Preview: Vehicles, kit options and co-op are all under the flashlight as we return to Battlefield 3... Part two of two.
On Monday I detailed my first hands-on experience with Battlefield 3 64-player glory on the Caspian Border map. But, realistically, there was no way that I was going to be halfway around the world and not go back for seconds; no siree. My second outing with 64-player Conquest was a slower-paced affair, as I was determined to get some time with the all-important vehicular component that’s part and parcel of any game with Battlefield in the title. I also had a sneaky peek beneath the hood to see what was hidden in the game menus.
As I mentioned in Monday’s piece, I partially mistakenly assumed that everyone would be scrambling for a coveted seat in a spawn vehicle. After all, this was the first time DICE was publically showing off jets and a lot of people were eager to see how they handled. While there was an initial dash for jeeps and tanks, I was able to spawn directly into the cockpit of a fully fuelled, fully armed jet fighter: nice.
Trying to be clever, I recalled the paradox of Bad Company 2’s flight inversion checkbox: unchecked was normal for an inverted player, but checking ‘inverted’ made it un-inverted. Throw in the weirdness of a naturally un-inverted UAV control scheme, and flying quickly proved to be a frustrating affair in Bad Company 2 when switching between choppers and UAV. Back to Battlefield 3, and I couldn’t tell whether the weirdness persisted because checking or unchecking the appropriate box ended in the same result: un-inverted flight.
Bear in mind that I was doing this while flying (time was precious) and I quickly had to settle for weird un-inverted flight. It was frustrating to say the least. The jets are slow enough to be manageable—no Desert Combat speeds here—but still fast enough to zip around the map. The other team was apparently struggling to get jets into the air, but I managed to take down one poor bastard who was clearly still getting the hang of flying with a whole lot of machinegun fire and a slight nudge at the end to get him back to the respawn screen.
Unable to rewire my brain for un-inverted flight for too long, I decided to hit the silk; but not before lining up a tank. My pilotless jet overshot its mark but the ensuing explosion was sufficiently epic. Aside from the jets, jeeps handle exactly the same as Bad Company 2, while my brief stint in an attack helicopter was just as sluggish as the keyboard/mouse handling of choppers in the last Battlefield outing. It’s worth noting that Engineers can now equip surface-to-air rocket launchers for targeting and combatting air jockeys. Tracer darts may be out, but at least this offers ground combatants more of a fighting chance.
Interestingly, the tank I took for a spin had a rather meaty mounted machinegun that blocked almost the entirety of my right-side view in first-person perspective. Apparently, DICE wants us to drive tanks in third-person view. It wasn’t too long before my physics test of tank versus tree ended abruptly with Frostbite 2’s glitchy solution for how to get my steel beast off a random piece of nature: a disappearing act. This was my cue to take a look at some of the class options.
As before, each of the four classes can be customised somewhat to your liking. Karl-Magnus mentioned that there are over 50 infantry weapons and apparently there are a whole lot of attachment unlocks for those, too. We only had a couple of weapons unlocked per class, most of which stuck to the core class specifics (e.g. sniper rifles for Recon, LMGs for Support, etc.), but shotguns and certain pistols were decked out with underslung and, as far as I could tell, permanently switched on flashlights. While these seemed a bit redundant for a daylight map, I swear I managed to blind a fool or two before unloading hot lead into their heads.
Vehicles, likewise, had the ability to have certain abilities (or should that be ‘unlocks’?) activated for their augmentation. Interestingly, the weapon and other kit options have seen a design overhaul since Bad Company 2, with no massive dropdown/drop-up menus. Instead, it’s a clean horizontally cycling approach with meaningful information provided for the currently selected weapon or kit item. It’s a small but necessary change. Back to vehicles, it seems that jets and choppers are following the Bad Company 2 tradition of forcing you to equip a perk to access countermeasures. Except this time around, it’s not up to players to determine that smoke = flares: they’ve named the abilities accordingly.
And then there was co-op mode.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012