In anticipation of the 25th, pre-ordererererers can get the giant download of BF3 starting today (or once you get an email from EA) . This in itself isn’t news at all, but I wanted to babble at some length about the excellent beta and other random stuff.
BF3’s beta was flat out the best I’ve ever been in. It dispelled doubts about the Origin system being crap, let us play on one map a lot and another map for a few days both of which are absolutely worth playing over and over and over as even the small one without the vehicles is supergigantic, super intricate and most of all, fun as hell. While there were bugs and issues, the long neck stuff, the dead-alive bug, crashing, not saving stats, and, of course, the servers being filled to the brim all the time, none of that really detracted from the hellacious amount of fun to be had running around, throwing grenades and just enjoying the carnival of carnage that BF3 has turned out to be. With 154 shotgun kills (and the suffering that goes along with trying to get close enough to people to use a shotgun on them) I was just going berzerk. EA is not a company I’m a huge fan of, so I went into the whole thing with a healthy skepticism born of being burned by their crappy steam-like client before (calling it steam-like is a bit of an insult to steam really) and the fact that it’s well know they want to eat into Valves electronic delivery mastery and BF3 is the engine that will lead them there. However, after a good span of time with BF2142, and a dabbling (as much as I had time for in the last year) with Battlefield Bad Company 2, I will buy every single Battlefield game made by DICE for the PC regardless of their publisher. That’s just a cold hard fact of life.
Politically, we’re looking at a huge AAA+ title about ultra-recent warfare that again has the Russians vs Americans, which is getting sort of ridiculous at this point (about as ridiculous as the USA taking on a 5th rate economy in the cold war for 40 years instead of concentrating on hegemony and dominance of other areas of the globe that are now much more threatening to everyone else’s way of life). However, if you look at the release trailer, Iran is in there as well and, of course, a good part of the game takes place in the middle east. Doing something on the middle east during the absolute height of Arab Spring is a tough row to hoe and I’m a bit afraid of what the politics the single player will try to be. We’re seeing the shitbags in power that the people of the arab world should have been burning in effigy for the last 30 years finally getting ousted or getting some bullets placed inside of them, and let’s face it, after the last year we can never look at Egypt, Libya and Tunisia the same again (and I hope we can say that about Syria and Iran soon) because everything has changed. DICE obviously has been working on BF3 for years, and I can’t imagine the panic the writers may have been going through during the tyrant shake down that’s been happening. Some of the factions they reference in the game may not even exist in the next few months. Overall, this is a multiplayer game and no one is going to care if the political landscape is changed when they are blinding people with a tactical light attachment, base jumping off half-mile high cliffs or crashing helicopters into giant wind turbines.