Battlefield 3 Initial Reactions, Everyone?

[FFHAuthor]

The Multiplayer is worthwhile. Graphic are good, gameplay is solid, some of the things included keep it decently balanced (For now). It's clear that this was a multiplayer game first and foremost. It's just sad that a multiplayer game was weakened to add on a completely generic single player campaign, since without a doubt, you know that the dev team had to take time from polish and such to work on the single player.

I enjoyed Battlefield Bad Company 1&2's campaign's immensely. Sure, the characters were cliched, but they were the right kind of cliched. They had character, you could identify them and pick them out of a crowd, you knew how they'd react and you could even anticipate what they were going to do.

Rainbow Sprinkles gag trailer exemplified this. Bad Company was about making fun of 'Realistic Military' FPS games. It took shots at Call of Duty, and Rainbow Six, and other major games that were out and popular and you could laugh at all of it even as it laughed at itself. You could laugh at the ultra cheezy jokes and outrageous one liners because hey, it was Bad Company.

Battlefield 3's campaign lacks character. There's no heart to it, nothing is unique. It's set in the middle east dealing with terrorism, US soldiers invading a hostile state, America and Russia are the main players and you're trying to stop terrorist attacks and kill insurgents. That has been done to death so much you can't even enjoy it anymore because EVERYONE know's how it's going to go, everyone knows the drum beat, everyone knows what the story says. BF3 didn't do anything that hasn't already been done.

Bad Company gave you a single player that was fun to play and you could enjoy it.

It's like the 'procedural Cop show' that's in vogue on TV. They're a dime a dozen, and you have a wide selection, from Law and Order, to NCIS, to Castle, to four different CSI's to whatever the latest ones are now. What makes people watch them? What makes them popular? Is it what's going on? No, Dragnet did the procedural cop show over thirty years ago and frankly you begin to see the pattern. Crime-investigation-showdown-badguy gets caught. How do all these shows get viewers? They all do it differently, they all make it interesting and enjoyable to watch. You can watch Castle or NCIS and enjoy both for different reasons, yet they're still the same kind of show at their core.

Battlefield 3 and Bad Company's single player games are both the same type of game at their core. Military FPS games. Sadly, BF3 decided to play that to the hilt for it's single player, and that style has been sorely played out in recent years.

I'm enjoying BF3's multiplayer so far, but I won't be finishing the single player campaign, I simply can't enjoy it.

 

[Greatjusticeman]

Actually changing my thoughts from earlier.

First: The single player,

I've yet to finish it all and I have no desire too. It's awful. The A.I. is no fun and it feels like I've played this sort of thing before in the CoD games, (yes, there are a lot of comparisons in this sector, and that's because they are true). I was especially disappointed after playing this jet fighter mission where you operate the missiles and gun but you don't even get to fly it. And from what I hear, it's only like 5 hours long.

Second: Multi-player.

I bought the game specifically for this reason, obviously, but I'm not impressed. One of my main complaints is the community. There have only been two or three games where my squad will actually stick together and do their class jobs instead of everyone else going off rambo like it's a CoD game. I'm often killed by camping snipers, people running around with shotguns, and when I want to respawn my squad mates are all over the map and not together.

And man, don't even get me started on the server problems and glitches. I play on an Xbox 360 - because I can't afford a hefty computer and because I like a controller better. I can't count how many times I've been disconnected by EA servers at the last minute when a game literally is about to end. To this day I'm still having issues trying to get into a game. I've also been killed by numerous glitches such as running lag, engine tweaks that shouldn't be there, or me shooting a whole round at an enemy - all right on that dot - yet a second later I'm all of the sudden behind a building and they are the one that is killing me.

This game is a disappointment so far. The videos looked good and I really thought this would take a big step forward in the FPS genre - but it didn't. A flashy engine isn't all that great when it's buggy and ruining a gamers experience. And EA needs to learn how servers work as well. The poor excuse they call a 'campaign' is embarrassing as well. After all the talk EA spewed about how this is going to take down MW3...man, they have to be swallowing those words now. (I don't play Call of Duty. But the whole fucking rivalry between the two Publishers was similar to High school rivalry's - it's fucking stupid).

I'm giving it a few days to see of things get better. If not, I'm just going to trade it in and put the credit towards Skyrim.