This blog will focus mainly on the multiplayer aspect of Battlefield 3 because...well lets face it. That's the game. I would however like to start with the single player. I have played probably about 2 and a half hours of this so far. After reading reviews and comments on forums about the games campaign I expected to hate it. But I have to say it is surprisingly fun. I have noticed a few scripting errors here and there but over all I am impressed with the campaign. If there is one thing to mention it would be that it seems like a massive Black Ops rip off even down to how the story is scripted (flash backs from an interrogation...come on).

Anyway on to the real subject of this blog. Battlefield 3 multiplayer. Lets face it, the game has issues. Issues that will hopefully be fixed through patches but at the minute these problems are annoying the fuck out of me. Firstly. Connection problems. Quite often I will play for an hour or so. Going amazingly on a server, owning fools (okay well I will be doing okay) and suddenly be pushed back to the battlelog having lost connection to the server. This is then raising my disconnects and is not really recording the match. This is my main annoyance with the game actually. This seems like a serious problem to me and definitely needs to be fixed soon. Another annoyance is Origin. Oh My Fucking Gawd I hate Origin. Its not needed. It doesn't work and it is clunky as fuck. I am really glad that as soon as you launch the game that is the last moment it is actually used. I know its EA's shot at a steam like service but seriously do it better.

Well they are my only annoyances with the game (at the minute) I actually love every other aspect of battlefield 3. I am glad that Dice didn't try to imitate Call of Duty in playing style and stuck with the slower paced large battles with vehicles. I surprisingly love the fact that battlelog is your server browser too. It allows me to check twitter or giantbomb while I wait for the game to load up. I actually hope more games take this on.

Overall I love battlefield 3 and I can actually see this becoming my prominent multiplayer experience for the next year or so...it doesn't help that the game looks fucking fantastic (seriously is the best looking game I have ever seen).

This blog will focus mainly on the multiplayer aspect of Battlefield 3 because...well lets face it. That's the game. I would however like to start with the single player. I have played probably about 2 and a half hours of this so far. After reading reviews and comments on forums about the games campaign I expected to hate it. But I have to say it is surprisingly fun. I have noticed a few scripting errors here and there but over all I am impressed with the campaign. If there is one thing to mention it would be that it seems like a massive Black Ops rip off even down to how the story is scripted (flash backs from an interrogation...come on).

Anyway on to the real subject of this blog. Battlefield 3 multiplayer. Lets face it, the game has issues. Issues that will hopefully be fixed through patches but at the minute these problems are annoying the fuck out of me. Firstly. Connection problems. Quite often I will play for an hour or so. Going amazingly on a server, owning fools (okay well I will be doing okay) and suddenly be pushed back to the battlelog having lost connection to the server. This is then raising my disconnects and is not really recording the match. This is my main annoyance with the game actually. This seems like a serious problem to me and definitely needs to be fixed soon. Another annoyance is Origin. Oh My Fucking Gawd I hate Origin. Its not needed. It doesn't work and it is clunky as fuck. I am really glad that as soon as you launch the game that is the last moment it is actually used. I know its EA's shot at a steam like service but seriously do it better.

Well they are my only annoyances with the game (at the minute) I actually love every other aspect of battlefield 3. I am glad that Dice didn't try to imitate Call of Duty in playing style and stuck with the slower paced large battles with vehicles. I surprisingly love the fact that battlelog is your server browser too. It allows me to check twitter or giantbomb while I wait for the game to load up. I actually hope more games take this on.

Overall I love battlefield 3 and I can actually see this becoming my prominent multiplayer experience for the next year or so...it doesn't help that the game looks fucking fantastic (seriously is the best looking game I have ever seen).

@nutta27 said:

Another annoyance is Origin. Oh My Fucking Gawd I hate Origin. Its not needed. It doesn't work and it is clunky as fuck. I am really glad that as soon as you launch the game that is the last moment it is actually used. I know its EA's shot at a steam like service but seriously do it better.

I think DICE's best accomplishment is getting around Origin. They're like "What? We can't use Steam? Why? OK, lets see this Origin thing. Wow. This will ruin our game. How do we get around this? Launch from Browser? Done."

@nutta27 said:

If there is one thing to mention it would be that it seems like a massive Black Ops rip off even down to how the story is scripted (flash backs from an interrogation...come on).

• Alpha Protocol did this as well. It should also be noted that BLOPS borrowed this from a tried movie trope as well. The interrogation narrative is nothing new; BLOPS didn't invent it.

This seems like a serious problem to me and definitely needs to be fixed soon. Another annoyance is Origin. Oh My Fucking Gawd I hate Origin. Its not needed. It doesn't work and it is clunky as fuck. I am really glad that as soon as you launch the game that is the last moment it is actually used.

• You could play the game on a console; I've experienced very few difficulties with my connection, beyond the normal issues, and there's no need to mess around with Origin. Oh, and I used Origin with the beta of the game and found it to be serviceable - you're not going to find many people who will say that they prefer it to Steam, but this is the way EA has decided that you will access their service on PC.

Overall I love battlefield 3 and I can actually see this becoming my prominent multiplayer experience for the next year or so

• Agreed, but substitute "best" for "prominent."

I like it a lot but to me it seems more like Bad Company 3 or even 2.5 rather than Battlefield 3. I started playing the game on conquest since it's Battlefield 3 and all and honestly did not enjoy myself too much. Maybe a large part of it is that I'm on a console so 12 v 12 on conquest isn't going to be as good as 32 v 32. Then I tried out Rush and I was loving the game again. I loved Bad Company 2 and fell in love with Rush mode. in BF3 Rush is just as good if not even better - I especially love that one map where you jump off that huge cliff and skydive to the next set of mcoms.

In short I've played the game over the weekend for about 5hrs. I had a TON of problems trying to get into a game with just 1 other friend in my squad (either he or I disconnected) but once we got in it was smooth sailing. The interface seems like a huge clusterfuck at times and you have to go through a bunch of menus to get to different pages and stats but oh well. I don't know if I'd call this Battlefield 3 per-se but it doesn't matter since at the end of the day I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

@TaliciaDragonsong:

I'm inclined to agree with you, for the most part. However, I find any arguments for the "originality" of the COD universe to be highly suspect; COD started out as a WWII shooter, proceeded to a "modern" shooter, and its story is simply a means for conveyance. What COD apparently does well is what it has always done well - vis. superb FPS gameplay - but let's not start making great claims about the originality of its story.

BF and COD both come from the same background, and they both appear to be heading in the same direction, so it stands to reason that their coexistence will appear somewhat incestuous at times.

I'm pretty iffy on this game.

@mikey87144 said:

@nutta27 said:

Another annoyance is Origin. Oh My Fucking Gawd I hate Origin. Its not needed. It doesn't work and it is clunky as fuck. I am really glad that as soon as you launch the game that is the last moment it is actually used. I know its EA's shot at a steam like service but seriously do it better.

I think DICE's best accomplishment is getting around Origin. They're like "What? We can't use Steam? Why? OK, lets see this Origin thing. Wow. This will ruin our game. How do we get around this? Launch from Browser? Done."

The reason the game isn't on Steam got nothing to do with EA, it's all Dice, as Valve would not support the way Dice want to do things. Steam is a prison for games. Do things our ways, or fuck off. Take any other online DD store. They can sell codes and the download. Steam is probably worse then Origin will be. we can't say much about Origin atm, as it says at the top, BETA. We don't know what's coming, beside 3rd party stores. But I know this for a fact. Origin works a lot better then Steam in offline :p As it doesn't even need you to run Origin for a lot of the games. Steam's offline mode however is a joke. The way you patch on Steam is a joke. Every developer have to make a special patch for steam games. So to play online, you'll often end 2-3 days after the rest of the world, who have bought it from somewhere that doesn't need steam.

Also for what you say about Battlefield, Launch from browser? It uses Origin to launch it. EA and Dice are very close, which is why Dice got to borrow the FIFA guys for Animations on characters. Battlelog was made because of what Dice wanted in BF:BC2, a massive statistic system, which wasn't really possible to do ingame, nor on Steam, nor on Origin, which is why this ended how it did. They never got around Origin, at all. They got around an issue with having a massive statistic system ingame.

Edit:

Oh, also, I haven't had a single issue with Origin. I've had shit loads with EA Download Manager before this, but Origin is running flawlessly for me. Just like Steam, it just hangs there, however, Steam do a use a bit more CPU for me. Could be becasue of the amount of games I've installed in it. 87 atm, vs 11 in Origin. I'm not a fanboy of Valve nor EA, I don't trust any of them more then the other, and the ideal Origin platform for me, with a store, would be like Battlelog, like Gamersgate, no app needed. At all. They could of course offered one, but not to install games and download them. That would be my favorite DD of games.

The single player was abysmal story-wise and gameplay-wise but I wasn't buying it for the story so..

The multiplayer- Server outages are frustrating as is the sometimes epic amounts of lag. Sometimes the online is frustrating due to the amount of people sitting in one spot just waiting for me. The amount of destruction is not as great as it was in BF:BC2 either, which was/is disappointing. Seems more like CoD with vehicles now too for some reason, not sure why. You also can't see the hit markers at certain points on certain maps because of the "Sun" effect, which is also annoying.

Disclaimer: I'm not very good at Battlefield games and I'm playing on 360.

@TaliciaDragonsong said:

@bwmcmaste: I kinda hate both games, the genre overall, war and its stories never interest me and all war shooters are lower then Arkanoid remakes on the originality scale for me. Halfway through Black Ops I kinda hoped for the zombies to play a part in the campaign. War stories are so generic. Don't matter if I'm playing Black Ops, Medal of Honor or something like Battlefield. I want war, I want massive battles, I don't want a story. On that note, why couldn't they sell BF MP only for 3/4th of the full price? I'd buy it, so would others. I have no dreams of war shooters disappearing or being highly creative sometime soon but as long as they keep providing new content I am totally in. That is, if we stop going backward with less and less maps, skins and remove things like AI bots, offline matches or LAN...then, well, I am not in. I find it silly that older games have more features then current ones, and that the current ones often fail in the execution of those few things.

It gets even more wonky when you consider that the size of teams employed to make just one of these games has gone up exponentially (ie brotherhood had over 200 people working on it).

I am really hoping that this fad of super realistic modern day military shooters loses steam soon. I am personally sick of playing as meatheads with shaved heads and a gruff voice trying to save the world in the most 'badass' way possible. I want super villains back, and outrageously impossible schemes for world domination, I want superheroes who's costumes consist of more than camouflage and a fuck ton of grit. And a sense of humor that's actually funny in a first person shooter. Bulletstorm was a interesting idea, but even ironically calling everyone a dick and being super gruff is still incredibly boring.

Maybe I'm asking too much from FPS's, but I thought I was done with shooters until I played BF3's multiplayer, and that reinvigorated my love for shooters. Now I just need one that can do the same thing for the single player side.

@twigger89 said:

@TaliciaDragonsong said:

@bwmcmaste: I kinda hate both games, the genre overall, war and its stories never interest me and all war shooters are lower then Arkanoid remakes on the originality scale for me. Halfway through Black Ops I kinda hoped for the zombies to play a part in the campaign. War stories are so generic. Don't matter if I'm playing Black Ops, Medal of Honor or something like Battlefield. I want war, I want massive battles, I don't want a story. On that note, why couldn't they sell BF MP only for 3/4th of the full price? I'd buy it, so would others. I have no dreams of war shooters disappearing or being highly creative sometime soon but as long as they keep providing new content I am totally in. That is, if we stop going backward with less and less maps, skins and remove things like AI bots, offline matches or LAN...then, well, I am not in. I find it silly that older games have more features then current ones, and that the current ones often fail in the execution of those few things.

It gets even more wonky when you consider that the size of teams employed to make just one of these games has gone up exponentially (ie brotherhood had over 200 people working on it).

I am really hoping that this fad of super realistic modern day military shooters loses steam soon. I am personally sick of playing as meatheads with shaved heads and a gruff voice trying to save the world in the most 'badass' way possible. I want super villains back, and outrageously impossible schemes for world domination, I want superheroes who's costumes consist of more than camouflage and a fuck ton of grit. And a sense of humor that's actually funny in a first person shooter. Bulletstorm was a interesting idea, but even ironically calling everyone a dick and being super gruff is still incredibly boring.

Maybe I'm asking too much from FPS's, but I thought I was done with shooters until I played BF3's multiplayer, and that reinvigorated my love for shooters. Now I just need one that can do the same thing for the single player side.

I thought Resistance 3 has a really good Single player story... def. better than CoD and BF.

I'm mostly enjoying this game. Good graphics, great sound, interface is a pile of shit, same gameplay I expected from Battlefield games, but with a little more survivability from the abundance of and uneven terrain in the game.

The interface issues:

1) Can't do anything when you're dead but stare uselessly behind the guy that killed you. Can't change squads. Can't look at the map for team progress. Can't choose spawns. Can't change loadout. Basically, you can't do any of the things that you'd normally be doing while you're dead. Instead it just wastes your time.

2) Terrible display of information. Objective marker and capture progress look the same, so when you're moving around at the edge of the capture zone to find the ideal cover, the game makes it as hard as possible to tell if you're in the capture zone or not. Just use a damn bar like every other game.

3) No interaction with multiplayer interfaces inside the game. You need to alt-tab out which unloads the game from your memory and then tab back in. It's idiotic. The battlelog should be launched from the in-game browser, not the other way around. This is designed to maximize loading time and it's asinine.

4) Terrible map. The useful map is located on the escape key which locks you in place so that you can't travel while checking the map. The minimap and the map key don't give enough information. You need to go to the ESC map or just spin around in 360 to find the closest objective

5) Poor objective labeling on the maps.

6) No voice chat. On PC? You've got to be kidding me. It's 2011 FFS.

They burned out their budget on pretty graphics and great sound. Great maps. Same gameplay design they've always had. But they've even chopped out polish elements they've already implemented in BF2, and they've sacrificed too much utility in pursuit of having a "pretty" interface with less information. But it's to be expected, battlefield games have always been flawed gems, and BF3 is keeping up with this tradition.

Single player is alright. Not what I came for, but it's nice that it's there.

My major gripe, aside from the god-awful singleplayer, I believe that whoever thought that tactical flashlights were a good idea in MP should be strapped to a chair and be forced to look at one of these lights for 24 hours.

Hmmm I think it just depends on the server you connect to. I've never been disconnected from the GB server, but some of the quick match servers have had issues. I'd say find a good one and stick with it. Also, cable modems are notorious for dropping packets. If you have a cable modem, that may be the issue.

I really don't see why reviewers were making such a huge fuss about the SP being bad when it's pretty much exactly what their beloved 10/10 call of duty campaigns have been. 
 
The multiplayer is stellar as well. My only gripe is that I have to dogfight against people with 400 jet kills who are like the motherfucking red baron while I've barely unlocked heatseekers.