come back to the game a month after launch, at which point it will probably be as good as it's going to get.

This game is nowhere near as polished as most people were expecting from all of the hype leading up to it. It is a beta yes, but from my experiences with betas running this close to release, not much is going to change at launch. Just like rebgav said, it's gonna be a month minimum before all of this stuff is worked out. Hell look at Killzone 3 it's still getting patched constantly and it's been out since February. While Killzone 3 looked beautiful even in beta, BF3 looks very lackluster and hasn't come anywhere near to meeting my expectations as of yet. I can't see them making it look a whole lot better this close to release. Starting to think that no matter how many patches and fixes come out if the game isn't solid by launch you can't polish a turd.

Vote with your dollar so they put it on steam?

@SquadBroken said:

Wow, I did not expect this at all. This is a poor experience from the start. The battlelog web interface is terrible. You have to install all sorts of plugins and then wonder if your game is ready to start or not. The it launches in a window and gives you a tip - press alt + enter to go full screen. Why not just bloody launch in full screen.. Then it also switches back to a window when loading between maps.

You can make it go full screen straight away, enable fullscreen in options. Sorry if this has been said before, just putting in my 2cents

@MrRoboto: wat. I play on a 9800GTX+ on low and still get 60fps and the game looks on par with BFBC2 on high with no AA...

@DonPixel said:

@scarace360 said:

im thinking really hard about buying this game after my horrible experience with origin. First it denies me the right to download the game which is crazy. I reboot it and it says ok fine you can download it then it stops mid way and says on the other hand you cant download it and stops my download says i cant download it and dosent restart it for 3 hours. I dont know EA you kinda have awesome games and shitty service.

Dude wait until you have to install the Battlelog plug in and then the Nvidia "beta" driver too se what horrible means.. quoting Jim Sterling: "So this is Origin. It's like my computer has cancer, and the tumor has a massive "EA" logo tattooed on it."

Battle log plug ins weren't that bad and i already had the beta drivers.

@DonPixel said:

@scarace360 said:

im thinking really hard about buying this game after my horrible experience with origin. First it denies me the right to download the game which is crazy. I reboot it and it says ok fine you can download it then it stops mid way and says on the other hand you cant download it and stops my download says i cant download it and dosent restart it for 3 hours. I dont know EA you kinda have awesome games and shitty service.

Dude wait until you have to install the Battlelog plug in and then the Nvidia "beta" driver too se what horrible means.. quoting Jim Sterling: "So this is Origin. It's like my computer has cancer, and the tumor has a massive "EA" logo tattooed on it."

Battle log plug ins weren't that bad and i already had the beta drivers.

@MrCandleguy said:

@SquadBroken said:

Wow, I did not expect this at all. This is a poor experience from the start. The battlelog web interface is terrible. You have to install all sorts of plugins and then wonder if your game is ready to start or not. The it launches in a window and gives you a tip - press alt + enter to go full screen. Why not just bloody launch in full screen.. Then it also switches back to a window when loading between maps.

You can make it go full screen straight away, enable fullscreen in options. Sorry if this has been said before, just putting in my 2cents

Nice, seems more like a proper game now. Enjoying it more the more I play it but still things annoying me like the weapon cycling feeling really clunky, defib seems not to work if you're standing up or even crouching sometimes. I think there is definitely a steeper curve to getting into this game than BFBC2.

Finding more bugs to post on the BF3 forum like not being able to access the key bindings menu, and keys randomly not working. Cannot get used to Battlelog at all though, the stats info is badly presented and unclear. Also I can't shake the feeling that Battlelog is trying to be Facebook for BF.

Best thing about the new game though? The vaulting animation - I could happily jump over walls all day lol

Yeah, to be honest, playing the BF3 beta somewhat deflated my excitement.

It's a fun game, for sure, but I won't be sprinting to the stores on day one. Too many other good games need my attention.

@DonPixel said:

@scarace360 said:

@DonPixel said:

@scarace360 said:

im thinking really hard about buying this game after my horrible experience with origin. First it denies me the right to download the game which is crazy. I reboot it and it says ok fine you can download it then it stops mid way and says on the other hand you cant download it and stops my download says i cant download it and dosent restart it for 3 hours. I dont know EA you kinda have awesome games and shitty service.

Dude wait until you have to install the Battlelog plug in and then the Nvidia "beta" driver too se what horrible means.. quoting Jim Sterling: "So this is Origin. It's like my computer has cancer, and the tumor has a massive "EA" logo tattooed on it."

Battle log plug ins weren't that bad and i already had the beta drivers.

The drivers messed a lot with my PC not quite sure why.. but that's good if you ain't having problems.

thought i would have to go through driver hell but wasn't that bad.

Did you read the part where it's a beta? Nowadays people seem to assume a beta is just a demo rather than a test for the full game.

@ajamafalous: I use a Logitech G9

Edit: The G9x replaced it. (not sure if ya know)

It's a great mouse, normally $100 but I've seen it on sale at NewEgg as low as $50.

Still, kinda odd that 1 mouse would work with binding but another wouldn't.

@Dangerlove: typically I'd post a ditto here, but having heard the code for this particular beta is a couple weeks old already, the game hasn't gone gold and they're really using it to stress test their server machines, I'm inclined to say, no, this one is really more of a beta.

A lot of people were really disappointed by the beta and theres thing big "YO DOOD ITS A BETA!" thing being slung around.

At least Jeff said in the Quicklook that it's month old code. Either way theres the issue that:

this is pretty representative of how the final product will play

if it's not then it was a pretty bad idea to release this OH MY GOD BETA BETA BETA as the first thing people all over the world will see.

People seem to be giving OP some flak, but I agree with him. You don't have to buy every game on the first day. I played this beta for a while last night, was not satisfied, and cancelled my pre order. In addition to the reasons he listed, the environments are actually less destructible than they were in BC2 (the small term destruction, like knifing apart trees or using melee to destroy doors, is all but gone from the game) and the leveling system is the same restrictive system used in BC2. I disliked it then, but at least I went through all of it eventually and now have access to everything I want in that game. I don't want to have to spend 3 hours with the game before I can unlock a simple sight for my gun, just because their leveling system decided that I wanted some other useless add-ons first. And like OP said, the Metro map is quite linear compared to a normal Battlefield map. Yes, it starts out and ends in fairly open areas with plenty of places to take cover, but once it proceeds into the metro tunnels I just lose all interest. I'm not trying to slam this game and say that it's awful, and I know that the build people are playing online now is probably a few weeks old, but some of these are fundamental design issues that can't be fixed in a few weeks. All I'm saying is, don't give him too much flak. He's justified in taking a few weeks to see how things play out before dropping 60 bucks

Why would anybody pre-order anything? Handing over money without any inclination of quality is bizarre enough but expecting your local Best Buy to not have enough of a blockbuster title is even more bizarre. Has this ever happened and was it then too much effort to go to the nearest competitor?

I wish people would stop saying, "it's a beta!"

In software, a Beta is close to being ready to go and will have some bugs, unexpected things they didn't think of or see. But that is besides the point, you cannot put out something that frustrates you before you get to the main game. You can't put out something that makes you product seem unfinished, even if it is. Because, really? You playing the game right now and what you see, has no impact on what they do to it when it releases. Hell, I am pretty sure the gold copy will be send off to press in a week if it hasn't already.

Those of you saying, "it's a beta!" are truly retarded. Sorry, but I have to say it. The guys have discussed this on the bombcast many times. It is a glorified demo. Beta's take place months before. See Gears or Starcraft or the Old Republic. Betas do not take place a few weeks before. They use the tag Beta to make you feel like you are getting a rare peek at the game, but everyone is playing it. Or that you are part of helping the development process. You are not. You are playing a demo that is less polished than a demo would be.

I am a Battlefield "veteran" from the good old days, but I kind of like it alot. Getting into servers was always kind of atrocious in previous Battlefield games, but the Battlelog is a fantastic solution. It's snappy, fast, has good filters, a clean interface and a great quickplay feature. The load times for maps have also been dramatically reduced.

• People don't revive you because most of them have not even unlocked defibs yet + they are new
• People don't spot because they are new.

The game looks fantastic even on medium/high settings, and the gunplay is satisfying. The pistols in particular feel very good (which is extremely rare for me). I found the common complaint about low health/high bullet damage to be nonsense, as well.

I wish people would stop saying, "it's a beta!"

In software, a Beta is close to being ready to go and will have some bugs, unexpected things they didn't think of or see. But that is besides the point, you cannot put out something that frustrates you before you get to the main game. You can't put out something that makes you product seem unfinished, even if it is. Because, really? You playing the game right now and what you see, has no impact on what they do to it when it releases. Hell, I am pretty sure the gold copy will be send off to press in a week if it hasn't already.

Those of you saying, "it's a beta!" are truly retarded. Sorry, but I have to say it. The guys have discussed this on the bombcast many times. It is a glorified demo. Beta's take place months before. See Gears or Starcraft or the Old Republic. Betas do not take place a few weeks before. They use the tag Beta to make you feel like you are getting a rare peek at the game, but everyone is playing it. Or that you are part of helping the development process. You are not. You are playing a demo that is less polished than a demo would be.

A lot of people were really disappointed by the beta and theres thing big "YO DOOD ITS A BETA!" thing being slung around.

At least Jeff said in the Quicklook that it's month old code. Either way theres the issue that:

this is pretty representative of how the final product will play

if it's not then it was a pretty bad idea to release this OH MY GOD BETA BETA BETA as the first thing people all over the world will see.

Also is there some sort of UAV or something? I just don't seem to be able to get a grasp on this. I was a pretty good BC2 player and could literally carry a random pub team to victory MOST of the time. Playing this BEEETA I can't get a grasp on the situation. I am constantly getting killed in a second from out of nowhere. I was just playing on the attacking team and we couldn't even get past the first stage. Almost everyone on the other team was a sniper and I couldn't for the life of me make anyone out, before just dying instantly out of nowhere.

I know spotting but is that it? Is it just people playing this for the past 72 hours straight or something? I honestly couldn't find a way to advance to any MCOM because I'd just die from sniper rifle instantly.

My main worry is that I'm primarily a FPS type of person. I like CoD games and loved Bad Company 2. I can pick up any FPS and do well on average. In this Beta I just feel so lost like I'm playing awful but it's just a complete lack of everything "wheres that shot coming from, where was that guy, how did he snipe me across the map with a pistol?"

@SquadBroken said:

@Humanity you can see snipers quite easily from the glint of their scopes, once you recognise it you wil see it often. If you are a sniper you can avoid this by running round with your pistol out and just switching to sniper rifle to make the shot

I'm playing on the 360 and can't really see sniper scope glints at all. I see the other scopes like the red dot from a mile away. Either way I think they need to do something to the snipers to make them act more like sniper rifles. I forgot what they did in Bad Company 2 but basically it took quite a bit of skill to actually kill someone thats sprinting. No sniper was a one hit kill except for the head and you had to lead targets. In this demo, because thats what it is, I'll be sprinting full speed and die from one shot. Thats some crazy marksmanship if those are headshots.

If you go to the website of the creators of Battlelog http://www.esn.me you will see that they push a ' web centric gaming experience' . They are re-defining or relabeling Battlefield towards, most likely, a service. If EA came out-right and started selling weapons in BF3, people would immediately have negative thoughts and the brand would degrade. So they slowly introduce things like grinding for attachments on each weapon. It's a tedious operation, to unlock something that is 'free' but is being kept away from you. At some point in the future you will most likely submit and consider, and be more accepting of, paying for items rather than grinding. One may also consider proposed options of subscriptions in order to 'improve' gameplay; where in reality they just want to charge for something that was previously free. It's all about monetizing all aspects of entertainment. It's the sneaky, behind the back, two-faced act they push that I dislike the most.

"Check back soon, Soldier!" yeeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaaaa. They laugh at you. You are going to throw down $60 for BF3. But that $60 does not mean you can access the game whenever you want, like offline... no lan support. In the future, the apologists will say "Well you played BC2/BF3 when they didn't have LAN support nor mod tools, so STFU". If you say something about LAN support today apologists will say "No one plays on LAN, no one makes mods". They will always lick ass, with poo inside.. that's the way they roll. That $60 is for permission to use their 'service'... their facebook-ish service.

In order to solidify their grasp on Battlefield as a service, they must make you dependent on their 'service'. In such a plan there is no room for mod-tools or anything that would allow players an 'exit' from the clutches of their service.

At the end of the day it's the people who make the fun in Battlefield games. If you jump into a 64-player server by yourself, I'd like to see you have fun playing the game. You won't. EA are charging for 'online meet-ups' , where before it was free.

@SquadBroken said:

@MrCandleguy said:

@SquadBroken said:

Wow, I did not expect this at all. This is a poor experience from the start. The battlelog web interface is terrible. You have to install all sorts of plugins and then wonder if your game is ready to start or not. The it launches in a window and gives you a tip - press alt + enter to go full screen. Why not just bloody launch in full screen.. Then it also switches back to a window when loading between maps.

You can make it go full screen straight away, enable fullscreen in options. Sorry if this has been said before, just putting in my 2cents

Nice, seems more like a proper game now. Enjoying it more the more I play it but still things annoying me like the weapon cycling feeling really clunky, defib seems not to work if you're standing up or even crouching sometimes. I think there is definitely a steeper curve to getting into this game than BFBC2.

Finding more bugs to post on the BF3 forum like not being able to access the key bindings menu, and keys randomly not working. Cannot get used to Battlelog at all though, the stats info is badly presented and unclear. Also I can't shake the feeling that Battlelog is trying to be Facebook for BF.

Best thing about the new game though? The vaulting animation - I could happily jump over walls all day lol

Yea, Battlelog is terrible, bugs are everywhere, though its a 'beta' so i'll let that slide. And yes, vaulting is great. THOUGH you can't bind knife to mouse wheel click, that's a bitch. Controller support is nice too.

Before anyone gets PC elitlest on me about controller support, its a nice addition for people who want to chill on the couch and not hunched over a KB+M. PC is about OPTIONS people, not about damn elitlest that you all seem to think.

@Evilmetal said:

It's all about monetizing all aspects of entertainment.

That would be the most valid claim in your whole post, and I'd like to follow it by saying that EA is a business and BF3 is a product that they want to profit from, so it stands to reason that they will try to "monetize" as much of the experience while they can (without jeopardizing their consumer base, mind you).

Preorders... All my friends are preordering this game (at least 50). MW3 just went down the toilet in my opinion. It is a beta. And, awesome :D

I still have faith, and I know its a beta. My problem with the game is stuff that will not be fixed. Like that horrible map, its plan awful.

@Afroman269 said:

@AlexW00d: My guess is that this thing must just be an old build but to keep treating this like some legitimate beta is ridiculous. The game is a month away, if this thing came out 4 months ago then the whole beta argument would be more plausible, but ya, I bet the final product will be just fine. This game is too big to be fucked out of the gate.

I believe they've said as much, that this is based on several weeks old code, since they had to get the code certified for the consoles before the beta. I think Jeff and Ryan talked about that in the quick look.

If this beta was in June, July or even August people would have more faith, but when a game is so close to being released and has a ton of problems it's hard to not feel worried. Sure it can be an older build but I don't see a lot of these issues being resolved for release without a day one patch or first month patch.

@Afroman269 said:

@Jimi said:

Did you read the part where it's a beta? Nowadays people seem to assume a beta is just a demo rather than a test for the full game.

Maybe because most of the betas that have been released so far are actually mislabeled demos. What the fuck is this thing supposed to achieve when the game is a month from release? Other than stress testing the servers.

Nothing. It exists purely to test the netcode. There's no other reason to run a beta except to simulate a launched product on the web. Features being incomplete, maps incomplete, remapping incomplete... none of that matters.

If they want to get feed back for user experience they run focus tests which are tightly controlled and monitored so they can collect real useful data rather than forum posts about how upset some one is the beta didn't work like they wanted.

This is a beta. All they care about are real world scenarios like hardware and connectivity. That's it. Anything more would be a nightmare to attempt.

oh my god. just found out that all squad management has to be done through battlelog. astonishing

It'll be broken for a long time after release as BC2 did but ain't gonna cancel my preorder, because this game is teh win.

I've beta tested games that have turned me off from buying the finished product. You play a beta right up until the devs say its "gold", and the testers say "WTF? It's not nearly done yet". "Bah, who cares! We're Big Game Developer! We'll release it anyway!" and then the game falls flat from bugs and lack of polish. No, I'm with the OP on this. If we're this close to launch, and you think its a buggy disaster, then skip it and buy MW3 :)

Battlelog is just about the worst thing ever. It adds another layer of needless complexity, not to mention it prevents you from changing your settings until you're ALIVE, IN GAME!

@President_Barackbar said:

Battlelog is just about the worst thing ever. It adds another layer of needless complexity, not to mention it prevents you from changing your settings until you're ALIVE, IN GAME!

Agree about the settings. Cannot fathom why we can't change shit up from spawnscreen.

You couldn't be more wrong about Battlelog though. Everything I could ever want to know is right there at my fingertips. It's fast and reactive. It's always up-to-date. I get all my news there. The forums are right there. In-depth-stats with BF history logs. They'll add all Battlefield games to the Battlelog too, it seems like - so if I feel like a blast from the past, it will be right there. I can sync up friendslists across platforms and... and... and...

It's extremely well done. We just need more live servers and an option to queue for server slots, which is there (I was in a queue once or twice), but it usually doesn't work yet. Guess that's somehting that's serverside enabled. Battlelog is everything a BF fan wants and there's so much more good to come for it as a platform. It's the bloody glorious future of BF franchise gaming.

Well at least the PC is way better than on the Xbox man that game plays as shitty as it looks. But like Jeff said we are getting an older build and also they are not done making the game which is kind of scary when its a month away.

The map funnels people into tight spaces, which is good for stress tests etc