Friday, September 30, 2011

A Day Into the Battlefield 3 Multiplayer Beta...



The Battlefield 3 multiplayer beta finally came out for everyone (360, PS3, PC) yesterday and been enjoying it despite how limited it is. For those who don't know, this beta features one map and one mode, which are Operation Metro and Rush respectively. Rush mode has pretty much became the primary multiplayer game for the franchise as of late as the goals have been the same and a single match can take pretty long to finish. Basically the point of rush is that the attacking team has to destroy sets of MCOM stations to progress through the map while the defenders prevent them from doing so. The lives count will reset for the attackers back to 100 when they destroy one set of MCOMs. As a team-based mode, rush still works fine even though people just wanna play it as if its team deathmatch racking up lots of kills while people like me would rather go for the win getting the objectives done. The class system is still present here with assault, engineer, support, and recon classes to choose from as they have their own perks. Personally, I have been going with engineer since I like the assault rifle they give you for both sides (M4A1 with red dot sight for example when attacking).

From what I noticed so far, people do love to go abuse prone no matter which side they're on whether if they are sniping because they're rocking the recon class or just simply hiding from the opposition to surprise them. Most of the time you'll be wandering how you got killed because you didn't see it coming at all, which is expected for multiplayer shooters being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course in typical Battlefield fashion, there is a leveling up system to unlock more weapons, ribbons and awards to collect when achieving certain tasks, and so on if you played any AAA first-person shooter in recent memory. Performance wise, this beta definitely lives up the name of being a beta with weird glitches. Being stuck on the terrain, not jump vaulting when you're supposed to do so, certain controls stop working for a second or two, and texture pop-in are just some of the issues I noticed with the beta in one day so far. In addition, the game will sometime freeze whenever a PSN friend window pops off, which is infuriating too. Other than that, the Battlefield 3 beta still performs functionally with no framerate hitches (still 30 frames per second folks).

The beta ends on October 10 for everyone and PC folks can somehow play the Caspian Border map as well, which features some vehicles to mess around with (Operation Metro doesn't have vehicles at all). At least EA and DICE are finally able to get some version of Battlefield 3 to everyone's hands unlike a certain franchise that only did one beta (cough, Call of Duty, cough). Then again, they have been pushing out betas for all Battlefield games lately (the Bad Company games and this one) to test out online performance rather than fix exploiting tactics since the game is out on October 25. Shooter fans (no matter which team you're repping) should give it a shot before it ends in two weeks.