Sucks to be on the dominated team and be spawnkilled repeatedly for an entire match. At least the uncap rules give you a chance to do something other than die continuously. I dont even enjoy games like that when Im on the dominating team.
When you are dominating an enemy team, not being able to press the attack gives the enemy an artificial, and thus unfair, chance to break out and recap flags.
Sucks to be on the dominated team and be spawnkilled repeatedly for an entire match. At least the uncap rules give you a chance to do something other than die continuously. I dont even enjoy games like that when Im on the dominating team.
Tue, Sep 06, 2011 | 14:36 BST
Battlefield 3′s September beta won’t be a cosmetic affair, and will result in changes for day one patches and Battlelog right up to launch. Head below for audio of DICE devs talking about the beta, confirmation of “hundreds” of changes being made to the game based on the alpha and everything we know about the beta so far.
In regards to the Battlefield 3 beta, the billion dollar question is “when”.
Speaking in a roundtable interview in Sweden last week, game dev head Patrick Bach was coy when pressed on a specific date.
“Soon,” he said.
A fellow DICE staffer added: “Well, we’ve said September, so it’ll be soon.”
Bach then said: “Before the game ships,” before his teammate said, “Sometime between now and the end of September.”
The final game itself releases on October 25.
Bach went on to say the alpha and imminent beta are working tests, and are very much affecting the end product.
“There were plenty of complaints, of course,” he said in answer to VG247 reader Colin Gallacher, who asked whether or not feedback from the alpha had impacted the shooter.
“There were some things we found out that we wanted to change based on the alpha; quite a lot, actually,” he said.
“Everything from gun-balancing to the placement of the objectives on the Rush map; we actually moved them around based on [the fact] that the first base was quite hard to take. We are still moving things around on that map to utilise feedback from the alpha.
“That’s why we’re doing it. It’s not to market the game, it’s actually to test it in a proper way. There are hundreds of things that we’ve changed since the alpha.
“Again, to the beta question, we are releasing the beta before the game and we are actually changing stuff based on that before we ship the game, even though you could argue that that’s very late close to the ship of the game, we will still have time to do, for instance, day one patches and changes to the Battlelog that will actually be game-changing.”
Bach was speaking during a trip to DICE last week by VG247, RPS and Eurogamer.
As to what to expect from the beta itself, DICE has been noncommittal up to this point. You’ll get a map, obviously, but it’s unknown if there’ll be more than one.
As the BF3Blog guesses, it’s likely to be a larger level so all modes of combat can be tested, and it’s expected the beta will go live for all platforms: PC, 360 and PS3.
Obviously, you’ll need to be a Gold Live sub if you’re playing on 360. Those that bought the Limited Edition of Medal of Honor last year are guaranteed a spot, as you are if you pre-order the PC version through Origin.
There have to be solutions other than artificially giving a chance to come back and denying valid tactics to the winning team.
Proper base design for example. Spread out the spawn points at a base and make more of them so that it's impossible to spawn kill and the defenders always have a chance to spawn where they can shoot attackers in the back.
bare min.
attackers if they get killed should not be allowed to squad spawn and spawn back to their home base , kill 4-8 of them and problem is gone for ten minutes any ways.
-in bfbc2 I would spawn back to my base to get a tank and 4-6 players are base raping for points knowing very few players are in the base - only suckers going back for tanks and helos or joining the server. kill 2 and their back up to 4 in no time or switch teams ,who then sit the armor shooting the walls\cover out\shooting at you in the only AA gun. to reduce the base defenses while their buds collect the points = fun .
-most of this not liking is from recon that never go back to the main bases or point pad them selves.
one good thing in bf3 is that you only get one name per game ,
-but base\spawn kills should have pins that show in the stats\sigs..
"make bases out of bounds to enemy vehicles, but not to enemy infantry."
that would help as once they jump in a tank it would blow up ? what's what you mean right?
-in bf2\2142 it was not a big problem ,yea 4 people would stay back but out of 32 players ,not 16[bfbc2] or 12 in bf3[most modes.
-but I still don't get the point[pun] if it's not point padding then are attackers willing not to take points if it's only suppressing the other team the whole round.
-in bfbc2 it was the game play only for some teams ,from the starting of the round to the end as they collected more points base raping than taking flags.
-depends on the maps to.
in bf4free all main bases are out of bounds , go close to a base and the counter starts to you die and will focus the game play at the flags and not the main bases.
-some maps have no main bases[no armor] so random spawning if you do not have a flag -works well.
Attacking bases is not point padding. Point padding is when you collaborate with the enemy to do something for free points. the enemy is not intentionally allowing you to attack their base, therefore it's never padding. Also, conquest is about tickets. Capturing flags is a more efficient way to win but it's not the only way, and indeed, tying the enemy up at their base keeps them off flags.
Also, what would happen in my idea is: If you try to enter an uncap with a tank/jet/chopper, you get a 20 second uncap death timer(just like the out of bounds death timer, but 20 seconds not 10). And if you steal a vehicle in the enemy uncap, that's right - you've got 20 seconds to get the hell out of there. Otherwise you have to jump out to reset the timer and that can get you killed, which is a balancing feature.
Also - what game has random spawning for your team if you lose all your flags?
I"m really not trying to flame/be a troll. But maybe you should look at getting a different game? All of your posts just seem to complain about the game, and what ifs about it. Let the game come out and give them a patch to nerf things and see how it is.
I actually thought the BC2 single player was fucking awesome and I played it three times, so I'm really looking forward to the BF3 single player. Even more so after reading that Kotaku article (although I hate that website with a fiery passion).
I tried to play it but it kept crashing and freezing so I gave up. That was before any patches were released, but by the time they issued some fixes I had already lost interest and moved on.Hmm I never touched the singleplayer, maybe I should try it out now.
Three missions, plot details and COD-style linearity - OXM gets under DICE's skin
Making a game that'll win the hearts of millions is no mean feat, but we suspect the harder call, once you've crafted such a game, is working out how to expand its audience. Do you heed the example of more popular rivals, looting their top tricks and filching their fanbase, or strike out on an unproven tangent of your own, seeking to bypass rather than beat the competition? Either way, you should be prepared for a running battle with the people who made you successful in the first place.
Microsoft has spoken to the difficulty of evolving a brand lately, admitting that squaring the needs of "broad audiences" and prickly core customers is "tricky". Though loath to admit it, BioWare appears to be struggling likewise with Mass Effect, attempting to pare away "meaningless stats" without slaying the sacred RPG cow. But as winter approaches, the franchise feeling these growing pains most is arguably Battlefield, the sometime PC monolith turned mass market shooter, shaping up for a titanic throw-down with Activision's Call of Duty.
And make no mistake: Battlefield is changing. Thanks to DICE's Battleblogs, our own interviews and extensive hands-on time, we know plenty about how the developer has expanded and restructured multiplayer to lure in laymen. We know that unlocks now happen on a per-weapon basis, making it easier to get at the gadgets you want faster, that tank armour now recharges above a certain threshold to accommodate solo rampages, and that Assault players can now heal themselves to minimise time spent trundling back to the frontline. DICE has styled these shifts carefully - explaining that the new team deathmatch mode will acclimatise greenhorns to teamplay, for instance - but some fans will call them concessions nonetheless, evidence that the studio is going soft.
The campaign's less of a worry for either party, simply because the campaign has never been Battlefield's calling card in the same way, for instance, Halo's has. While the community debates the pros and cons of leaving out Commander mode, DICE is taking more drastic steps with the single player formula hammered out in Bad Company and Bad Company 2. Dialling up the seriousness of the endeavour is a primary objective. "We want it to feel personal and intimate, and for you to feel close to the characters around you in-game," comments producer Patrick Bach. "We want players to understand why things around you have become like they are, instead of offering a cartoon story that just says: you must save the world - go.
"We want a more mature audience to enjoy the game, so we're creating a story that people will find interesting, where players can understand the motivations of the characters throughout the game. We don't want to be pretentious though, and claim that we're making something that has never been created before - because everything has been created before, in one shape or form at least."
The Bad Company games are just such "cartoon stories", deriving main characters from the set of the Dirty Dozen and stagecraft from the adrenaline-slicked annals of Roland Emmerich. Tone, insists general manager Karl Magnus Troedsson, is the biggest shift. Along with the all-new plot, the decision to leave the wisecracks to Bad Company is suggestive. Activision has created a profitable distinction between Treyarch's wackier Call of Duty games and Infinity Ward's unrelentingly po-faced Modern Warfare series, and EA seems to have similar designs on Battlefield.
If levity's in shorter supply this time round, DICE is no less interested in making you feel like you inhabit a physical body. One earlier mission kicks off in an APC, ranks of huddled squaddies swaying to and fro as the vehicle turns and breaks. Strains of Johnny Cash waft through the thick, dusty atmosphere, and shafts of light peck at harried faces. Traffic honks like geese, the noise spreading to both speaker channels as the cunningly nicknamed Sergeant Henry "Black" Blackburn clamps a hand on the hatchway and hauls himself onto the tarmac, every motion accompanied by a finely mapped lurch or judder. Later, we watch squadmates sprint through heaps of loose objects to slam their shoulders against cover spots, the transition between animations barely noticeable. Bach may have script and dialogue in mind when he talks about fostering "intimacy", but it's the quality of the engineering, not the writing, that carries the sentiment home.
Such expressive subtleties make up the thin end of Battlefield 3's technological wedge; earth-shattering spectacle comprises the other. The Blackburn mission soon escalates as the squad penetrates deeper into Tehran, provoking the wrath of dug-in People's Liberation & Resistance fighters. Frostbite 2.0's destruction systems earn their breakfast as you engage snipers across a carpark. Dust clouds envelop battered cars and writhing tangos, and bullets tear metal plates off bridge frames. Later, a whole skyscraper spews its glassy guts and tips gracefully, devastatingly forward at the prompting of a compact rocket launcher, only to be upstaged not long after by a full-blown earthquake. The bombast isn't enough to obscure fine details, however, like the shell casings that cascade from a helicopter's cannons.
Small touches in the midst of chaos. It's a visual contrast that compliments DICE's narrative agenda, shunning wider politics or exposition in order to "put you in the boots of a soldier". Battlefield 3's global plot will turn on characters rather than the events they're caught up in. "We depict it from the perspective of an individual rather than an army. It's about you as a soldier on the battlefield, because no matter who you are or on what side you are, it's still drama. I don't want to create a war simulation or a game which picks sides. I think that would be tasteless." Bach dryly acknowledges the input of legendary military author Andy McNab. "Talking to people who know how things are done in real life adds quite a lot."
The developer isn't above soppiness in small doses, as the beginning of a tank mission starring corporal Jonathan "Jono" Miller reveals. The camera pulls back from a low angled close-up of a toy dinosaur labelled "to Dad", looming over a desert landscape. A child's voice whisks by on the wind. The vision is caught on the verge of being cloying by an order to "stop screwing around", and the view tilts to show the tank you're riding and the convoy beyond. There's time nonetheless to soak up the ambience, the chassis creaking and clanking over the rumble of the engine, temporarily blotted out by the thunder of passing helicopters. Then battle erupts and Jono takes over control of the main gun, slapping enemy vehicles to debris with single shots. A smaller calibre gun is used to thin the ranks of advancing RPG wielders, and a laser sight employed to plonk airstrikes on troublesome buildings. It's a knock-'em-out-of-the-park shooting gallery that's worlds away from Black's taut gauntlet run, but you never feel like you've been dumped into a different game: the execution is just as convincingly weighty, Jono grappling with monitors as you swap cannons.
Bach wants "all of the variation we have in the multiplayer game to shine through in single player", echoing Troedsson's suggestion that Battlefield campaigns are best treated as tutorials for the online modes. This tilt towards multiplayer is reflected in Bad Company 2's enjoyable, but somewhat fragmentary-feeling campaign structure, with many areas resembling taped-off multiplayer maps populated by bots - but Battlefield 3 alters the tempo here too, retiring many sandbox elements for a more "sealed", choreographed and fluid experience. The earthquakes that reave Tehran's streets are among DICE's key conjuring tricks in this regard, using Frostbite 2's otherwise choice-enabling destruction systems to beat players into line. To some, this tighter, pushier style will constitute Battlefield's greatest capitulation to commercial thinking, recalling as it does the relentless thrust of a Modern Warfare campaign. Bach is pragmatic about his game's newfound linearity, stating flatly to Edge that "in most cases, sandbox games are boring, hard to get into and not very popular".
It's tough to get a sense of just how much flex DICE has cut from the preview levels, selected and edited as they are for promotional purposes. Dynamism seems no less prevalent at the micro level: incoming mortars knock out allied NPCs at random during Operation Guillotine, a night-time foray across a river into an apartment complex, and when you punch out a crisp nugget of concrete to perfectly frame a sniper's head, the sense of empowerment prompts ecstatic wiggles. But there are "gateway" actions to keep straggly squads in order, like being boosted over the lip of a concrete wall, the surrounding darkness deters exploration, and once we're deep in the gloom of the buildings themselves, the only way is forward.
So it goes for Battlefield 3 as a whole. Ostensibly a return to earlier form, brushing past the irreverence of Bad Company, the new shooter is progressive to the core - for good or ill. Frostbite 2's fancier tricks show a developer with one eye on next generation consoles, but as far as more prosaic matters of scenario design, pacing and scripting are concerned, a new creative agenda is already in action.
Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
oxm.co.uk
Tuesday, 6 September, 2011 at 21:01 PST | ^Scott^
More small details about Battlefield 3 coming out today via twitter. The first is about MCOMs or crates not being in destructible buildings. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has a number of MCOMs stationed inside destructible buildings, allowing enemies to destroy the building causing it to collapse on the m-com. Battlefield 3 will have buildings that can collapse, but no MCOMs are inside.
Kertz also revealed that voice chat will be by default the whole team and individual channels can be chosen. In Battlefield 2, voice chat was limited to squads. This should be interesting to see how this will work if a team of 32 can all speak to each other.
A lot of the community seems to be split on this issue, but it looks as if a revive in Battlefield 3 will not count as a death. The soon to be released beta will not reflect this change.
Last we have a tweet from Rendering Architect, Johan Andersson with some information on the resolution Battlefield 3 will run at on consoles. Both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 will run the game at 1280 x 704, which is basically 720p with a few vertical lines removed for performance and memory. Andersson also states each platform has 1 or more anti-aliasing solutions. Beyond 3D has a list of many console games and their resolutions.
BY ALEC MEER | ROCK PAPER SHOTGUN on August 31st, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Just two months ahead of release, Battlefield 3's singleplayer mode remains something of a mystery – oddly so, given this game is DICE's attempt to make their biggest franchise as appealing to lone gunners as team gunners. So getting eyes-on with a never-before-seen singleplayer level yesterday went some way to explaining BF3's approach. That approach: MEGA-GRAPHICS, MEGA-EXPLOSIONS, MEGA-WAR. And yet, somehow, it's also far more subtle and convincing than COD and its recent raft of wannabe crown-stealers.
The mission in question was named Operation Guillotine, and is placed about halfway through the singleplayer campaign. No, they're not saying exactly how long said campaign is, but executive producer Patrick Bach intimated that he's not sure games with "movie-style narratives" and no sandbox elements are unwise to exceed 10 hours if they want to sustain "high quality".
Guillotine is a night-based mission, "something we haven't done before", and aims for a different sort of tension and action to the big street battle I played earlier in the day (more on that soon). Nonetheless, it's not exactly a quiet affair. It kicks off with a clutch of soldiers crouching on a hilltop amidst the ruins of unknown buildings, staring down at Tehran, vast capital of Iran, windows in its towering city blocks twinkling in the night. It's a hell of a sight: ugly and beautiful at the same time. One of the soldiers whistles in awe. "That is a biiiiig city." And they're going in, obviously.
Their orders are to capture an apartment complex on the other side of a canal, but that's a whole lot easier than it sounds. First up is charging down a forested hill towards the city below, which would probably go more smoothly if said hill wasn't being bombed to hell at the time. Thunderous explosions lead to trees aflame, which you and your comrades dash past to reach the relatively safety a gigantic concrete overpass. One chap is sent flying in the air from a shell that lands dangerously close – while key storyline characters will either live or die according to predetermined narrative decisions, other soldiers could dynamically bite it at any moment. This feels dangerous.
All the while, Tehran itself grows closer: this really is a remarkable spectacle, the Frostbite 2 engine doing remarkable things with lighting even on what, for this demo, is just the console build. With DICE bullish that the PC version will be about as bleeding-edge as videogames get, I can't wait to see how this looks on a decent graphics card. The sound, too, is top-flight stuff. I'm far too uneducated in the mysterious ways of the recording studio to be able to tell you why, but everyone here's been enthusing about how meaty and involving BF3′s audio is.
There's also a sense of vastness and openness to the level, despite this being an essentially linear experience. Tehran seems enormous and all around, not just a series of flat bitmaps painted behind impassable walls. And, at this point at least, the game doesn't seem to be pushing characters or dialogue too hard: clearly it's war-as-entertainment, not any kind of simulator, but it does seem militaristic, not melodramatic.
Amidst the noise and screen-shaking explosions, there's an emphasis on silent team-work. When you set down a mortar to soften up (and, perhaps more usefully, illuminate) a distant target, another soldier is on hand to put it in place and prime. When you and your comrades scale a wall to finally drop into the city proper, you're all giving each other leg-ups. Then it's down into the canal, all crumbled mortar and spilled water, and a tense, terse run through the night. The combination of darkness and smoke makes visibility limited, but the noise of battle is everywhere. Fire and explosion highlight enemy positions as you charge through, taking out who you can but mostly trying to stay alive. This does seem like a war, not an Arnie character elbowing his way through all and sundry. Crouching and crawling and staying near your allies is the way to get through, not dashing chaotically around the frontlines and cackling.
Then it's time to infiltrate the apartment block, with a laser-sight-equipped shotgun proving surprisingly adept at picking people off from medium range. A grenade through a window leads to a door bursting open, an enemy soldier wreathed in flames falling through it. This small moment, as are others in this run, is scripted in the name of drama and progression, though Bach claims the grenade that caused it could have been thrown either by you or an NPC ally. Not that you can rely on NPCs doing all the work for you: "We want the player to be active and not just be a coward, you need to fight to win."
Inside the apartment block, things feel a little City-17: crumbling, stark architecture, but packed with incidental detail like litter, puddles and snazzy light and reflection effects. The scripting aims largely for subtlety rather than overt puppetry too – for instance, breaching a door (yes, you do this yourself rather than watch an AI do it for you) sees a filing cabinet on the other side knocked over with a startling clang. Come the next door, things aren't quite so low-key: an armoured enemy kicks it open, sending you sprawling onto your back and leading to a slightly jarring slo-mo sequence in which you have the time to raise and unload your shotgun as you fall.
Then it's back outdoors for a short street sequence, walking past this battle's wounded. A medic desperate applies a tourniquet to a fallen comrade, another soldier is being dragged away, and all-told there's a sense of devastation and panic. For you, though, it's off to a Humvee under orders from a Captain Brady. There things wrap up, with Bach determined not to reveal any of the context for this incursion into Tehran. "You're going in to… do… things" is all we can get from him. Oh, and he also confirms none of the game will be set in Scotland.
And so we end with almost as much mystery as we began, but what we do have is more reassurance that BF3 is quite possibly going to be 2012's most spectacular-looking game while resisting the urge for open excess. Obviously, its singleplayer is exploring some similar territory to the recent raft of post-COD modern military shooters, but it does seem to be taking a more low-key, less rollercoaster-like approach. Bar a couple of over-obvious brief scripted moments, it seems pacier, a little more subtle, a little more tense, more like a battle and less like a pop-up shooting gallery.
While still a linear run'n'gun game (in this section at least), it seems a long way away from the overtly prescriptive play and tone of Medal of Honor or Homefront – clearly determined to be its own game with its own feel rather than just try to keep up with the modern combat Joneses, or to simply be a ludicrous action film in disguise. There's still much left to be seen, however – Battlefield's trademark vehicle play will make its way into singleplayer at some point, while Bach has made repeated reference to the narrative taking a sobering look at the realities of war.
I suspect the multiplayer will remain BF3's biggest draw for me – that's where the real stories happen – but I'm an awful lot more interested and impressed by the core Battlefield series' first foray into solo play than I ever expected to be.
Alec Meer is a writer for Rock Paper Shotgun, one of the world's best sites for PC gaming news. Alec's true power is in his ability to charm us with a smile and a sunny outlook. Follow him on Twitter.
Republished with permission.
where are you bf3 beta
I need to play you
Hmm I never touched the singleplayer, maybe I should try it out now.
Gully I don't want to sound like a prick because like everyone here I appreciate how much effort you put into this thread (this is my one and only source for BF3 news) but I have a suggestion. In my opinion you shouldn't post the full text of articles you link, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, a lot of authors put a lot of work into the articles and deserve the pageviews from linking. Secondly, it would keep the page nice and compact, especially for those having to scroll past articles they have already read.
Mostly though it's for the first reason. Plagiarism isn't cool. In the case of the Kotaku article above you didn't even provide a link to the original source.
Maybe a short synopsis or the first couple of paragraphs of an article?