Word from Major Nelson’s blog:
Content: Battlefield 3 Beta
Price: Free
Availability: Check availability in your Xbox LIVE region
Dash Text: Join the Battlefield 3 Open Beta! Grab a few friends and jump into the Operation Métro map in Rush mode. Be sure to check out the integrated Battlelog features and share your thoughts on the Open Beta at battlelog.battlefield.com /The BF3 team at DICE
In other words, you can go play the beta now. If you do, let us know what you think.
– They should not call it a Beta when you’re this close to launch. There’s not much time for major fixes.
– The product provided for trial at this point should be in far better condition than this is. It’s extremely buggy.
– Feels more like Medal of Honor than Bad Company, particularly with no vehicles in the demo.
– Not graphically impressive, but they’re claiming that’s on purpose to keep download sizes lower. Seems like a crazy trade off.
Yeah…I wish they’d quit with this “Beta” crap. It’s a marketing thing. It makes people feel like they’re participating in the development process. I’m sure there’s a thirteen year old out there somewhere declaring that he’s a BF3 “beta tester”.
Anyway, I went a couple of rounds with it today. It feels enough like Battlefield to me, but I do agree that without the vehicles it lacks some character. It took me a few minutes to get my bearings, but once I did it was down to business. Squad play remains essential, even if you don’t talk to your people sticking with them and watching for cues to coordinate is what makes this game.
It’s glitchy as hell. Tons of visual quirks, hanging on-screen prompts, uneven framerates. It really doesn’t look that great visually, it does look better than BFBC2 though.
I’m optimistic. I loved BFBC2 and I’ve been hankering for that particular kind of shooter (particular Rush mode) so I’m looking forward to getting back into it. Probably won’t do more with the Beta since we’re just a month out from the full release.
I posted something earlier today in another thread because this one didn’t exist last night. I guess there was a glitch on XBL but if you tried to download it last night you would have gotten a message saying the game cost over 4 billion microsoft points got a picture of it. Pretty funny to me.
MW3. When I see that this is OMG still hot a month or three after release. I’ll look into it.
Meanwhile Ill be rockin MW3 which looks exactly like what I love which is MOAR MW2 with some new stuffs.
Its disappointing to see how badly prepared they were for the open beta launch. The whole germanspeaking part of europe was screwed because of germanys protection of minors laws. Ill stick with my decision to wait till the game gets some patches and a price decrease.
p.s. its also kind of a joke that they recently put out a patch for bfbc2 after a long time of nothing. i dont want to sound too dismissive because i really like the game and probably the new one too, but still…
-Graphics on the 360 vary from acceptable to kind of jarringly bad (clipping/animation glitches/artifacts).
-Doesn’t appear to be a way to easily mute teammates, which makes me wonder whether the guys doing the development have ever actually played on Live
-Rush is fun, and the variance in environments throughout the course of a round on Metro gives a great feeling of pitched battle. Different areas recommend different playing styles and tactics, it’s good stuff.
-Spawning on squadmates is a really good way to get shot in the back of the head- sometimes I can predict with decent accuracy which gamertag on the other team is going to be [AK74SU]‘ing me when I make the choice to spawn with a given squad member
386689 129280Thanks for the write up! Also, just a heads up, your RSS feeds aren?t working. Could you take a look at that? 35039