Battlefield 3 Proxzor Impressions
By Remko Molenaar (Proxzor), OnRPG Journalist
As every year, the last few months are where the big guns come out blazing for sales dominance. This year’s competition betweeen Activistion and EA is really fierce and they are battling for the best sold first person shooter spot of 2011. EA decided to give everyone a quick sneak peak of their try for the throne and Battlefield 3 did not disappoint in open beta. The open beta ran from the 29th of September until October 10th. With such a monumental opportunity on my hands, I powered up my PC and Xbox360 and gave it a whirl.
Battlelog
Normally you install a game and you can open it easily with the shortcut that has been placed on your desktop. With Battlefield 3 however when you have finished installing or downloading you have to log in on your Origin client. After you have been logged in and try to run Battlefield 3 it will automatically open up your browser and visit the Battlelog site that EA made for easier access to quick information.
After you logged in on the Battlelog, you can look up every piece of information that you desire. For example you can look up what kind of rank you are, how many experience points you will need to rank up and what kind of weapons you have unlocked and have been using. You can also look up your detailed profile information such as accuracy rate, win/loss ratio, and Kill:Death ratio. The Battlelog is a really easy to access yet informative site that will help you look up everything that you have experienced in Battlefield 3 without even having to start up the game. If you are ready to hop on a server with your friends, you can make a party before starting up the game. Once you have made the party and everyone joined your party you can choose to join the voice channel or simply leave it. The Battlelog site supports voice channels for you and your party to use while playing Battlefield 3 and surprisingly enough they work great. I could hear everyone just fine and with minimal lag time too!
Gameplay
When starting up your game you get immediately thrown into a server before you could even change your options. I hope that they will fix this before the release of Battlefield 3 but it was somewhat annoying. I actually had to join a server which automatically puts you on a side to deploy to change my graphical options. This wasn’t too enjoyable as I got shot like 3 times while adjusting my graphics options. Once I fixed my settings I went about learning the differences between the 4 available classes.
The first class is the assault class; this class has been given the medical treatments the medic class in previous Battlefield versions had. They also are equipped with a basic power weapon such as the AK47 and M4 for heavy pressuring of enemy front line positions.
The Support class returns to its role it had in Battlefield 2; they are equipped with the Light Machine Gun to give the best possible cover for their teammates on the battlefield. They are also given ammunition kits to throw on the ground and supply teammates with extra ammunition.
The Engineer class is very similar to Bad Company 2; they are made to engage tanks and armored vehicles with their rocket launchers. They use carbine rifles to defend themselves and there are a wide variety of weapons to unlock for the Engineer class to make them effective on every possible map.
The sniper class in Battlefield 3 is called the Recon; the Recon carries a sniper rifle for long range engagements. After unlocking the ability, the Recon class can call in artillery strikes. They even pack C4 explosives to blow up enemy vehicles or map objectives.
Since I have always taken the role of sniping I really got into that class and unlocked several different rifles and scopes. The unlocking system is plain and simple; if you make kills with a weapon you unlock more equipment upgrades related to that weapon. Besides the scopes and rifles I also unlocked suppressors and even a laser guided scope. These add-ons assist you with strengthening your aim and lowering recoil.
I have tested Battlefield 3 both on the Xbox and PC, and it’s a completely different experience. Peaking around corners on the computer can be instant death while on the console you seem to have a bit more leeway. The graphics are also much nicer on the PC but that speaks for itself since the consoles are quite limited. After playing on the console for a while I really missed my mouse and keyboard because it felt like a much smoother control mechanism. I feel that the controls on the Xbox could be slightly better as there just aren’t enough button placements to compliment the actions you need to take in the heat of battle.
Graphics
To play this beautiful game that demands quite a machine you will need to have at least a CORE 2 DUO 2.4GHZ Processor with at least 2 Gigabytes of RAM. You will also need 20 Gigabytes of free space and a DirectX 10.1 supporting Graphics Card that is compatible with 512 MB RAM. The recommended system requirements are much higher demanding and actually ask for a QUAD-CORE CPU along with 4 Gigabytes of RAM and a DirectX 11 compatible Graphics Card that has at least 1024MB RAM.
If you have no idea whatsoever about computer specs and you might think what is he babbling about, if you have bought a computer in the last year or 2 you might be able to run it but Battlefield 3 is a very high demanding game.
Conclusion
The Beta still had a lot of glitches and bugs but luckily most did not seem game breaking. The game looks really stunning and it will only look even better once the game hits the shelves. Unfortunately the beta only gave us access to one map, but I really got a good look about the game and I am definitely running to the stores once this game is released. Every class in the game fulfills an important role and the squad play is really needed to capture objectives and win matches. I have unlocked a lot of weapons and am pleased to say every weapon handles unique and can be further differentiated with the various unlockable add-ons. DICE and EA can be really proud of their game and it will have no problem selling out through the holiday season because Battlefield 3 is truly a work of art.
