while i was randomly trawling the web i came across this excellently edited video with a dash of music and rageguy images for extra amusement. its a bit puerile but damn some of it made me laugh. I'm not even sure if its trolling? is exploiting some ones stupidity trolling?

EA have now announced when we can expect to see the new maps, vehicles, and weapons that are all included in this add-on, and we won’t be waiting long.

December 6th is the date they gave us for both the Americas and Europe, although since the PlayStation Store updates a day later in Europe, it may actually be the 7th before it shows up in your region.

Speaking of the PlayStation Store, that’s the only place you’ll be able to find it for the first week of release, per the previously announced agreement EA made with Sony to release all add-ons on the PS3 first. You can expect the Xbox 360 and PC versions to launch the following week on the 13th. Regardless of platform, the expansion will be free if you purchased the Limited Edition of the Battlefield 3.

Has anyone had a chance to play the PC or PS3 versions of the game since the patch went live on those platforms?

Source: US PS Blog

So as you can see from the above screenshot, the game looks lovely. There are however some serious flaws in the multiplayer game.

Overall it’s still first and foremost a Battlefield game, it requires strategy and teamwork to complete and win a round, what ever flavour you play: Rush, Conquest, Squad Rush, Team Deathmatch, or Squad Death Metch. Big maps and upto 24 players per server can make for some astounding games, myself and RavingZombie have had some excellent rush and conquest games this weekend. Sometimes funny, sometimes frustrating, but never boring, and thanks to mine and Raving’s excellent gameplay, we’ve usually won.

The Game Godes:
Rush – my favourite
Gold Rush in Battlefield: Bad Company and Rush in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 are game modes introduced in the Bad Company series. The objective of the game is for the attacking team to destroy the defending team’s crates (gold crates in Battlefield: Bad Company, M-COM Stations in Battlefield: Bad Company 2). Attackers receive reinforcement tickets at the start of the game and will lose if they run out of tickets. The reinforcement tickets are restored by destroying both crates at one defending base. Each defender team’s base has a pair of crates, and when both objectives have been destroyed, the map is expanded, making room for a new base with a new set of crates where the defenders have to fall back. This process is repeated until the last defending base is lost.

Conquest:
The aim of the Conquest game mode is to capture neutral (usually white or no-flag) or enemy flags and hold them. Once captured, flags serves as a spawn point for both infantry and vehicles. Teams must hold flags and kill opposing team members to reduce the enemy ticket count. Once a team ticket count is reduced to zero, the other team wins. In Battlefield 1942, ticket loss depends on the type of Conquest mode:

Head-On – Enemy tickets start reducing once a team holds over half of the map’s flags
Assault – Enemy tickets only reduce once every flag on a map has been captured by a team

Ticket Loss

Ticket loss, also referred to as ticket bleeding, is the state where a team constantly loses reinforcement tickets due to the opposing team holding more or all flags. This is a strategy employed by many teams in order to avoid lengthy periods of fighting, although if the current team re-captured flags, the ticket loss may be incurred on the opposing team.
History

Conquest mode made its popular debut in Battlefield 1942 and featured as a staple online game mode, featuring in every Battlefield game. However, this trend was broken with the release of Battlefield: Bad Company, although a conquest mode was quickly released as a free downloadable content. It returned in Battlefield 1943 and as one of the many game modes of Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Along with rush, it is the premier game mode for Battlefield 3. Also, Conquest Assault will be included for maps in the Back to Karkand map pack for Battlefield 3 in December.
Trivia

Conquest was the only game mode in Battlefield games until “Capture The Flag” was introduced in Battlefield 2: Modern Combat, although there were several variants in Battlefield 2.
A variant of the Conquest game mode called “Titan” was introduced in Battlefield 2142, in which both teams compete to take and hold missile silos instead of flags. This change added a more story-like appearance to the gameplay of the Conquest game-mode, with desperate fighting inside the Titans ensuing once one team gains entry to the opposing team’s Titan.
Conquest mode in Battlefield Play4Free works much more differently than previous games. Instead of having “ticket bleeding” as in previous games, now there’s a score limit that one team must reach just by holding any number of flags, in which more flags held by one team earns them more points.

Squad Rush: My other Favourite
Same as Rush but smaller…
Up to 4 players per team (1 Squad).
1 M-COM Station per base.
Maps are much smaller than on Rush.
Only 20 reinforcement tickets for attackers.
Exclusion of any vehicles

Team Death Match:
This mode has a player cap of 24 on all platforms, meaning there will be two teams of 12 pitted against each other. The mode is entirely isolated from use of any vehicle, like Squad Rush. The objective of the game mode is to reach a certain amount of kills, like in Squad Deathmatch.

Squad Deathmatch:
In this game type, 4 squads (labeled Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta) will fight each other on a map. The first team to achieve 50 enemy kills wins the match. Instead of spawning in a set base like in Rush or Conquest, Squad Deathmatch has players spawn in either a random spawn point around the map or on their squadmates. There is also an IFV – always an M3A3 Bradley – in the center or near the center of the map and it is labeled on the HUD and the minimap with an icon marking its location.

Gameplay relies on good teamwork for each team to play their best. A well balanced squad that communicates well has the best chance at winning a round, where as a team full of Recon Kit wielders may suffer, but this is not always the case. The light tank proves very useful to the squad that decides to capture it as it has three machine gun (the top mounted M2 Browning and the two side-mounted firing ports) positions to cover the vehicle as the driver moves about toting the main 30mm chain gun. It is recommended that each squad-mate has a different Vehicle Specialization, with the driver having an active Specialization like the Alternate Weapon Package or the Smoke Countermeasures Package.

So now the important bit: The Problems With Battlefield 3

1. Unlocks:
The unlocks are great and add a huge amount of choice to the game, but it’s flawed and in a bad way.
You start out with a simple main weapon in all the varying classes, both the USA and PLR have different weapons too, making the range of availabe unlocks absolutely massive. The problem is that when you play as one side (USA assault for example), you’ll start to unlock some goodies like heavy barrel (increased damage and vertical recoil), red dot, holo scope, acog 4x scope, grenade launcher, sniper scope and more.
The problem is when you change sides to PLR, you have to unlock everything again! Change main weapon – yep you guessed it, you have to unlock everything again, change class… unlock everything again.
This makes for tens of thousands of weapon combinations, but it also makes changing weapon type or class very very frustrating.

2. Squad System:
Finding a decent server with space for one or more friends is a nightmare, try finding a server with free space for four people where you are all in the same squad, hell, getting on the same team is a challenge on it’s own. This is where squad play falls down, DICE would be better advised to rent servers to console owners, at least this way you can kick or switch players and make room for you and friends.

3. Voice chat:
Some improvements have been made since the realease of the game, but talking to friends in the same squad is sometimes impossible.

4. Lag:
Again improvements have been made by DICE to reduce the rubberbanding, but it’s still not entirely perfect, and the more players you join with (squad play) the more lag you will get.

5. Helicopters, Jets and land vehicles:
Helicopters were hard to control in Bad Company 2, and they’re even worse, much worse in Battlefield 3. It’s a common sight to see a pilot take off with a chopper full of people and crash within seconds killing everyone on board. Jets are easier to control, but are severly limited to basic weapons and gadgets until you get enough kills to add extra’s. It’s a similar system to the unlock system for various classes and loadouts. You have to unlock as much as you can for one vehicle, then do it all again for other vehicles. Same with tanks and IFV’s. The unlocks take time, then you have to do it for the other team.

6. Bullet Damage:
This is far too high, and more often than not you’ll die and not know where the kill came from, let alone have time to react and defend yourself. So be prepared to die… A LOT.
This causes a problem in that people will camp rather than run/rush around trying to support team members.

Overall:
While the game is still fun to play, it’s very frustrating for all the reasons listed above, and the biggest problem… issues 1, 5 and 6 will never be fixed, DICE wanted the game this way and this is how it will stay.
This wont stop me from playing the game, but I definitely wont play it as much as Bad Company 1 or 2, and if I dont play it as much, most other people will loose interest too.

Over and out. Dazbobaby: Die hard battlefield fan.

I played anything and everything I could get my hands on, but mostly Command and Conquer Red Alert 1 and 2, racing games, Black Hawk Down ( a truly brilliant FPS), Battlefield 2, and Battlefield 2142.

But it was 2142 that killed PC gaming for me. I loved it you see, I played this game for 12 hours a day where possible, and even quit a job so I could play it even more. My name is Dazbobaby and I am (was) an addict.
I had my own 24 man server running Panama Canal Titan Only, and it would be full or nearly full 24/7.
I had regulars playing, I had clans playing, and one clan even paid me a small fee each month to keep some space reserved for them.

But the game wasn’t without it’s problems, it crashed a lot, and sometimes when it crashed nothing could get it working again, nothing but a complete re-install of windows, drivers, then the game.
It got to the point where I had a backup of my Windows partition, all ready to go for 2142, and I could be up and running again in less than 10 minutes, thanks to a DOS programme called Ghost, you know it as Norton Ghost. Back then it fit on a floppy disk, now it just fits on a CD… bloatware!

So now I had a means of backup and fast restore, I was happy. Eventually one of the clans asked me to join forces with them, and I did.
And things were good, for a while, at some point I had to get another job, and that would really interfere with my gaming, but a job came to me, it involved nights, was short on hours and high on pay. I worked for a driving agency, worked weekends, and got paid upto £50ph – nuff said.

The rest of the week was mine, and things were good again. But it wouldn’t last.
In the end I got fed up with re-installing windows just for this one game, and I ended up getting so frustrated I did the unimaginable… I sold my PC. My high end gaming rig was gone, I had no game console, and no games.

Drastic I know, but I needed to break away from all the problems I’d been having and give myself a rest from gaming.

Amazingly I had no withdrawl pangs at all, infact I enjoyed the lack of stress that gaming enduced in me. No more frustration at dying, no more rage at the game having crashed for the 10th time that day, and no more back stabbing and sniping that comes with playing in a clan.

I worked more and earned more and didn’t look back once! That was nearly 5 years ago.

I did eventually get bored without gaming and took the plunge on a shiny new PS3 in Christmas 2008 (without the emotion engine), but I had some big problems with the controller. I was used to the keyboard and mouse, and this single joypad thingy just wasn’t working for me. It almost broke the deal to be honest, the only reason I stuck with the PS3 was the blu-ray drive, and media playback. This was a boon at the time, no more watching movies on my laptop, I could now watch them on my TV, and DVD upscaling looked awesome – until I bought my first blu-ray… I was hooked, nothing compared to the picture quality, and that sealed the deal… I was a Playstation 3 fanboy. I would just have to get used to the joypad… and I did

Once I clicked with the controller, nothing could stop me, and thanks to a few guys who loved Battlefield Bad Company 1 from the official Sony forums, I started www.dazbobaby.com (dont bother looking it up, it’s now just a holding page), then after a short time, www.mess-hall.co.uk our new permanent home.

The rest is now history, until recently that is.
You see I’ve just bought a new PC (and pissed off a few people because of my video and screenshot uploads – jealousy!), and started by playing Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, Mirror’s Edge and Bad Company 2… yeah,yeah,yeah, I’m a walking advertisment for D.I.C.E. games, and lets face it, they do look so much better on the PC in 1080p with the highest level of detail turned on.

BUT… despite the lushness of the images, playing is not without problems, control is one of them, keeping the games working is another.
The mouse maybe a lot more accurate than a joypad, but it’s this sensitivity that making it difficult to control, and so is the keyboard… my finger just aren’t used to the dexterity required anymore.
Factor in that the games either work or they don’t – modern hardware is a blessing and a curse… Need for speed: Carbon just wont work in widescreen or resolutions past 1280×1024. Some games can manage these new graphics cards and processors, some can’t, and this is where games consoles just rule… They will play games that were made at launch, just as well as games made last month.

The joypad also doesn’t require as much finger bending as a keyboard, and while there are people out there who might scream at their monitor calling me a fool, I prefer joypads to keyboards… and for the longest time I thought I would prefer a keyboard and mouse. But by buying a new PC I’ve proven how wrong I am.
I’m getting my ass handed to me on a regular basis in Battlefield games, yet on the PS3 I almost always come top at the end of the round.

So now for some comparison pictures:
First off GRiD PS3 Version – By CodeMasters

GRiD PC Version:



And a nice 1080p video:

Battlefield Bad Company 2 by D.I.C.E.
PS3 Screenshots: (Yes we all know Symonator likes to play with his chopper – A LOT )

Bad Company 2 PC Screenshots

For a Mirror’s Edge PC Gallery clicky here!
For a Mirror’s Edge PS3 Gallery clicky here!

I could go on for even longer, but whats the point, you already know that PC’s rule in the graphics department right?
Yep, but the PS3 rules in the control and compatability department.

So the Pro’s and Con’s.
For PC:
Lovely graphics.
Keyboard and Mouse – but only if thats your thing.
Multimedia
Faster loading times

For the PS3:
Cheap – £250 or less
Joypad
Compatability – you just know your games WILL work no matter what
Works with your TV
Blu-Ray
5.1 upto 7.1 sound – doable with a PC, but it’ll cost more
Multimedia
Friends list
Playstation Move
Console Exclusives: Just try buying InFamous or Bad Company 1, or Battlefield 1943 on the PC!

So there it is, my personal opinion of why I think the PS3 is better than a gaming PC.
And thats just what it is, “My Opinion”, you can argue with me, but you can’t change my mind.
Right now I’ll stick to what I can manage – Racing Games on the PC, everything else PS3 baby yeah!

Thanks for reading.
Steam: dazbobaby
PSN: dazbobaby
Raptr: dazbobaby