LOL @ illscarlet. Has to make a seperate thread because just getting attention here wasn't enough.
As for the Battlefield 3 Beta, I tried it and here's the result:
Intro:
So I installed Origins, just because the beta is absolutely free of charge without needing to preorder. I figured it was the perfect opportunity to test the game instead of having prejudice.
As for the battlelog page that opens, I actually like it. It allows browsing the game until the game has dropped you into a server already.
Funny enough that I needed to apply a registry fix just to play the game, getting RO2 to work was just as troublesome.
Graphics:
So when I started the game the first thing I noticed was the graphics of course, and how utterly bad they were. Everyone goes like "Oh pretty graphics" but the only good thing about the graphics is that the textures look relatively sharp. The lack of polygons in many of the world details is something they try to cameoflage with the blur.
Blurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, that's the idea I get from this game. It's an absolute horror to play this game due to the blur. It is by far 10x worse than RO2.
Here's why: If you are playing a shooter, situational awareness is something that is a very important aspect to staying alive.
Because of the blur that this game has, enemies just blend into the environment way too much.
As a result of this, it is very very hard to keep situational awareness as you litterally need to doublecheck everything instead of doing a quick sweep of your surroundings.
This is something that completely destroys the pace of the game. Either you can camp and take the time to carefully doublecheck your surroundings. Or you can just rush, frown like mad to focus your eyes and push your nose on the monitor to try and blitzkrieg enemies before they see you.
Gameplay Mechanics:
Spawning on the squad leader in this game works very well as you spawn so close that you are basically already in squad formation. But this is also where it's utterly bad, you spawn so close that you basically bump into your squad leader and he noticably feels him getting bumped.
Navigating through the world isn't hard, you can jump pretty far, leap over obstacles and you can run endlessly and your character does feel like he's got momentum. Unfortunately this smoothness quickly disappears when you get stuck behind every tiny bit of rubble.
There's seperate keys for hold crouch and toggle crouch and the connecting animations from prone to crouch or prone to sprint feel very comfortable. Though it's obviously arcade as you're able to slide a tiny bit every where, which is a clear sign to me that they didn't include friction into the formula.
Yet I'm missing functionality in the game, I was expecting some kind of cover system or atleast some extra motions that my character could do. I don't really know how to properly say this, but the control scheme might be just a little too simple for my taste.
Weapon Handling:
The weapons in this game for an arcade shooter are not bad, but compared to RO2 they simply can not stand up.
There's obviously recoil, moreso than RO2. But it's not the type of recoil that makes you feel like you're holding a gun. It's the type of recoil that feels very artificially made to balance the game.
Though the speed of bringing up the stock to the shoulder after sprinting seems to be spot on, which is something RO2 could learn from.
The weapons unfortunately are not very balanced, it seems that the guns that you unlock are quite a bit stronger than the guns you start with, and the fact that higher level players have acces to quite some unlocks such as the forward grip doesn't help either.
Sounds:
The sounds are meh, you constantly hear the same "31337" sounds, that try to make you feel like you're some badass soldier. Perhaps this works for 12 years olds, but I'm not buying it anymore.
There's just sounds everywhere that really do nothing to help your situational awareness. I could easily call them overwhelming without having any positive influence to the game.
Gameplay:
It's mostly Call of Duty mixed with some Medal of Honour mixed with Bad Company 2. It is nothing like Battlefield 2. You run around like it's Call of Duty, but atleast you need to decide where you want to run not to get your face blown off. In that sense it does not promote running on open fields. Sometimes you can get a glimpse of the teamwork that is possible in the game. It really is more effective to be with teammates, yet the game hardly encourages it enough.
Conclusion:
The game will still be a great game for many of the people that do not have a long list of demands. But if you are a gamer with appreciation for good gameplay, Battlefield 3 will not give you any satisfaction.
