Battlefield 3 - Thoughts on the beta

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Category: Games N Stuff

Published on Monday, 10 October 2011 18:13

Written by Super User

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After reading the initial posts on the Battlelog servers just after the beta test was released one would have thought that the BF3 game engine was so unbelievably flawed that it was never going to see the light of day in a playable form. There was plenty of angst and not an un-generous helping of bile being spewed by a great many players who seemed to forget the concept of what a Beta was. A great many have (or so they say) cancelled their pre-orders though given the number of ‘boycotters’ who went on to play COD MW2 one cannot help but think that a lot of this is idle bravado and seeing who can piss furthest up the wall.

Dice themselves made it clear that the engine that was released was at the very least a month old build and they were aware that it was far from perfect, in that at least they were spot on. Whilst the engine was as buggy as a lepidopterists out house it was at least playable and was more than enough to whet the appetites of gamers and show them what was to come. It also gave us all the ideal opportunity to see how the game would fair on our systems.  For me it was a thrill ride and easily one of the best FPS experiences for some time.

Putting aside the issues being experienced by the poor console players and the closed system servers, the PC version of the frostbite engine ran extremely well on a mid range system at high detail with a good resolution, in my case I ran it on two systems ;

 Intel Core 2 Quad 6600

 3GB DDR2

 Nvidia GTX275

 22” Viewsonic monitor @1680 x 1050

And

Intel Sandybridge Core i5 2500K clocked at 4.6ghz

 8GB DDR3 1800

 Asus p8p67Pro Mainboard

 Nvidia G460 SSC (GPU@763Mhz Shader@1526Mhz)

 Dell 3007FP 30” monitor @2560x1600

Whilst the top end system didn’t pull up any trees at such a high resolution it never dropped below 40FPS and given that everything was on HIGH leaves a lot of room for scalability to increase the frame rate.

There were of course a plethora of bugs to deal with, thankfully judging by some of the complaints on the forum I got off quite lightly, some of the bugs i experienced included;

• Tearing of textures (most likely a driver related issue)
•  The odd random disconnect
•  Inability to use aim after a reload
•  Stretching of player models when prone
•  Clipping
•  Dying or appearing to be dead whilst still being able to move and in some cases shoot 7 kill opponents.
•  Inability to fire after going prone.

Big-ish issues I admit but I struggle with people that think that these (and other) bugs appeared en-masse only after the beta was released, as dice said the engine was an old version and most of the bugs were fixed or being addressed.

 So what about gameplay? Well we were treated to the same map that many saw during the Alpha release ‘operation metro’ though this time the LAV was absent. The map is somewhat linear starting out in a Parisian park where attackers and defenders fight it out for 2 control points. Bright sunlight streams down from the sky and genuinely blinds you if you look at it, missiles randomly streak off from their launchers leaving a vast trail of smoke in their wake whilst burning vehicles add to the fog of war. Once clear you move down into the depths of the subway system and fight it out in the dark dimly lit service tunnels hampered by the wreckage of trains and tunnel. In here the sound is what grabs you by the balls, the deep throaty staccato of heavy machine guns and the booming thud of frag grenades going off altogether too close, it really is claustrophobic and intense. Up the escalators and into the foyer things get more difficult for the attacker, it’s all too easy for a good defence to hold the two main escalators but a 3^rd stairway offers a route in if one can sneak around the corner. The trick here is moving forward far enough to let squad mates spawn on you and keep up the momentum of attack. The endplay of this level sees the attackers heading back out onto the streets of Paris, with the sound of gunfire and missile being interspersed with the sound of French emergency services gallantly retreating

Here things are (for me) a little too easy for the attacker with the two cap points being overly exposed to the flats opposite, whilst the defenders spawn in open view of the enemy.

All in all the gameplay is frantic and visceral and really does require some semblance of teamplay to work; lone wolves will not go far in this game mode.

So what of the Frostbite 2 engine?

Whilst Activision and IW seem content to eek out the last dying breaths from their now ten year old quake engine, Dice took the step of completely reworking their frostbite architecture.....and boy has it paid off. That’s not to say that IW are in the wrong, after all their development costs for the upcoming MW3 will be much less than those incurred by Dice, but the drawback there is that MW3 will look no different from MW2 which in turn looked no different from MW. The frostbite engine is a thing of beauty, even in this beta piles of paper get shredded by machine gun fire and leave pieces of paper fluttering in an imaginary breeze, fire blinds and smoke almost chokes whilst hiding from view attacker and defender alike. Bushes and trees are something to hide behind but offer little in the way of real cover when an rpg comes in or someone lets rip with 100 rounds of 7.62. Cover, like the last BF2 game is fully destructible, hiding behind that tree are we? Let’s see what happens when I lob an SMAW at you, oops it fell over, see that wall? Not anymore.  Just as in the real world, when you shoot something, shit gets broke. To get the best from the engine though you will need a decent PC, budget PC’s just wont be up to the job of getting the best from this engine, which is something of a drawback to those on a tight budget, which during a recession is pretty much everyone except premiership footballers.

 All in all the 28^th of October cannot come fast enough for me, when this game hits the doorstep i will become a hermit for the entire weekend at the very least. If you love shooters and aren’t a cod / dice fanboi then you WILL love this game.

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