Battlefield 3 announced

[neliz]

PB is not implemented in the beta yet, but there's plenty of cheaters around.

Oh . and for the "I don't like prone" camp here.. I'm pretty sure I'm heading the B3D leader board now with a 483.91m headshot.. ofcourse on a guy being prone.

Weapon used, the M240B withM145 (3.4x) and bipod deployed and large capacity magazines, prone of course

 

[DeF]

PB is not implemented in the beta yet, but there's plenty of cheaters around.

Oh . and for the "I don't like prone" camp here.. I'm pretty sure I'm heading the B3D leader board now with a 483.91m headshot.. ofcourse on a guy being prone.

Weapon used, the M240B withM145 (3.4x) and bipod deployed and large capacity magazines, prone of course

I am not sure what are you trying to prove here. You were in prone position yourself! I am against prone camping because i like to attack and move around/get to target quickly. Thats just my personal play style. This makes games faster paced and thats what i like. Proning slows the game because you have to carefully check area before moving forward. And if your target is smaller (in prone position) it will be harder to spot and kill. For me this means more creeping and less fighting so generally less fun.
And i consider your headshot argument invalid because you get more heads not because of your enemy being in prone position but because your enemy is almost static. Still you have to wait for him to show up or crawl yourself from a position he is not watching.
I think we will just have to agree to disagree. We have different play styles. Im not trying to say one is better than the other, its just we get fun out of different things in game.

 

[tabs]

Would be nice if a serverside setting could stop prone usage. Personally I like prone, but highly configurable game settings for servers are the bees bollocks (surely worth more than the dogs knees).

I'm looking forward to playing lots of unranked games with unrestricted unlocks, for a fairer game, or dissallowing certain OP ones (like BFBC2 Carl Gustav). Love the fact that as a server owner (for unranked) you can choose individual weapons to allow. Hope the options go much deeper than that too.

Been playing a bit of Caspian, and it's wierd but I'm not getting the same joy out of it as I am Metro. I prefer conquest games... but this map can be a little yawn-worthy if you don't have a vehicle. It got better when I started defending the Forest point. Racked up a few kills there from troops coming over from the adjecent Hill point.

I think the big issue is because of the size of the map (and the poor map we have to guide us), a good squad is req'd to keep you in the fun. Running across a big field on your own is pretty boring, but with 1-3 others on voice it's not boring at all. Looking forward to proper squad creation/selection so I can play with buddies.

Had half an hour or so in Jets... Felt okay, but the wierd stall thing that surprises you is terrible. Not sure if it's from going too high or going out of the zone but all of a sudden you lose pretty much all control and just go in a straight line, usually in convoy with an enemy jet on your tail, or you on his. You can eventually get out of it by reducing throttle, but it's half a minute of just staring at the screen waiting.

Only having cannons unlocked is an awful idea. It just means that people who are late to getting in a jet have to suffer enemies A2A missiles while they basically fly a WW2 plane.

The surface to air armor seems very underpowered. I must have spent a good 10 total seconds of hits on one jet before I disabled it. It's possible that between bursts he was auto-healing, but in that case I think the auto-heal is too powerful.

I'd also like more clarity on what squad bonus options your squad have selected. It would be great if as you were customizing info would pop up on what not to pick. I'm not sure but I think the squad list on the lower left shows an icon for the option, but I had squad suppresion selected and the icon looked like squad sprint.. not sure if the '>>' meant something else though.

 

[RobertR1]

I am not sure what are you trying to prove here. You were in prone position yourself! I am against prone camping because i like to attack and move around/get to target quickly. Thats just my personal play style. This makes games faster paced and thats what i like. Proning slows the game because you have to carefully check area before moving forward. And if your target is smaller (in prone position) it will be harder to spot and kill. For me this means more creeping and less fighting so generally less fun.
And i consider your headshot argument invalid because you get more heads not because of your enemy being in prone position but because your enemy is almost static. Still you have to wait for him to show up or crawl yourself from a position he is not watching.
I think we will just have to agree to disagree. We have different play styles. Im not trying to say one is better than the other, its just we get fun out of different things in game.

Well it's simulating a battlefield so people lying out in key spots and waiting is a big part of that. The whole game would be too run n gun without prone. Prone adds a very nice element of caution esp when hovering around objectives. I like the tension. Also, if you spot a proned player before they spot you, they're absolutely screwed. The prone player is only at an advantage in scenario where they spot you first and don't miss the first shot/burst.

For me, I don't use prone mainly because I can't remap my keys yet but when I do use it, it's to avoid fire, not to get in line to take shots.

 

[DeF]

Well it's simulating a battlefield so people lying out in key spots and waiting is a big part of that. The whole game would be too run n gun without prone. Prone adds a very nice element of caution esp when hovering around objectives. I like the tension. Also, if you spot a proned player before they spot you, they're absolutely screwed. The prone player is only at an advantage in scenario where they spot you first and don't miss the first shot/burst.

For me, I don't use prone mainly because I can't remap my keys yet but when I do use it, it's to avoid fire, not to get in line to take shots.

As bigtabs said, sever side option to enable/disable prone would be awesome. We would get best of both worlds. I see what you are trying to say here and i also dont want it to turn into simple deathmatch. But IMO game objectives eliminate the risk of game being too much run & gun. Also we have rich environment and high bullet damage that enforces slower and more tactical approach to gameplay. Adding prone seems to be a bit overkill for me.
I would like to see kill and death stats removed from the ingame scoreboard entirely and moved to battlereports (or at least an option to do so serverside) for out of the game view only. Also objective completion reward should go waaaaaaay up and points for kill down. This way more players would have incentive to complete objectives no matter the cost (death count wise).
Some people complain that there is not much spotting or reviving going on and i think its also due to prone camping being too common. Also spotting is a bit borked (is that even an English word ? my translator cannot find it so i am not sure if its a right term ). Sometimes i can see scope glints from far away yet i cant spot the enemy.

 

[neliz]

I doubt prone has anything to do with your issues, but rather as you say, the reward scheme.

In BC2 a medic is often the highest ranked player since reviving players has a huge reward.
in BF3 I can score more points by suppressing an enemy than reviving a teammate.

The reward scheme is promoting camping, not the fact that we can prone or climb in trees.

 

[RobertR1]

At this point I've put 19hours into the beta and that's more than any beta I can think of (CoD4 on the 360 coming close). There are rough edges ofcourse but overall the game feels and plays great. I'm almost looking forward to the beta being over so I can focus on other games before diving back into the retail copy. I don't forsee myself touching the campaign or co-op at all. It's not why I bought the game. I wish there was an "install MP only" option

On a side note, being back to PC gaming feels so damn good again. It's like the old day of CS and BF2.

 

[Richard]

Let me go against the current here and say I prefer Metro over Caspian Border. Conquest is pretty much the same as it was in BF2 and what happens? You have 64 players on the server and yet all your fire-fights are 3 on 3 because everyone and every vehicle is scattered throughout the map. On Metro, you have your entire team with you.

Also, with BF2 I got tired of the flag-sitting gameplay where you and your squad wait whole minutes defending a flag that never gets attacked: conquest is forcing you not to play the game. I still enjoy it and I've played some pretty tense games yesterday on Caspian but the tension and constant pressure Metro has is more to my Wolf:ET/ETQW taste.

Caspian is beautiful though, and it runs so damn smooth. It's also an awe-inspiring sight to be the lone flag-defender and watching an Abrahams rolling down a hill towards you.

 

[tabs]

To be honest Richard I felt exactly the same way until about an hour ago when I really started enjoying Caspian. Playing as infantry (my preference) and defending Hill, Forest and Gas truly rocks. About now it's a 50/50 on both modes for me, and that shows how good DICE have tuned them both IMO.

Defending a central point that's near other points is lots of fun, and you're not waiting for action for too long. The only down moments are when your side has got all 3 capped, but at least then you know where the enemy is coming from.

I was playing as assault most of the time, which is wierd for a conquest map, but was racking up the kills as if I was in a tank.

The hotspots need to be found before you enjoy conquest on foot, but they are there.

I have to say I'm REALLY looking forward to the retail release when we can all squad up together and experience it as it's meant to be played. We maybe should think about getting a TS server, it seems that there's enough of us and it would magnify the fun by lots.

Shameless plug for my clan:

Spoiler

If you wanted to, you could join TOG. It's a fun clan for older gamers... not skill based but we have some good players. We have a very good TS server... only for 25 or older though, which I think you all probably are. There's not many european/american players playingn BF at the mo, we lost alot after BF2 died off, so it would be really nice to have more regulars (or irregulars) to add to the few northern hemisphere peeps we have already. We have about 250 aussies/kiwis playing BF3. If interested it's one forum post introducing yourself, and you're in, and free to use the Teamspeak.

I know it's a bit unusual advertising a clan here, but I think the B3D crowd and TOG are a good fit, being a bit more mature (ha!) and all.

 

[Richard]

I'm mostly around hilltop and checkpoint. This last game hilltop's structures were razed to the ground. Very intense.

 

[neliz]

The hotspots need to be found before you enjoy conquest on foot, but they are there.

For a large map, Caspian's Flags are actually really close together and you approach all except E (Antenna) unseen from another flag.

This is supported by the fact that even B, Hill has a couple of main entrances but loads of small pathways hidden between the rocks to allow for surprise attacks.

I also like the "mobile spawnpoint" appearing when all the bases are captured. this comes directly from Play4Free I think.

 

[Aeoniss]

The performance on Caspain is much better than I expected.

I did some FRAPS benchmarking on Metro and Caspian. I mainly compared the first set of M-Com's on Metro vs multiple places on Caspian. Metro's first set of M-Com's is the most taxing part of the level thus I focused on that.

Settings:
All Ultra except
Shadows: Medium
MSAA/Post-ProAA/HBAO/SSAO/MotionBlur = OFF

Specs:
GTX 580 @ 950/1900/2225
8GB CL9 DDR3 RAM
2600k @ 4.6ghz. Hyper Threading on
2560x1600

Metro OUTSIDE. FIRST SET OF M-COM's:

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
8104, 120000, 51, 93, 67.533

Caspian. Start of level and large fight at "CheckPoint"

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
7057, 120000, 47, 83, 58.808


As you can see performance does drop but it's certainly more than playable. My personal experience is that BF3 can run fine in the mid to higers 40's. When you start getting 30's or low 40's you start really noticing the issues and can make gameplay a challenge. The game and drivers will hopefully mature and provider evern more perforrmance.

After exhastive testing, HBAO is a major performance killer and can get you a lot of performance. Here is Metro with the same settings as above but with HBAO enabled:

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
6540, 120000, 43, 70, 54.500

That's because the graphics were toned way down on Caspian Border. I noticed a night and day disparity between the two, especially if you compare it to the tunnel\city portion of Metro.

I mean the background mountains were some really low rez fuzzy texture as one example.

Metro>Caspian from a graphics perspective.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

The reward scheme is promoting camping, not the fact that we can prone or climb in trees.

Yeah I don't mind the reward scheme encouraging "supporting" over killing, but the biggest issue I see is there's too much reward for "personal" stuff vs. overall team results. Each player on a team should get massive points for winning or killing objectives vs. the individual stuff. As it is right now I can get more points just camping on defense for kills and ignoring objectives. Even if we lose I get way more points for getting kills than I do for winning anyways, so why run in and die even if it means I defend a point?

Of course I don't play that way because I don't really care about points, but if your goal is to maximize your score then it's clear how to do it.

My guess is there will be less problems with camping in conquest and with vehicles; haven't gotten a chance to play caspian yet to see though.

As an aside, platoon stats seem pretty messed up to me. They are totally inconsistent with people's individual stats and some just seem outright broken.

 

[RobertR1]

At this point, I think I prefer Metro. Much more action at all times. Caspian, even with 64 players can feel rather empty at times.

I noticed that I tend to lose concentration on Caspian after a couple of rounds esp if you get some slow rounds.

 

[Otto Dafe]

I'm really surprised so many of you guys prefer metro. I may of just overdone it, but every new round of metro was starting to feel like a do-over; like I had fallen off the screen in mario bros. and I had to start over for the umpteenth time.

 

[tabs]

The two are just very different experiences for me. Same feel(controls), different game almost. I think they compliment each other nicely.

I don't know if they've had a word with the server providers, or there's been a server patch, but I've had no lag whatsoever today on Caspian, whereas yesterday is was practically unplayable on every server I tried.

Oh neliz... 502m 6cm

 

[Otto Dafe]

Don't get me wrong, I expect I'll be happy to see metro come up in the rotation. Besides I'm really curious to play conquest on that map, and maybe I'll actually learn my way around the city part at the end.

 

[NRP]

All right, I think I got my hands on a PC that can play BF3 (i7 2600 3.4GHz, AMD 5770 ). Hopefully, I can get the beta and AMD's latest driver installed without too much fooken hassle. If so, I'll see you guys in a bit.

Edit:
Robert,
I (ObliqueShock) sent you a Friend invite.

 

[tabs]

Don't get me wrong, I expect I'll be happy to see metro come up in the rotation. Besides I'm really curious to play conquest on that map

Me too! The thought of tanks rolling through those city streets with AT guys at the windows gives me a... well I'm excited at the prospect. Very interested to know if you can bypass the underground section by going over the top of it too. I'm wondering if there will be a couple of capture points underground that only infantry can get to; I'd think there would have to be, otherwise why bother going that route?

 

[Bludd]

I think maybe Metro conquest (if such a mode/map exists) is the park and before the park or after the tunnel and beyond.