The holiday gaming season is nearly upon us and, with it, the upcoming showdown between Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3. DICE and Electronic Arts are getting ready to fire the first shots with Battlefield 3 and the open beta has gone live on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360. Nvidia estimates that 84% of PC gamers will need to upgrade their computers to be able to play BF3 on their PCs, but we've got you covered, running the Battlefield 3 beta on Ultra settings so you'll know what to expect.
First off, to play Battlefield 3 on your PC, you have to have EA's new digital distribution platform - Origin. Not a big deal, but it is an interface that takes some getting used to. It runs in the background and features a few social aspects similar to Steam, albeit with a lot less people and games. Launching the beta from Origin brings up a browser window in which you can see your stats, progress, upcoming unlocks, and other information through Battlelog. It's a fairly nice interface, but lacks many items that would be really useful. You can't adjust your loadouts from Battlelog, nor can you mess with your game settings, so if you want to adjust your visual settings or invert controls your first time in, you have to wait until you've already loaded up a multiplayer match and adjust your settings while bullets are already flying at you.
Once in a match, the first things you'll notice are the astounding visuals. The Frostbite 2 engine is in full effect on a PC that can handle it. Debris effects that never stop, trees that blow in the wind, lighting that's so realistic it takes you a while to realize what it is, and everything in between makes for some of the best visuals ever. The sound effects are also something to behold. Every sound in Battlefield 3 makes other shooters sound downright cartoonish. Different weapons make their own distinctively different sounds. Distant weapons fire sounds truly far away and you can hear reverberation off various surfaces. DICE has also spent time creating animations for vaulting over objects and crawling while prone, something most shooters don't even bother with. This is a beta, however, and not without its glitches. Falling through maps, dead bodies twitching their way away from you, and a myriad of other bugs are ever present in the beta, but it's a beta; glitches happen. The whole point of a beta is to iron these problems out and get the online servers up to speed. As long as they work them out before October 25 (or in a day one patch), there's no reason for concern.
Sadly, the gameplay falls well short of the amazing visuals and sounds. Rush Mode on Operation Metro has four sections you can work through. Each section has two targets that have to be destroyed/defended. If/when the two targets are destroyed, a new section organically opens up with two new targets. The first section is a large park. This map is gratuitously unbalanced for snipers. Mind you, you can't pretend Battlefield 3 is a Call of Duty game. The bullets in this beta have a lot more to say when they impact your body. Running and gunning will quickly turn into running and dying. The more effective strategy is to move slowly, communicate with your squad, and advance on targets with precision. You will die a lot, but you also have the potential to get more kills. After getting picked off repeatedly by enemies I couldn't even see, I quickly realized the sniper rifle was the favored weapon on this map. It's just too open and there are too many elevated positions with decent cover.
The second and third sections are a portion of the French subway and the lower floors of an office building. These work better with assault rifles and occasional CQC, feeling like more balanced areas. The objectives are very defensible, but precise tactics and communication can still work to overwhelm them. The final area is the pièce de résistance of the beta, a street area with tall buildings you can enter. This section is still unbalanced, favoring snipers, and since the attackers come out close to the buildings and the defenders spawn across the street, this last section usually falls to the attackers fairly quickly. However, it's the most fun, and the only section where the trademark destruction of Battlefield can rear its head. One big drawback to this Operation Metro section is there are no vehicles, something thatBattlefield is known for, so the destruction is also harder to come by. Nevertheless, a couple of players with RPGs were able to rip the face off a building and expose the attackers hiding within. This happened once in well over a dozen matches I played that got to this final section, so it was a glimmer of what Battlefield does so well, but only a small one.
The last big issue I had with the Battlefield 3 beta was the spawn camping. On the first three sections, the routes to the objectives are fairly narrow and there were several times I was killed literally two seconds after spawning. You can spawn on an ally, but the game isn't good at detecting if this is a safe measure or not. You may spawn on an ally just so both of you can be gunned down by an enemy in quick succession. Their apparent fix for this in the second section is to spawn you so far behind the objectives that you have to spend at least 30 seconds sprinting just to get back in the action.
So what's the impression so far? Battlefield 3 is gorgeous, but needs a lot of work if it wants to compete with the big boys of online multiplayer shooters. Unfortunately, the Caspian Border map was taken offline before I got a chance to play it, but some chatter in the beta seems to indicated that larger maps with vehicles are a lot more fun to what's been made freely available in the open beta's Operation Metro. So there's still plenty of hope for DICE's next big shooter, but, based on the open beta, color me underwhelmed.
