Breaking Battlefield 3 news from Gamescom 2011 - the PC version of the game may feature a Commander mode. We pray for the day! UPDATED.
UPDATE: As we started to suspect, Nathan has now updated us, and confirmed it was an ironic communication issue. What was actually said was 'Comm Wheel', referring to the radial communications wheel. Sorry for the excitement, folks :)
Our man Nathan Lawrence is at we speak running around the German city of Cologne like some kind of game-fueled headless chicken. But in between climbing the cathedral and laughing at bird-poo spattered PRs (I read Facebook!), he's covering Gamescom 2011. And he's getting some interesting news on Battlefield 3.
In fact, he just emailed through a sweet little tidbit from Karl Magnus Troedsson, one of DICE's designers, regarding the game's current Alpha-testing.
It’s been quite interesting actually, because we needed to load-test the backend. But we also got some really good feedback when it comes to actual features, and so on. The map that people got to play was the Rush map on Metro that we had showing [at E3]. Some of it we actually already reacted to. One of the key feedback we got, for instance, was that people wanted the comm roles back on PC. So that’s one thing that we actually have added. It’s a PC specific feature, but it’s the PC community that has asked for it.
The Commander was one of the most interesting roles in Battlefield 2, allowing a player to direct his side from off the battlefield, and to deploy assets like artillery strikes, UAV sweeps and more. There's been no news of this mode of play making it into BF3 yet, so this is fantastic news for the control freaks out there.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012