So after a few weeks of picking more niche titles, it seems like it’s time to come back with a big hitter, and they don’t get much bigger than EA’s Battlefield 3. The amount of exposure and advertising the game was given last year was absolutely incredible, outweighing pretty much every other title. The big release finally came after months of hype in October, and we actually got to see what all the earthquakes in the trailers were about.
Personally I felt the game’s single player started well, but when it turned to the early night-time section I got frustrated and then bored. Ultimately I gave up and haven’t returned to the title since. Fortunately, Alex is a bit more patient than I and managed to finish the single player for our review.
We’ll get to the multiplayer in a moment, but whilst Alex found a number of issues with the game, in particular the fact that it can’t stick to its own rules, he was pleased to call the campaign “surprisingly good”. Rating the single player at 7/10 he had this to say about the game in conclusion:
You can’t blame DICE and EA for the direction Battlefield 3 has taken. There’s a decent game here, but it’s nothing – beyond the special effects and presentation – that we’ve not played before. The AI might be smart and your squad at least can fire for themselves, but when it’s the same thing each time, ad verbatim, you can’t help but wish for something a little bit more freeform, dynamic and tactical rather than a roller coaster ride through the Middle East.
Switching gears to the multiplayer now, it was Matt who looked at that aspect of the game. Whilst I’m not all that interested in the multiplayer content of most games, although I’m not above a bit of Gears of War co-op, it certainly seems to have come to the forefront of many console titles this generation. Many of the complaints with the game’s multiplayer were technical, talking about server issues and alike. Hopefully you can tell us to what extent these have now been resolved, but for now here’s a quick extract from what Matt had to say:
Once we made it on to a server and in to a properly running game, we found Battlefield 3 to be one of the most intense and enjoyable multiplayer experiences we’ve ever had. Unfortunately, technical issues absolutely devastated the launch of this game and have likely left a very deep scar on the Battlefield community. Any fan of the franchise or modern shooters in general should definitely give Battlefield 3’s multiplayer a shot, but at least for the moment, be prepared to fight through some mean bush to reach the good stuff.
With all of that said, it’s time to ask you for your opinions of the game. Did you think EA’s gamble in putting so much into the title paid off, or does it fail in comparison to its peers? Did DICE manage to pull off a technical tour-de-force, or did it not leave up to the high expectations it had? Even if it was technically impressive, was the gameplay lacking? Of course maybe you just think the game is without fault, and you can’t get enough of it.
Wherever you fall on the scale of opinions it’s time to make your voice heard. All you need to do to take part is drop a comment below with you opinon. Remember that your comment needs to include a final verdict of the game on the Buy It, Bargain Bin It, Rent It or Avoid It scale. Just select one of those four categories and make sure you include it somewhere in your comment.
Finally, you need to make sure you have your comment in by Sunday afternoon, as at that point I’ll have started to write Monday’s verdict post.
element666
Really couldn’t get into this at all, I regret buying it tbh
I’ve been back to it several times and it doesn’t get any better.
Even playing with friends doesn’t help :(
Avoid from me
Kronik76
I have to agree with you. Completed the single player campaign (which was ok), but I felt the multiplayer wasn’t a patch on Bad Company 2. Left me feeling disappointed. I would say bargain bin though, as it’s not terrible.
Ed the Penguin
I’m constantly flipping between Call of Duty & Battlefield 3. This is all because I find Call of Duty can be more ‘Pick up & Play’. But when I have the house to myself, there’s nothing better than spending a good few hours getting engrossed in Battlefield 3 – it’s like my little treat. Levelling up initially can be a bit of a slog, but it’s worth it. When I do well on BF3 I get a real sense of achievement that not many other FPS’s give me. It’s not all about the kills/frags in this game, you get awarded for working as a team.. That’s what more games of this genre need.
Buy it.
Rocket_345
Well said. Kills wise im not very efficient, unless im in a tank, but i always rack up the points as i like to capture the objectives, healing people thus putting me top half of the leaderboard most times.
david24
i’ve been 0-0 after a half hour game and got mvp purely through capturing objectives.
Ed the Penguin
I’m pretty much the same. I spend a lot of time either running round with anti-tank mines strategically placing them, sit in the turret of a tank or back of a chopper (I’m not good at driving/piloting). There’s something everyone can do.
zb100
Seconded. I just don’t have the skills to head-shot folks but do enjoy a support role & rolling big-@ss tanks into capture flags.
Bilbo_bobbins
Nice, I’m a big battlefield lover. I have all the games on PS3 and was really looking forward to this. SP I found pretty dull in all honesty, it was good but nothing special. It was the MP that I was interested in more anyway.
The beta went really well, so I was hoping for much fun in the final release, unfortunately this didn’t happen.
Hit detection is terrible, lag is a major problem too. US players hitting UK servers and gaining big scores because of the hit detection. Inout lag, still not fixed even DICE admitting it can’t be, but will be for the next DLC??? what a joke
The game is enjoyable, but with so many problems with balancing and technical problems in all its been a let down. I haven’t touched it for months now, because I find it frustrating online more than anything. DICE recently admitted not finishing the game properly because of time constraints, to me, thats poor and us gamers shouldn’t expect them to finish a game using 750mb patches.
In all, I would say its worth buying but certainly RENT IT first. Its a good game, but has so many problems on MP its just put me off now and I wont be going back.
Forrest_01
To be fair to the title – It is you & a handful of gamers that get issues with hit detection & lag. Millions upon millions simply do not see the issues you describe.
I play week after week without any hitches whatsoever, as do many that attend the meets. The odd disconnect here & there may happen to the odd person, sure, but show me a multiplayer game you don’t get that in!
david24
i never had any lag/hit detection/input lag problems and one of the few i know about, it’s quite a confusing issue really since it’s been proven that it is hardware related and for anyone where input lag isn’t an issue on other games it’s also been proven to not be your tv. are you using a 3rd party controller? it supposedly fixes it for most people but not all and again there’s no obvious reason why a 3rd party controller would cause input lag in battlefield alone. even dice don’t know where or if the problem is battlefield related and why only a handful of players have got it.
Bilbo_bobbins
I play with a Sony controller, tried it on 3 tv’s with Game mode on. I’ve never had a problem with any game before, only this game. Never had input lag in the beta, so why now?
To be fair, most people who say they don’t have it, don’t realise that they do, they just change the way they play to accommodate (good for them). Hit detection has been proven that its terrible, its client side so its massively unreliable and what you see on your screen is most probably not what they other person will see, its worse than COD in bf3.
it’s also not just a handful of gamers, its most of the bf3 forum having these problems. Its the fact most casual gamers don’t understand the problems in the game, so think they aren’t there. Like I said, DICE wouldn’t try to fix the problems if they thought they weren’t there, so they must be.
They even said they think they have fixed the input lag in the next DLC, so that says something and can’t be a figment of many gamers imagination. There are even threads advising how to get refunds on the game over the problems people are having.
In all, its a great game but it has so many problems that DICE refuse to fix. Releasing half a game (already admitted by Bach) is poor, and I unfortunately wont be preordering another DICE game anymore. I want to know what we are getting on release, because you can’t trust a beta/demo anymore.
david24
playing with the ds3 I’ve had no issues at all. switching to an Xbox controller with adapter i then had terrible input lag until i turned off anti-aliasing so its defiantly not there for everyone. also only people with a problem complain so again i doubt its just people have adjusted to it.
and hit detection was changed to server side after the beta.
Forrest_01
@bilbo – Defintely not most of the BF3 forums. In fact, i stand by my intial ‘handful’ statement. There are millions upon millions of players & there are not millions that are having the problems you describe.
Oh that’s right… I apparently can’t tell the difference can i? :S
Besides, what are you doing hanging around the BF3 forums if you admittedly don’t have any interest in the game? Is it just to moan like you do here?
I respect your right to have an opinion & am not trying to get at you, but the way you throw stuff around like it’s ipso facto for absolutely everyone is a little bit annoying.
david24
if your talking about the battlelog forums I’ve never seen it and i look at them every time i play battlefield on PC, admittedly i don’t hang around in the technical issues forum too often but there’s a list of reason forum posts and i haven’t seen an input lag thread come up. that said since this is a ps3 issue and battlelog forums are mostly pc players there could be more in console centric forums.
LTG Davey
Battlefield has been my “go-to” FPS for years, starting with BF1942 on the PC followed by BF2 and BadCompany2 on the 360 – the latter of which I clocked up nearly 100hours on!
As a result I was eagerly awaiting the release of BF3 for a large chunk of 2011. Upon playing it at Eurogamer (and also taking part in the beta) however I came away a little disappointed. Shooting mechanics felt “off” and the visuals, while looking stunning on PC, looked a bit washed out and blurry on the 360/ps3. Given I wasn’t playing the finished product I kept my hopes up that the final game would be a lot better.
The final release didn’t fare much better unfortunately. The gameplay still didn’t feel right. It suffered from lots of connection issues and there were a number of visual bugs, especially in terms of the frame rate. The campaign was also lousy, feeling very generic and even containing QTEs (no, no, no!)
I personally didn’t stick with the game for too long, which is a shame given how much I enjoyed previous entries in the series. I wouldn’t go as far as to say avoid it, but certainly RENT it first.
Bilbo_bobbins
totally agree here, the gunplay is shocking, all guns feel the same and the blue tint visual is very strange. With supression thats way over the top and poor shooting mechanics, its just very odd.
Ed the Penguin
The irritation with this being an EA game and suggesting the rental approach is that you would need an online pass to try the multiplayer :(
LTG Davey
Ah yes thats true :( Well its definitely not worth checking out just for the single player so I’m going to change my RENT IT to a BARGAIN BIN IT
david24
imo the gun play is a huge improvement on the perfectly acceptable bfbc2, they just seem to have so much more wight to them without feeling overly heavy like kz2.
“with suppression that’s way over the top, its just very odd”
the idea of suppression was to attempt to simulate the feeling of getting shot at. not only that but’s its allowed so many extra opportunity for team play. for example, several times since the patch I’ve seen people be killed and then have one of there squad suppress the enemy and the other run out and revive them.
Bilbo_bobbins
david24, does a bullet flying past your head make you dizzy? Not really. It does help with team work, but its overdone again, bit like many things in the game (flashlight/red dot/sniper glint)
david24
so if someone shot a bullet at you you wound’t be affected at all?
david24
i’ll agree that the flashlight’s overpowered though but after a while you just get used to shooting it and most times you’ll kill the guy.
the lasers not blinding in the slightest and’s more of and advantage for everyone else since it’ll let them know when your aiming at them and the scope glints great imo since with 12x scopes and 2km² maps there’d be no other way of spoting a camping sniper.
SilverCider
Should be fairly simple, if you like online military shooters then Buy It – There is very little excuse not to if you intend to get the PC format given the nice price :)
I have yet to finish the Single player, and to even try the Co-op aspects however the Multiplayer is wonderful. Balancing is generally quite good; there are times when your team will just be slaughtered over and over – nothing to do with balancing, just the other team is working well together.
teflon
Janky, miserably failed attempt at replicating a CoD-style set piece based Single Player, thanks to lots of bugs, difficulty spikes and other nonsense. Through that, there was a decent plot underneath it, but I just felt it was mishandled. Likewise, the gameplay was good, but it just had issues with pacing.
Would have been a decent first attempt, were it not for the fact that they’d done Bad Company 2 in 2009, and that had a far superior single player, because it really hammed it up and had a bit of humour and swagger to it, making its own minor mistakes much less of an issue, because it was being more fun.
A game can live and die by its SP in my eyes, and here it was on the cusp between good and bad. The co-op, though, was utter pants, with broken levels when I played it. I did enjoy the Helicopter one. I like helicopters.
Beyond that, though, it’s pretty awesome in MP, and that was clearly the aim of this title. Even with a hamstrung player count and scaled back maps to accommodate consoles, it was a lot of fun while I was playing it. A few maps started to grate, and it’s very hard to get started on the right path with air vehicles, since you need kills to get unlocks, and you just can’t spot a tank on the ground when it’s not popped in yet, because you’re too far away… Needs a higher resolution and slightly adjusted LoD to make that possible.
The graphics engine is also very impressive, though we don’t get to see half of its power on consoles. It’s clearly an engine that was designed to be the basis for the next few years of EA titles (as evidenced by C&C:Gen2 using it now, and MoH: Warfighter), and should give them a decent head start over Activision when the next generation of consoles hit, since they’re already developing at a higher fidelity.
Absolutely Buy It, but only if you’re a fan of the MP. The SP will disappoint, and the Co-Op was half baked too.
david24
whats lod?
Forrest_01
Legion of Doom!
But seriously, i have no idea either. :S
Severn2j
Level of Detail, I guess..
Forrest_01
Light of Death. Just without the ‘Yellow’.
bmg_123
Level of detail. When you move further away things get blurrier etc. like in GTA/any open world game where things ‘pop’ in and textures appear sharper.
bmg_123
I didn’t see any problem with lod, but the overall experience felt like a bad COD copy, as you said. It’s like as if they forgot all the fun elements of Bad company 2 (which I put over 200 hours in, and I only occasionally play games) and instead pursued a stupidly realistic aesthetic that made the game crap, quite frankly. Avoid at all costs, unless it’s cheap of course…
gideon1451
Never had so much fun & wow moments in an online game, buy it.
BrendanCalls
The standard when it comes to FPS games reached a new level with BF3.
EA are on the brink of complete domination of more or less every single genre of gaming, not that I think that’s a bad thing, I think EA set the bar high in almost all the genres they provide for
BrendanCalls
Buy It
0-SPaRTiBuS-0
Agreed. FIFA 12 and BF3 is all I play at the moment, by far the best games in their genres
Haydar
As a long time Battlefield fan and a player who spend about 800 hours on BF: Bad Company 2, BF3 is a big disappointment for me.
Considering map sizes, player numbers and player base, BC2 was much better -suitable- for a multiplayer game.
The biggest problem here is public servers of BF3. It’s very hard to find a balanced server. Almost in every game, one team f.cks the other so hard.
Also because of the popularity of BF3 over older Battlefield games, servers are filled with some gamers who don’t care anything about “squad system” and without squad play, BF is [null], nothing.
I don’t have many friends while playing online, i’m a public server guy; so BF3 is not an option for me on competitive multiplayer games because of its public servers.
BC2 was a smaller community so it was easier to find good, balanced public servers and also BC2: Vietnam was the greatest DLC for an online FPS game, ever.
yogdog
I absolutely hated the BC2: Vietnam DLC, imo it was extremely disappointing. This is due to mainly personal preference with the maps and so on but the character models were absolutely shocking-the eyes used to pop out, glitches with holding guns etc. The eyes problem was quite widespread but I think the problem with holding guns was pretty rare, so I’m just unlucky. My opinion is still that however :)
SpikeyMikey23
Add some TSA-ers – we’re lovely! ;)
Seems to be quite a few BF3 Meets
Forrest_01
Yeah, there are a few going on at the moment – I am regularly hosting the friday night shenanigans as usual, but i know that a few spontaneous meets have been happening through the week too (there were a few playing last night if i recall).
There’s a lot of life left in it yet! :D
gazzagb
I’m a huge FPS fan, and although I love most of the COD games, I did also really enjoy the original Bad Company games. But I just can’t get on with BF3.
The online just didn’t seem ‘fun’ to me, it was lifeless and boring. You spawned, and then had to walk for 10mins because everyone had already nicked all the vehicles and driven off. So you have to walk for miles and then as soon as you start to get near, you get picked off by a sniper, and have to go back to the spawn base. The squad spawning system work if people actually went into squads, everyone seemed to lone-wolf it, even though it’s an objective game.
The single player though was more enjoyable I thought. Yeah it was your usual action set pieces, but that’s what I like and I actually thought they were really good.
Overall though I think the worst thing for me was the game running at 30fps. I’m so used to COD’s smoothness at 60 that I find it a lot harder to control and aim, it’s a lot more jumpy. That isn’t just a criticism of BF3 thought, that’s most fps’s that run at 30. But with BF3, most of the enemies were further away than in most games, and there’s far more recoil, so having precise aiming is all the more vital.
Overall thought, I’d say rent it and see if it’s for you. It’s a marmite game and just like COD, you’ll either hate it or love it. Personally I just found it not to be fun, and I got annoyed by the numerous bugs and gameplay ‘features’.
teflon
Doesn’t it automatically shovel people into squads? You can opt in for that, at the very least.
Absolutely at its best when you have a squad of mates with headsets to play with, though. You should try one of the Friday night meets, and see if a squad of TSAers having your back helps.
Forrest_01
It does, i assure you! :)
Doesn’t go so well when yogdog (or a couple of others) get thrown onto the other team though! :O
gazzagb
Really?! I never once got put in a squad, except when I played once with Adam. Must of pressed the wrong button or something, but I could of sworn I always pressed the one to automatically put me in a squad.
Forrest_01
Ah, if you played a while back (around release) then there was a small issue with squadding up at that time. This has now been patched & now you should only get split up if the server is unbalanced!
david24
on the big maps at least there’s always enough vehicles unless the enemy stole them.