Battlefield 3 announced

[homerdog]

Did they already give you the key? you should've gotten it with your game I guess as it did for us who ordered through Origin.

Otherwise it's a great excuse to stop buying from middle men?

Is the code in the box? I couldn't find it. On the receipt it says something about redeeming my LE stuff but it doesn't say anything specific.

You can't squad up in Origin. Oh wait.. you can't squad up at all.. well battlelog gives you a party which sometimes works in-game.

I think we're talking about two different things... I was just saying since you have to register on Origin to play regardless of whether you have a physical copy, what's the downside from buying from Origin?

 

[tabs]

So if we bought it from Gamestop, how do we redeem our LE stuff? I don't care about the extra gear but I do want the maps.

That's tied in to the product key for the core game. The limited edition product keys are a different batch to the regular one.

 

[nightshade]

Why is the game priced at 39 pounds? When most other games cost between 25-30 pounds?

 

[Malo]

Why is the game priced at 39 pounds? When most other games cost between 25-30 pounds?

The top publishers want to sell AAA PC tiles for the same price as consoles now.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Why is the game priced at 39 pounds? When most other games cost between 25-30 pounds?

Holy crap it was £29 last night on Amazon and now it's £39!! Guess it's being recieved very well!

 

[tabs]

If I were to divide my BF2 playtime by the amount I spent on it I think DICE end up giving me about 3 grand.

 

[homerdog]

$60 is a perfectly reasonable price for this game. I'll be playing it for years. Almost makes me feel guilty for paying $30 for BC2... almost

The auto settings are right on the money. It set everything to Medium for me and that's perfect. I got greedy and tried High but there were too many slowdowns.

Now I'm back to Medium except Textures and PP AA (which has no perf impact at all AFAICT) to High.

On a 3.2GHz C2D + GTX260 at 1440x900 with these settings it plays and looks great.

Battlefield 3 Performance: 30+ Graphics Cards, Benchmarked

They mention some shadow corruption with NVIDIA DX10 hardware. I saw this in SP but have yet to come across it in MP. I did have some weird instances when I was playing on High where the screen would flash every now and then for one frame. It was so brief that it was hard to say if it happened at all, and on Medium it doesn't happen.

Unlocks are much more important in BF3 than they were in BC2. I view this as a slightly negative change but I have to admit it is a great feeling after a match to watch your points accumulate and earn new equipment.

P.S. if you guys have gotten kicked by admin a few times you need to update your Punkbuster DLLs. There is a message in the server browser with instructions on how to do this. It took me about 1 minute and I haven't been kicked by admin since.

We need to get some games going tonight. Experiences with random strangers range from great to horrible. I had some asshole bitch me out for grabbing the mobile AA on Caspian Border because I don't have AA missiles yet. How does he expect me to earn them if I never use the mobile AA? What a dick.

 

[nightshade]

Well PC games are usually priced between $45-$50 , if we were to consider the quality of the game while discussing about the price then a lot of game should have been priced much lower and quite a few should cost over $100. But that's not how it works, does it? (except for Japan, where this has always been the case). The problem here is that a couple of weeks ago you could've ordered the game for GBP30 over here in Britain but now its priced GBP35 for normal edition and 40 quids more for the LE.

I am getting 55-60FPS on my i7 950/GTX 580 with Ultra setting (post process AA set to high with 2xMSAA) at 1080p....not surprising but the real surprise here is my Alienware M14x which gives me a solid 30-35FPS with minimal dips at 720p with all settings at medium (motion blur on) except Terrain detail,textures and game effect set to Ultra and motion blur turned on. I never expected it to perform this good !!! Loading times are ass though, somewhere around 20-25 seconds.

 

[neliz]

tain but now its priced GBP35 for normal edition and 40 quids more for the LE.

I noticed that in the weeks up to release the price was dropped. RRP is €49.99 and some online shops had the LE on "pre-order sale" for €36 here in Holland.
Now the regular version retails for €36.50 in that store and the LE €47.99.
Now let's hope they keep it this way because MW2 is still being sold for €39.99.

 

[Richard]

I noticed that in the weeks up to release the price was dropped. RRP is €49.99 and some online shops had the LE on "pre-order sale" for €36 here in Holland.

My LE pre-order on a brick & mortar store was 35.11€. Picked it up today, went shopping, got home, installed it in Origin, sent a B3D platoon request, had dinner, now I'm going to install the new AMD drivers and fire it up!

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Well PC games are usually priced between $45-$50

Steam and digital distribution has luckily started to change that. Note only are there $5, $10, $20, $30, etc. game launches now, but even for the so-called AAA games if you wait a few weeks they respond to their actual quality level very quickly in price. So you have poor games that drop to $20 or lower in no time and great games that don't drop for years.

As stated, I don't think $60 is an unreasonable cost for what you're getting here at all. In fact, I'd pay twice that if not more.

 

[NRP]

P.S. if you guys have gotten kicked by admin a few times you need to update your Punkbuster DLLs.

I need to do this because I get kicked constantly.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Jesus, Origin is ridiculously slow for me. Was lucky enough to get a free code from work, but at the rate the download is proceeding I can consider myself lucky if I can play this game on Monday.

 

[homerdog]

NRP, what is your Origin nick? I dunno if you're on my friends list or not. I think we're friends on XBL but the only one who showed up on there for me was Robert.

You must ride with us on the B3D train to glory

 

[tabs]

EA Q2 report. Cliff notes: 10 mil BF3 shipped. Back to Karkand out in December. Origin will get Capcom, THQ, and Warner titles starting with pre-orders in November.

 

[Bludd]

Anyone else getting juddering HUD/minimap when strafing without looking down the sights?

GTX 285, 285.62 drivers

 

[homerdog]

Apparently the PC version is selling through the roof.

 

[tabs]

As well it should. It's a bargain for the content and replayability.

My only little gripe is that I convinced my Dad to preorder it (he's over 60 but loves single player FPS gaming - pretty much has to use a 360 controller for comfortable gaming). During the run up to release there were Twitter posts from DICE about how the PC would have 360 controller support out of the box and the only limitation mentioned was that there would be no auto-aim on MP..(hardly bad news). So what with the coop for us to play together, and the great looking single player trailers I recommended it to him.

In the end the controller support is very poor for SP mode on PC, the SP is a lot shorter than I thought it would be and there aren't many coop missions, and what coop there is feels a little under-loved. Had a go on the first couple of missions with a friend yesterday and you can't even choose who pilot's the helo. If they could just fix the interface when using the controller it would be a start. I guess I feel a bit responsible for what might turn out to be a bit of an annoying experience for him. I should've known that a pre-order wasn't really suitable in his case, despite being convinced of the game myself already. Just a bit surprised at some of the corners that ended up getting cut on that side of it.

In other news:

Car horns will be patched in.
Jets are getting buffed.
Pistols are getting buffed.
UMP is getting buffed (had major nerfage after beta).

sources: 1 2

I'm happy about the horns, but what I really want to hear is they're fixing the squad menu to make it at least as functional as it was in BF2.

 

[RobertR1]

I think the level ups are too far apart. For new comers, it'll be a demotivator.

 

[tabs]

I'm only just noticing it starting to slow down now, a few after level 10. Otherwise it felt like every round was a level up or an unlock or two.

At what point is someone no longer a new comer? I think by the time it slows down appreciably they've already got 10 hours under their belt.