Battlefield 3′s PC Multiplayer. I’m rolling in the rear of an armoured jeep, manning the .50 cal doing 60km/h for a wide swath of grassland, heading straight in a contested jumble of buildings part way through a huge map. A jet roars overhead, inbound in to the same location. It’s all very interesting, and… bam. I’m fallen from the server, back to the desktop.
I load a different game, hop into my customisation screen as well as begin to go through my support gunner’s kit. I click from a ridiculous number of scopes, thoroughly enjoying thinking about how they’ll all work in-game. We’ve everything picked, and… bam. I’m dropped from the server, retreat to the desktop.
Battlefield 3 may not be quite ready for prime-time
This is the tricky preview to create, because I stood a very good time playing BF3‘s PC multiplayer — when it worked. I went through a whole few different maps and modes (many of that are, unfortunately, still under media embargo, so I can’t talk about them yet.) However, my time playing the overall game was marred by massively disruptive technical problems, from in-game freezes to continual server drops to conflicts together with the Origin account that EA had setup for me. I really believe that some (though not all) of one’s bugs and crashes I experienced were unique to the media event I attended and towards PC that EA gave me to use, but but bear in mind it was tough shake the suspicion that three weeks from launch, Battlefield 3 may not be quite ready for prime-time.
As Fahey currently noted although playing the PC Battlefield 3 beta, Battlefield 3 is accessed by way of a web browser, not through a Steam-like standalone program. It feels peculiar. It is all totally hosted on EA’s Battlelog website, with Origin running in the backdrop. Finding a game server happens in-browser — there looks no way to swap servers in the adventure itself, which feels like an odd step backwards.
Battlefield 3 – significantly more fun
This awkwardness was hugely exacerbated by the point that I was dropped from the server at least 10 times during three hours of multiplayer. It occurred in number of ways, and inside places in the action–right at the beginning, mid-match, even after freezing and requiring me to Ctrl+Alt+Del my way outside the Battlefield 3 game. Every time I’d get dropped, We would be kicked out of your game back on the desktop, which was jarring. Particularly because We such rampant connectivity issues.
While i got up and running amongst Battlefield 3 gamers, things became significantly more fun. One belonging to the first maps and modes I played was Rush mode on Grand Bazaar, that’s been covered previously (you can take in a developer walkthrough from it here). It’s a narrow, non-vehicle map placed in a middle-eastern city bazaar — all corridors and alcoves. With regards to rush mode either to plant or disarm M-Com explosives for a variety of points on the map.
Rush on Bazaar is a chattery, fast-moving good time, though not particularly new-feeling or remarkable. These types of map is a lot closer to Modern Warfare than other larger, vehicle-based Battlefield maps, but yet there were several things that set it apart. Specifically, I was impressed with how significantly lighting and smoke affect gameplay.
Attaching a torch or perhaps laser sight towards your gun barrel can be described as highly tactical decision. Regularly I would come round a corner and then be blinded by a bright red-flare — someone’s laser sight catching at my face just before they gunned me down. Smoke and explosions offer a similar experience — the volume of one’s smoke combined with light-flares and particle accumulation for the “camera” makes visibility a constantly fluxuating, functionally important factor.
Gunplay feels punchier than Bad Company 2 (though not as directly impactful as Modern Warfare) and despite the many rock walls and explosions in Grand Bazaar, the emphasis on environmental destructibility felt significantly downgraded, with a level-design standpoint. Almost all the walls seemed indestructible, though I wasn’t able to put them to the test — for just about the most part, combat worn-out(a) the same in the same chokepoints, without the ever-shifting, ever-shrinking cover of Bad Company 2. That’s neither a plus nor a minus, however it did leave the match feeling much a lot more like Modern Warfare.
Another level we played was a 50-player Conquest match on the map Operation Firestorm. There were clearly about 20 other journalists around the PC section within the event, so I’m guessing that other 30 or so QA players were created offsite by EA. Conquest revolves around taking and defending checkpoints — on the map, each team begins at a substantial air base populated with tanks, jets, helicopters and jeeps. We only got to play each map once, that has been simply not lots of time to get an in-depth sense of things.
Something about this felt unpopulated, however — I kept hitting Tab to be conscious of the roster and seeing 25 or 26 people on each team, it also just didn’t feel prefer this many were actually in the action. It was that standard large-map Battlefield thing in places you spawn, then go beyond to a vehicle, wait to ascertain if someone else is nearby to visit and assist after which you can drive off to fight. Agonisingly, I was unable to fly a jet, but whenever I looked on the sky, I saw curiously slow-moving aircraft doing battle. They didn’t come across as too connected to events on the land, but again, which was likely due to your event attendees’ unfamiliarity with a lot of the more advanced air-to-ground weaponry. I could truthfully easily imagine how 64 players who really knew the map, vehicles and tactics could get this a riotously good time.
I asked Battlefield 3‘s executive producer Patrick Bach about the technical difficulties we were having, and hubby was very straight with me. He acknowledged that there was clearly something “very flakey” taking place with the Battlefield 3 PC game at this event and that in case that kind of thing was the norm, how they would not indicate the game in the slightest degree. “It’s super embarrassing, we’ve not seen this before. So we want to figure out the reason. We had a QA connecting problem in Romania for example, we don’t know if it has anything about it, or if this’s driver versions, and the connection in the structure.”
“We had exactly the same event in the british isles and we had zero difficulties with stability,” he laughed and said. “We have no clue what happens to become the issue. Knowing the drivers, I believe we’re getting a newer driver version but that’s simply for one of the laptop types.”
Part belonging to the problem, Bach said, has been including so many excellent connections in a space (there were around 40 consoles during the other room running the Battlefield 3, combined with roughly 20 PCs. “PCs normally takes as much bandwidth as encounter, whereas the consoles, these are much better at being conservative. Considering that console version works fine, so there is an activity funky with laptop version. We were leading with PC, we certainly have had zero failures of PC compared to console.”
There appeared that they are stability and connectivity issues all through the PC room, though I did get the sense that mine were some belonging to the worst. But it’s worth mentioning that while an Origin account bug kept me from logging into any games, most everybody else was plugged in and happily shooting away. So, take these impressions for what they are — possibly unique, but nonetheless worrying.
I can’t make any broad statements concerning technical sturdiness of Battlefield 3, aside from to express the doubts raised by my experiences at yesterday’s demo. I sat down and spent an entire day playing a Battlefield 3 that consistently froze and crashed, booting me to your desktop, where Even i did to reconnect which consists of odd browser interface. A couple of times I would start a match, get an enemy in my sights and kill him… just to have his body do a lag-freeze and refuse anyone with go down before being dropped back towards the desktop. It was beyond aggravating, it wasted a large sum of time.
Battlefield 3 will almost surely work better on launch day than it did for me yesterday. Even if it will are well as it needs to is another question entirely. Despite all of one’s extenuating and possibly unique circumstances of yesterday’s hands-on, I now can’t help but have doubts.