The first time I discovered Battlefield was when I tried Bad Company 1 demo on PSN store. When I picked up a sniper rifle (yes aren't we all?) and made my first successful leading shot I was like "Sheeeeet, this game follows physics!" and I was sold. Destructible environments made each BC1 round unique and unpredictable and land, water and air vehicles and distinctive classes made it great fun to play. I also just fell in love with the hazy effect on distant map rendering making the whole atmosphere very immersible. Pwning in BC1 felt good. Getting trophies pop up on the screen with harmonica jingle while in midst of action may have been a little annoying, nevertheless very satisfying. And staying alive after a crazy firefight and looking at the floor covered with kit bags was an unforgettable view edged into memory.

As I later found out after getting interested in BF franchise more and more, BC1 was trying to stay true to real Battlefield game. No auto-health or vehicle regen, no killcam, yes damage from friendly fire. Ok, you would get occasional team killing session break up, but actually knowing that you can hurt your teammate by mistake gave a great feeling of solidarity to the team. Knife in BC1, even though often failing in laggy games, was equippable and a joy to use. Rushing in a room and wiping the whole squad with just a knife – win! Did you also know you could jump on top of a raping tank and knife tank gunner because the top of his head was exposed? Yes, ain't this a Battlefield moment?

When DICE announced Bad Company 2 many of us just wanted a bug and lag fixes and more maps for Bad Company 1 and were willing to pay just for that the full price of the game. And the BC1 maps? Easily the best maps DICE produced post Battlefield 2. But Bad Company 2 was delivered on schedule and while it had great improvements over BC1, it lacked a lot of fun features from BC1. The BC2 netcode however was tighter, much better.

BC1 had low damage and high capacity magazines for rifles and SMGs and you needed to keep aim on a target longer if you wanted to kill someone. It therefore required some skill to both to gun someone down and to dodge bullets and survive. Getting better at aiming meant getting better at the game, room for improvement. Running on low health and kit swapping with a killed Support or Assault kit to fix yourself, then swapping back was also a skill. All guns except sniper rifles and 1 LMG had iron sights meaning you could not camp miles away from the action and pwn.

Bad company 2 changed all that. The damage went higher but the clip size went lower, fair play. The overall damage was not too high, but BC2 introduced damage modification perk in form of magnum ammo and to counter it a body armor perk. Default damage was right on the spot however. But you could equip almost each gun with 4x scope and some sniper rifles with 12x scopes. This encouraged camping as then you didn't need to be in the midst of action but could sit on the edge of the map and still score. Of course this back fired and discouraged people to seek CQC so many of the maps therefore featured linear flag placement and bottlenecks to compensate for the lack of CQC engagements. Conquest style was also changed from Double Assault. In BC1 there were no bases, each team would spawn on 1 of 5 flags at opposite ends and capture it straight away,then proceed to capture other flags. Teams often would change sides of the maps several times during the round. If one team would capture all flags the round would end very quickly.

In BC2 each team started at the uncapturable base. If one team would capture all flags the round would not end and baseraping would commence, where the said team would enter the other teams base and start spawn killing the other team. Even though it was a fair play decision, encouraging a team to capture flags so that they have alternative place to spawn, it caused too much crying and controversy among less skilled players.

Knife went from BC1 animation to Call of Duty stabbing animation and wasn't equippable any more. Needless to say it failed as much if not more as BC1 knife even with its commando auto-lunge mode. BC2 also introduced kill cam, auto-health regeneration and auto-spotting perk for scopes and more guns to chose from. You could no longer knife tank gunners or hear trophy jingles or see kit bags as soldier would just drop his primary weapon on the ground instead, which wasn't obvious at all. But DICE improved on destruction making some building fully collapsible and added some micro-destruction. Both changes were good as they opened more new possibilities for game scenarious.

Overall BC2 was much smoother than BC1. After playing BC2 for awhile going back to BC1 felt like downgrading experience until about few hours into the game then one would realise how much better the maps in BC1 were in comparison. Fair to say DICE released 2 most popular maps Oasis and Harvest Day from BC1 as DLC for BC2 but they also altered Conquest versions too much, which made them feel quite different from the originals.

Both games were perfectly crafted for consoles and their 24 player limitation. Lets put it this way, there was never a lack of action on the full server. Then DICE announced BF3 and it looked stunning from every trailer and in-game footage. It looked much more polished too. It was like a candy in a bright and colourful wrapper. But of course it is what is under wrapper that matters.

High bullet damage in BF3 is insanely high. It is so high that it makes the game play not fun. You can no longer duck for cover at the first sign of getting shot at. And even if you manage to drop behind an object you will still die a second later, allegedly because some of the hit detection/confirmation was moved to the client side and on the other guy's screen you are still in the open because of latency. High damage encourages camping. BTW camping – waiting patiently, usually in a corner, ready to shoot at first sign of another player passing by.

Someone on PC extracted the damage values for normal mode and with most weapons it takes 3 to 4 bullets into the body to kill someone from 100% health. High damage is quite understandable from a weapons designer view. How can you balance 1,000 guns so that none of them is overpowered? Easily, make them all overpowered. This way it doesn't matter if one gun kills you gently and another gun kills you roughly. You are dead either way. This is what it feels like in BF3. High damage means no skill required. You can camp your way to a great K/D just by camping stairs, as many do. But if you are like me and need to move then you will often get downed by a camping low skill player. You also don't need aiming skills any more, with such high bullet damage any noob can spray with closed eyes and still get a kill.

Some say, well this is how you do it in real life, you prone, you camp and this is where I'm getting all confused. Is this an accurate battlefield simulation or an arcade first person shooter? Why you cannot for example blow up a what seems like a sheet metal door on a garage on Seine Crossing if it is supposed to emulate reality? Why high damage is ok but the destruction that every neuron in your brain tells you should happen, does not? Why you can't blow up a hole in a thin wall at the end of a corridor at B on Metro with an RPG? This would've stopped RPG spam at that location after first rocket hit that wall instantly.

BF3 knife is the biggest fail of all BF knives I've seen. If you want dogtags you have to knife enemy only from behind, it switches to unnecessary long animation and will most likely get you killed if someone else is in the room too. Yes you have to be extremely lucky to knife a bunch of people next to each other in BF3 and survive. You can equip the knife but then it takes 2 to 3 slashes to kill someone and needless to say you will get killed before you finish, unless they are on their last leg. This is exactly what I'm talking about, seems like not one BF3 designer thought that you might need to knife a bunch of people next to each other. This short sightedness in everything is what ruins BF3 for me. Coolness over practicality. Yes it is cool to see your guy taking dogtags with the tip of his knife but it is completely impractical. When you play the game for years after you have seen this cool animation enough times it is getting annoying. Cool is good, but when it is overdone and impractical it is not cool any more.

In BC1 for example all 5 classes were really distinctive. Recon(sniper rifle) – long range, Assault(Assault rifle) – long/medium, Support(LMG) – medium, Specialist (SMG) – medium/short, Demolition (shotgun) – close range. Assault would lose to Specialist in CQC but Specialist would lose to Assault at range. Also each class had their distinctive role. In BC2 two classes were merged into one and the effective distances at which they operate got blurred with introduction of all class weaponry and scopes. In BF3 this line is even more blurred, where every weapon can have 25,000 scopes. If you pick up a kit you don't even know what you are getting. Quick kit swapping, one of the great techniques that required some skill in the past is now obsolete in BF3, it also requires you not to just press but also hold a button to kit swap. Yes in a game where anyone can just sneeze on you and you are dead you have to sit there holding a button to kit swap…to a surprise kit set up as well!

But it has jets you say. Having jets might work on PC where you have 64 players but on consoles where there are only 24 and it is 4 people out of the action at any given time since all jet maps have 4 jets. You have to have large maps to accommodate jets at the same time less people on the ground. BF1943 had air superiority mode where all you could do is fly around trying to shoot another guy. This is what jet action in BF3 like. 4 jets chasing each other helping no one. And the sad thing is, it will probably not change.

Playing all maps in rotation I quickly found out that game play on each map is always the same. On Caspian, the server is full but there is no one anywhere and just 2 guys doing all the flag running. In Metro it is always lying down on a belly at B and shooting people coming through the doors from A. Grand Bazaar (Grand Bizarre as my friends call it) is always shoot out in the long passage way with flag B in the middle. You know I'm starting to think that B as in flag name stands for Boring. Actually some time ago I made a post on EAUK forum with a joke suggestion for a new game mode with a long corridor, where one team starts at one end and another at the other end, the one that reaches the opposite end of the corridor wins.

http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/batt … -ever.html

Don't know what I was thinking, but it seems like someone from DICE liked it a lot to implement it in both Grand Bazaar and Operation Metro.

I know for sure that DICE guys are very proud of the level of persistence they added to the game. 145 ranks, FFFFFFFFUUUUU! Tons of unlocks medals and stuff and you can customise your gun, your look and your vehicle. But is it what makes a game great? Is this what makes you want to play game over and over and over? There are people that like trophy collecting and lots of them played BC1 and BC2 until they got all the trophies then never touched those games again. Lots of them have never even reached top rank. I myself reached top rank on 2 accounts in both BC1 and BC2 but do not have any trophies, neither I platinumed all the guns. I played both games because I enjoyed playing them. I played them because each round was bringing different challenges. Playing against more experienced opponent was making it even more engaging.

Note how I did not say anything about the bugs and glitches this game is full of even after the patch. This is all about the game play. I'm really sad to see my favourite game being simplified to accommodate the lowest denominator noob. I was always supporting the idea of making games newcomer friendly, I know how it feels to come late into a game, but noobifying game is not making it newcomer friendly, it is removing any skill required to excel. And this is what I'm against.

BF3 has no depth – as simple as that. It doesn't get better after playing it more, unlike with other Battlefield games. Campers win. When it comes to vehicles it is about who has the latest unlock. The more I progress the less I feel the urge to play it. My W/L improves, my K/D improves, my skill level raises but my desire to play BF3 diminishes. I feel like there is nothing to aspire to. Too much freedom to experiment and get better was taken away by introducing unnecessary auto features. Quite coincidentally I made a thread on EAUK BC2 forum about various automatic features present in BC2 as BF3 was announced

http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/batt … o-bc2.html

It was a joke post to summarise the level of noobification existing in BC2. From that thread: "Can BF3 get even more auto?" And what a silly question that was. BF3 noobified a Battlefield game on a new level. Among killcam, auto-heal for infantry and lack of friendly fire you now have auto-heal for vehicles and auto-guided missiles as well as auto-spot on minimap when fired without silencer. Anti-air at the bases are indestructible, every jet, helicopter and even infantry have heat seekers that require no skill, just point and wait, beep beep beep, fire. Even tanks have guided shells now. All the Battlefield franchise lacks now is an auto-win button (not sure, maybe you get one at rank 145). Also too many restrictions were imposed on the map in terms of OOB (Out Of Bounds) zones and allowed destruction. Ever heard of "nanny state" expression? Well, it fits how I feel right now about BF3 to a T. Will Back to Karkand expansion bring back true Battlefield? I guess we have to wait and see.

In conclusion I will leave you with this word of wisdom – Make a game that caters for good players and you'll give bad players something to look forward to. Cater for bad players and it'll die soon.

There is no Battlefield canon. BF1942’s World War II doesn’t shape the sci-fi tundra battles of BF2142, and buying XP boosters as a cartoon Nazi has no bearing on Bad Company 2’s royal rumbles. The developers, DICE, go where they want, and after years of circle-strafing around the subject, it’s time for Battlefield 3

My first glimpse of it at DICE’s Stockholm HQ is a bit of a shock: singleplayer, urban. DICE briefly mention that there will be multiplayer on the same scale as Battlefield 2, but retreat from any specific talk of it. For now they’re showing the strides they’ve made with their wonderful Frostbite engine – now up to v2.0 – and demoing the setting and the singleplayer.

You’ll play Sgt Black, part of a four-man squad in a city on the Iran/ Iraq border, patrolling the streets for insurgents. As if that locale wasn’t unstable enough, it’s also built on a faultline. And it’s a towering, glittering city, not the dusty, clichéd Middle East tips we’re used to seeing. Cast in highcontrast blueish light, it’s gorgeous.

Black’s squad winds through the city listening to Johnny Cash’s ‘God’s Gonna Cut You Down’, proving that DICE are effortlessly cool. They disembark from their APC, and are following orders and cutting through alleys when a tremor shakes dust loose from the surrounding buildings. Knowing DICE, and the destructive capabilities of the Frostbite engine, I start to wonder. Bad Company 2 introduced dynamic destruction to the PC: small squat buildings that could be blasted full of holes or crumble under tank blasts. Nothing bigger than a few stories. But this is an updated engine, tailor made. A destructible city? They couldn’t… Could they?

The tremor subsides and the patrol continues, through a building and out into a makeshift carpark, just a small square between more buildings.

Perfect ambush territory. From a balcony overlooking the square, an insurgent fires down at the squad, dropping one of the men instantly and forcing the others to take cover behind cars. The square is suddenly alive with gunfire. Before there’s time to take stock, a terrorist squeezes in between Sgt Black and his men, and the game drops to slow-mo for a second, before the terrorist is headshot. The downed teammate calls for help, and Black drags him out of the fight and into cover. Rescue injured squaddies, take them out of the fight, and they have time to recover.

In any other game it would be an effort to dig the terrorist on the balcony out, but Battlefield’s destructible scenery changes the way you think about cover. Concentrated fire on the concrete chips away a hole, exposing him. He flees. Destruction is a lot more subtle in Frostbite 2.0.

With the ambusher gone, it gives the squad more room to manoeuvre. Little ground-level battles weave in and out of the parked cars. When it’s over, Black’s squad pushes on.

It’s significant how DICE are handling the story bookending all this action. Battlefield 2 was the original over-the-top modern combat game. With the arrival of the Modern Warfare series, they could easily have re-engineered their game as a political blockbuster, but the story of Battlefield 3 goes in a different direction.

Karl-Magnus Troedsson, DICE’s general manager, explains. “I don’t think we have, like, some arty-farty agenda. I’m not saying that they have, don’t quote me on that! Sometimes I get the feeling that some developers make a game because they want to make a statement. It might be compared to writing a book, or writing an idea on a blog, or something like that. We make games because we love playing games. We still make Battlefield games because we still love to play our Battlefield games. It’s like cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, it’s like shooting around when you’re a neighbourhood kid and you were playing on the street.

“The setting we choose is more about how we can gain enough interest, and we know that a healthy level of controversy and realism always gets people’s attention, and that’s the kind of space we want to be in. Do we want to go over the top and raise people’s eyebrows and get people to ban the game and get attention? No, that’s not really what we do.”

The demo cuts to a rooftop a few minutes later. The squad are now under fire from a single sniper who, in a neat reversal of the previous action, is blasting away chunks of their own cover. One by one they crawl (you can go prone!) to the edge of the building, to a concrete lip that provides some shelter. Even so, it’s crumbling under the sniper’s attention: each huge, concussive bullet blast sends chunks of wall spilling over the rooftop. Black collects a rocket launcher, the team blindfires over the wall, and he pops up and launches. He’s not entirely accurate, but it doesn’t matter. The entire facade of the building the sniper was stationed in shivers, then falls off. Dust billows out from each storey, and the floors crumble, making the exposed inside of the building frown like big, sad face. Yeah, he’s dead.

Black barely needed to aim: as long as he hit the building that sniper was going to suffer, and I now know a lot more about the subtleties of scenery destruction in Frosbite 2.0: it works on a both a smaller scale than in Bad Company 2, and a larger. The building they just destroyed was much bigger than those of BC2, yet it didn’t collapse all the way. It was later confirmed to me that while you can do a lot of damage to the city structures, only prescribed ones will be able to fully collapse. The rest will just turn into swiss cheese, at least enabling new hollows of cover to be carved out of their husks.

It’s not all wanton destruction. The next section brings a surprising change of pace: Black is alone in a building, following a wire to a bomb. This disarming sequence is interrupted by an insurgent, and there’s a brutal quicktime event, left and right mouse buttons controlling his fisty pummelling. Ordinarily I would be wary of filler material like this, but it comes as a welcome respite from the firefights and carnage. It’s also amusing that in a game built for large-scale destruction, Black is actually stopping a bomb from going off.

The calm doesn’t last. Black runs out into a large battle on the city streets, abandoned cars and military vehicles providing cover. Rather than freeform, it feels tightly scripted: he moves through it to a bridge overlooking the road, firing down onto the rushing insurgents, thinning their assault. The ratatat of his rifle is drowned out by the whumph of the helicopter that backs him up. Even so, the insurgents rush under the bridge and over to the other side. Black retreats from the bridge to the street, to the abandoned military vehicle. Again, it feels more like a scripted event than an emergent battle, but it has a point. He’s holding off the insurgents, rattling off bullets as the support helicopter comes back for a second strafing run at the enemies.

Then a full-on earthquake hits.

It shows just what DICE are capable of with their engine. The ground rips and tips. Giant, ragged tears appear in the concrete. The buildings begin a slow, inexorable collapse. One takes out the helicopter, others fall into each other. In about five seconds, the whole city has changed: the ground is at odd angles, tilted underfoot. Buildings are lying on their sides, broken and ragged. I imagine scrambling through them, trying to escape insurgents while worrying about the inevitable aftershocks. The scale of the destruction is astonishing. Everything as far as the eye can see has shifted, the air is full of dust, the towering cityscape that impressed me at the start of the game just doesn’t exist anymore. This is why DICE have been building the Frosbite 2.0 engine.