Despite my strong opinions on what makes a good game and how versed I keep myself with video games, I am less competitive than many people think I am when it comes to multiplayer. I don’t play fighting games, strategy games are restricted to only people I know (end up getting wiped out anyway), everything else is usually just cooperative play. There was a time I felt too uncomfortable playing online with other people because I felt I can’t be good as anyone out there. Games like Team Fortress 2 made me disregard that, but games like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 motivated me into getting better at them. 

That’s why Bad Company 2 holds a special soft spot in my heart, that multiplayer discomfort quickly vanished in my first attempt in destroying an enemy tank while hopping from rooftop to rooftop as an engineer. I felt rewarded destroying an opposing force significantly larger than myself, it distracted me from issue with online multiplayer shooters. I later found myself being quite good as a medic healing injured teammates who needed healing, later reviving dead ones the second they’re off their feet. As friends joined me in my Battlefield bad company antics, the fun multiplied in the numbers

You see, battlefield scratches an itch that many shooters don’t to me, rather than just jumping in mindlessly shooting everything that moves, Battlefield is full of illustrated moments where you are rewarded for the drastic measures that you take to fulfill the objectives you are given. Your actions are stories worth telling in large expansive maps, and they become even worth more when friends are there to see and to take part in your crazy antics. These are many things that made my experience in Battlefield Bad Company 2 worthwhile, and essentially what got me excited over Battlefield 3.

Before talking about the game, I will discuss Battlelog and how it plays a big role in Battlefield 3. Battlelog is the launcher website in Battlefield 3 to both the campaign and multiplayer, it also serves a database for the multiplayer servers and a place to keep track of all your multiplayer stats. During the beta I passionately hated it for not getting me logged in to play any multiplayer game and hated it even more when it took forever to load the single player campaign (which was meh anyway). Once started using it for the full multiplayer and not the beta it started to make much more sense.

One of the major problems I have faced before with Bad Company 2 was how awful the in-game server browser was, it was slow, obtuse and took forever to find a decent server to play in. If I find a server that I can play with, I’d stick to it no matter how foul mouthed or exploitative the players are in that server. But that seems a little different thanks to Battlelog, it’s much faster to find a game and if I don’t like the server, I wouldn’t be too worried about not finding another server to play on.

One issue though with Battlelog is that the there are different soldiers for each of xbox, PS3 and PC, and you can’t transfer your unlocks around the different soldiers. At one point I was planning to own the 360 version to play with console friends, but that soon became a dilemma as I didn’t want to play 2 different soldiers.

Much has changed in the game, let’s begin with the job classes, if you’re coming from Battlefield: Bad Company 2. While the job classes remain intact, some of the equipment has either been replaced or swapped around, for example the assault now hold the medical supplies (med kit, defib unit, etc), while Support holds ammo supplies and the light machine guns that the old medics use to use in Bad Company 2. Engineers and Recon remain the same, except the Recon has been given a few more interesting gadgets, which include being able to erect spawn points for the team and rather than the old motion sensor balls of old, you can place motion sensor points that can be destroyed by enemies if found. 

Vehicles more or less are the same as Bad Company 2 except a bigger variety has been introduced, there are now amphibious vehicles, and jets. Helicopters are a little easier to maneuver than BC2, I managed to fly them more gracefully in BF3 than the clumsy “2 seconds in the air then into the water” that I kept on doing in BC2. Jets on the other hand require anything BUT mouse and keyboard, the controls with the mouse are awful. 

Game modes remain the same, only thing that differs is that the number of players has significantly changed in PC as compared to console, you do have massive 64 player maps and some of the 32 player maps can be made to play 64 player. If any changes are apparent, the game has better, more interesting, more balanced maps to play through that have much more variety than previous maps. Maps that consist of metro tunnels, base jumping, crushed cityscapes and wide open spaces, at first they might seem tighter and more closed as compared to previous maps, but still retain a massive amount of complexity in their design.

One gripe in the design of the maps is that they are less destructible than previous battlefield maps which can be a major let down since the Frostbite engine 2 has been boasting destructable environments for a very long time. Sure you can punch holes into walls but you can’t make buildings collapse on your opponents. Like the singleplayer, the multiplayer is truly a showcase of how beautiful the engine really is, and the game looks very good on powerful PC. Speaking of PC, this game is definitely made to be played on PC, while consoles are stuck playing the game on 720p on 30 frames per second, the game really shines when it’s running on 1080p on 60 frames per second on a good PC, especially when that’s the majority of where people play it. That goes with out saying that the PC version lets you have 64 players in one game (with a few able to hack it to play 128 players in one server).

There is much to unlock in this game from gaining points while playing, not only do you unlock weapons and gadgets, but also weapon attachments, that not only add more options to your firearm (grenade launcher for example), but also give you some advantage (bipod, hand grip, tactical flashlight. etc). Dogtags are somewhat more collectible now, rather than only collecting dogtag with names that belong to players you knifed, you also collect dogtag art that you can use to customize your own dogtags. There’s a massive number of dogtags to collect, one way is to meet the objectives that that are required to get that dogtag (number of kills with a weapon/vehicle, number of victories in a game mode, own specific EA title, get a specific ribbon a few times, etc), or just knife someone with a dog tag you don’t previously own.

Some of the controls have been altered, whenever I played with friends who mainly are Call of Duty players, they would complain about the controls being unflexible for not letting you prone or sprint diagonally (we coined the term “crab sprinting” here at Lochal Archade). Call of Duty players will be happy to know that this is not a problem any longer as Battlefield 3 includes those two controls, making it slightly more flexible in terms of controls

Battlefield 3 takes everything good in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, making it better, more concentrated and above all fun.

What We Think: EA’s Origin is pretty much a hit or miss to some people, I have had friends facing issues trying to download the game, while I have not experience any problems whatsoever. both on-disc and download versions will unfortunately require  you to have Origin in order to play if you’re playing on PC. Other than that Battlefield 3’s multiplayer is mountains and canyons better than the mediocre single player that it comes with, among the finest multiplayer experiences we played this year.