Preview: We give you the first-round skinny on the epicness of 64-player Conquest in Battlefield 3... Part one of two.
I am not a fan of lines. Scratch that. I abhor lines. That’s why you’ll struggle to find me anywhere near a theme park, cinema chain that doesn’t allow me to book my seat online or high-profile sporting events. So when I tell you that I gladly lined up not once, but twice for some glorious Battlefield 3 action at GamesCom, you can probably start to formulate an idea of how excited you should be about this game.
And so begins the epic two-part journey that was my recent experience with Battlefield 3.
After some initial teething problems on day one, 64 lucky players were led into a ‘stalling room’. In this room we were made to watch 15 minutes worth of Battlefield 3’s single-player. Y’know, the stuff that every gamer anticipating this game has seen multiple times already. It was exactly the same as what was shown at the reveal in LA and has been broadcasted to the general public since. For shame! After the wait, a so-called training video was shown to the eager crowd, laying out the rules of Conquest (seriously), the basics of Battlefield gameplay (double seriously) and a general overview of the map we were about to play (hooray, something useful!).
From here, an impatient dash to a patiently waiting PC was next on the agenda before finally getting into the game. It’s worth pointing out that there was a strict 15-minute limit on each session, so I wasn’t about to squander my first time with Battlefield 3 going through kit options or trying to score a vehicle that I (partially wrongly… more on this in part 2) assumed everyone would be scrambling for. I’d already made the decision that my first 15 minutes with 64-player awesomeness on Caspian Border would be a Call of Duty affair: that is to say, I was going to rush my arse around the map and try and get in as many firefights as possible.
First and foremost, Battlefield 3 feels a lot like Bad Company 2, but in a very, very good way. It’s the myriad of gameplay tweaks across the board and the incredible prettiness of Frostbite 2 that makes this deserve the title Battlefield 3 and not Bad Company 2.5. Anyone who played Bad Company 2 will be right at home here, while fanatics (myself included) will instantly notice the differences.
Take, for example, the minor changes to the Assault and no-longer-called-Medic class that have major implications for Battlefield 3. You’ve probably heard that Assault is the new medic (albeit, still under the Assault title), while Bad Company 2’s Medic class is now called Support. At first glance, it seems that they’ve changed team support kits: the Assault guy exchanging his ammo pack for the medkit/defib combo and vice versa. But the implications stretch so much further. In my interview with the calm and informative Karl-Magnus (which I’ll publish soon), he highlighted the realisation behind the change.
In practical terms, players that favour the Assault class tend to move faster and act as frontline soldiers, while the Medics of Bad Company 2 preferred to play more of a mid-to-long-range role. What this meant was that the frontline, where most of the player deaths were occurring, were devoid of revival possibilities. Fast-forward to Battlefield 3 and I certainly netted a lot of team revives in my time as defib-equipped Assault class because I was closer to where the death was happening. Conversely, the Medic of Bad Company 2 was armed with a core weapon type, the light machinegun, that tended to chew through ammo fast, despite the weapon types sizeable ammunition capacity.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012