Article by John Strike

Next week we'll catch our first proper glimpse of Battlefield 4, and if the picture on the press invite is anything to go by, DICE's latest in the supersized shooter series will stick with the near-modern-day setting. Also: it will have rain. Though I'm delighted by the presence of these delicately rendered drips, with over 700 Battlefield hours under my belt, and a clan to lead, I have a few more items on my wishlist.

Spawn protection
One of the most frustrating parts of Battlefield 3 is spawning and dying immediately in one of four equally infuriating ways. Firstly, you may spawn on a squad beacon that looks clear but has snipers watching it and deliberately not destroying it. Secondly you may spawn on a squad leader who’s about to step on a grenade. Thirdly you may spawn on a a flashing Conquest flag half-capped by an enemy that has every spawn place covered. Or you can find yourself at the mercy of a point-hungry medic under fire in some god forsaken corner of Operation Metro, being revived and instantly killed by a support soldier on overwatch. Regardless of how it happens, it feels like a frustrating waste of time.

DICE’s answer to this was to add a one-second ‘safety time’ in BF3 which allowed you to grasp your bearings and start firing. It's a great solution for the vulnerable spawnee, but it creates a knock-on imbalance for the spawnee's opponents, who aren't rewarded for their skill in quickly spotting an enemy. You can often empty a clip into a freshly spawned enemy, and then perish during the reload. By protecting newly-spawned players, DICE have penalised the abilities of their opponents. Admittedly, they've sweetened the pill: deaths from which you’re revived don't count towards the scoreboard, but this alleviates little of the annoyance.

There’s no easy fix here, but it's an issue DICE must address. While it could be resolved by a wholesale restructure of the spawn system, I feel like revives and squad-spawning are elements that set Battlefield apart from its rivals. It would be a shame to lose them entirely and revert back to static spawn points sheltered from the frontline. Planetside 2 allows you to decline revives from medics - that seems like a good solution to one part of the problem. Meanwhile, perhaps emphasising the risk of a certain spawn points would help alleviate the annoyance of being murdered instantly. Skull icons currently mark recent deaths on the minimap, but it could be made even more explicit: changing the colour of the spawn marker to a bright red if everyone who drops in there dies within moments. There are probably even more elegant solutions out there - let us know in the comments.



Smarter friendly fire indicators

A more specific problem is that of friendly fire or, rather, how the risk of friendly fire is flagged. Anyone who plays Battlefield 3 will have at some point been killed by an enemy who they've plainly seen but presumed is a friendly due to a blue/green tag above his head. What they're actually seeing is the ally marker of a team-mate some distance behind the hostile trooper. There’s no differentiation in the size or transparency of the tag to help you deduce this. I'd like to see friendly tags vanish if positioned directly behind an enemy.

More throwbacks to Battlefield 2
Whatever happened to the sweeping orchestral music at the start of games, or the support of a commander who could call in pin-point artillery? How could we forget what fun we had spotting a camping sniper for the commander as he dropped a jeep on his head in a brutal act of "cartillary". Whatever happened to those big 6-man squads and a class dynamic that never felt like it needed changing? Why did I seemingly sacrifice my netcode and framerate for destructible buildings? Why can I level up a character in a matter of hours?

Some of Battlefield 3 and BFBC2’s features have been fantastic and series has undoubtedly evolved in line with others, but I think much of the legacy of BF2 and perhaps even the identity of the Battlefield games has been lost along the way.



Deal with la...           ...g
If I had a pound for every time I shouted, "He just shot me round a fucking corner!" I’d be able to pay transport costs for everyone on the server to come and sit in my lounge and play on LAN.

Of course, the UK's abysmal network infrastructure is rather out of DICE's hands, but the game's design can account for it up to a point. And, as BF3’s Close Quarters’ DLC maps illustrated, the netcode was never built for fast, twitchy encounters.

More scoring sounds and player barks
BFBC2 and BF3 are among the most sonically accomplished games ever made - witness the sudden subdued volume and tinnitus ring that follows a close detonation, or the way sounds echo off the walls of a confined space. These are key to the sense of embodiment that roots you right there in the action.

But they could expand their score-related sound indicators. Currently, there's only one sound used to represent everything from "YES! My mine blew up a tank" to "Bollocks I’m dead". You even hear the exact same soft ping if you clock up a teamkill. Surely a set of sounds could exist attributed to Battlefield 3’s huge number of bonuses.

I also quite miss the use of non-English languages from Battlefield 2 and BFBC2. As an English-speaking player there was an exciting vulnerability in not being able to interpret enemy barks - although, if you played the game long enough, you began to unconsciously assimilate the phrases. If I ever get stuck in China or Russia, I will be able to confidently ask for a lift from passing jeeps, although I suspect "Grenade!" and "Enemy tank spotted!" may be rather more hazardous to use in everyday conversation.



Bigger, more malleable environments
Visually stunning and relentlessly tested maps are crucial if Battlefield 4 wants to be what we need it to be. Aside from perhaps Operation Metro, BF3 has been a leader in flowing and multi-layered map design, with minimal choke-points and plenty of neat little hidey-holes.

Playing the Armoured Kill maps in particular I was struck with how good the game looks on a larger scale, and feel that even more could be done for Battlefield 4 to make those environments more interactive. Alborz Mountains for example has heaving great rock formations above Conquest flags which I'm just itching to destroy. If you can flatten a two-storey building why not bring rocks and rubble crashing down around your foes?

Consider Alborz' steep inclines, laden with snow. It would have been fantastic if you could cause avalanches. What better way to ambush a convoy of attackers in a ravine than by blocking the road with snow? Imagine breaking up those sheets of ice in the lower valleys with tank fire, sending crossing troops into the sea on impromptu icebergs.

Vast, open environments and destructibility were the defining features of previous Battlefield games. In the singleplayer at least - DICE abandoned that in favour of aping Call of Duty's cinematic linearity. This was definitely a mistake. This is what the "next-gen" should be all about: wowing audiences with dynamic, interactive worlds, not funneling them through a slightly prettier duckshoot.



Consistency among patches
The running joke of game patches needing patches of their own has never seemed as true as in BF3. From its catastrophic server problems at launch to the frustrating wait between updates (thanks to them being tethered to patch approval processes on consoles), Battlefield 3’s patch history has been turbulent, but DICE’s support for the game has been strong.

However, as a player, there’s one aspect of this patching process that has been slightly frustrating: the radical changes to the strengths and weaknesses of the game’s arsenal. Game balance is obviously an ongoing process, but it seems that something's gone wrong in your QA or beta-testing process if, after launch, you end up shifting weapons and vehicles into completely different brackets of strength and agility. As a gamer the consistency of your instruments is important, and a more thorough closed beta or external game testing by trusted members of its community would make DICE’s Battlefield 4 a game to remember.

That's my wishlist - what's yours? Let us know what you want to see from Battlefield 4 in the comments and add me on BL @ Stryk_uk if you like hardcore mode and teamwork!

It's hard to believe that it's been a whole decade since we were riding on the wings of bombers and making car bombs with satchel charges in Battlefield 1942, one of the most influential multiplayer shooters of all time. To celebrate its storied run, Origin is offering six major entries from the series at $10/£10 a pop.

Included in the promotion are Battlefield 3, Battlefield 2142 Deluxe, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Digital Deluxe Edition, Battlefield: Bad Company 2: Vietnam, and Battlefield 2: Complete Collection. No love for the series' World War II-based entries, unfortunately, but it's still a hell of a deal: five Battlefield titles for less than the launch price of BF3. Well, six, technically—but why would you buy BF:BC2 when its Digital Deluxe Edition is the same price?

The deal is exclusive to Origin, of course. If you're hopping into BF3 for the first time, have a look at Armored Kill, BF3's most recent DLC. We like it.

You're captivated by the elegant figure of an F/A 18 Super Hornet as it roars over the desert and—BRAP B-BRAP!—syncopated machine gun bursts ripple past your head and cut your gawking short. You sprint to cover in time to watch a tank shell devour your last entrenchment and spit out its dusty remains. Alone you're dead, but above you a UH-1Y Super Huey chops through bursting sun rays and scatters reinforcements like dandelion seeds (if dandelion seeds carried rocket launchers, of course).

I do love hyperbole, but this really (virtually) happened to me. The emergent drama of Battlefield 3's large-scale multiplayer battles is hard to overstate, which is why we've dedicated the latest episode of PC Gamer Digital, which is available now on Steam, entirely to Battlefield 3 and the renowned Battlefield series at large. More details below!





In this episode, you'll explore the present with a guide to deadly BF3 helicopter piloting and a recklessly destructive, physics-testing stunt show (jumping jeeps over helicopters is just the warm-up). Then you'll step into the past with a 360-degree tour of Wake Island—the series’ most famous map—from 1942 to the futuristic war zone of 2142, and relive the series' history with every Battlefield-related magazine article ever published in PC Gamer US. And there’s more (for less than the price of most shoelaces!), making this episode a must-have for any Battlefield fan.

If you haven't yet experienced PC Gamer Digital, it's an exciting, unique application featuring original interactive content and HD video features from the editors of PC Gamer. Check it out by downloading the free base application (which comes with our debut episode!).

While talking with the dev team about Planetside 2 at Fan Faire this past weekend, SOE president John Smedley and Creative Director Matt Higby listed EVE Online and Battlefield 2 among outside games that have inspired their designs for Planetside 2.

Smedley plays EVE Online regularly and frequently mentioned it as the major influence for the sandbox portion of PS2. Its influence is obvious in both PS2's time-based, offline skill progression system and the desire to have a single shard server, even if Smedley said that they probably won't be able to manage that until awhile after launch, when there are multiple planets. "We're probably going to end up with servers," he continued, "but we're going to experiment with internally to see what we can do with it." It's an interesting idea, and there's a lot of great potential in having the meta-game played on a single shard. It's easy to imagine the same type of large-scale territorial control schemes that pop up in EVE replicated in Planetside 2.

Both Smedley and Higby mentioned FPS games as inspiration, including the Battlefield and Call of Duty series, and Higby specifically mentioned that Battlefield 2 (and what he's see so far of Battlefield 3) is "definitely on a pedestal" as the pinnacle of vehicle combat in multiplayer. He feels that "they've done the best with vehicles. I want to be at least that good."

I'm quite fond of the games that they both mention, and it seems to be a good big-picture way of picturing PS2's main elements. You don't often hear EVE Online and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 discussed in the same interview, but it seems like an apt combination of gameplay styles for Planetside 2's big dreams of shooter-powered territory control warfare.

DICE's General Manager, Karl Magnus Troedsson has described the upcoming Battlefield 3 as a "real sequel to Battlefield 2."

Speaking to game.on.net, Troedsson also discussed the series tonal shift, and how the developer has taken on more community feedback this time around.

Troedsson told the website: "We now feel like we are ready to make a real sequel to Battlefield 2. With Bad Company we introduced the franchise to next gen console. With Bad Company 2 we introduced co-op; we introduced single player. Now is the time to put all that together and make a proper sequel to 2005's Battlefield 2. The biggest change from Battlefield Bad Company 2 to Battlefield 3 will be the tone of the game, definitely."

DICE's general manager says community feedback has also had a significant impact on Battlefield 3's design decisions: "It was hard to ignore the outcry from the community. The return of jets and the return of prone is definitely... we have listened to the community straight off."

Players had the ability to lie prone in 2005's Battlefield 2, but not in DICE's more recent Bad Company games. Battlefield 3 will let players lie on their bellies as much as they like, as highlighted in the most recent trailer. "We wanted to bring it back but we also know that there's a lot of hassle with things like that; both visual quality-wise but also balancing. How do you handle that sniper, up on a hill, on the grass, lying down?"

His confidence in the franchise was obvious: “The competitors … are out there, they’re established, and they’re very, very big... we believe that they are not innovating, that they are treading water."

For more on Battlefield 3, check the official website or read our in our 10 things we'd like to see in Battlefield 3 feature. Will Battlefield 3 will be a worthy sequel to Battlefield 2?

The end of this year is going to be an orgy of exciting sequels: The Elder Scrolls 5, Mass Effect 3, and the tenth Battlefield game, Battlefield 3. It's a sequel to the third Battlefield game, Battlefield 2, which was the 1,940th prequel to the original, Battlefield 1942. It all makes perfect sense.

The important bit is that it's not part of the Bad Company sub-series, whose last entry Bad Company 2 is what most fans are playing these days. That means it can handle 64 players, fighter planes are back, and most exciting of all: you can lie down. All these things were in Battlefield 2 but lost in the Bad Company games. If Battlefield 3 is going to be the culmination of all the things we love about the series, what else does it need?

Rich, Tim and myself came up with ten demands and cut them together into a blackmail note using letters hacked out of Edge magazine with our Future-branded safety scissors. Then we typed them out.


1. Jets for pilots only
Battlefield 2’s saddest sight was the aeroplane queue. You could gauge the tone of a server on spawn by checking how many workshy freeloaders were bunny hopping around an empty runway, desperate for their jet to reappear. For every competent pilot who could flip upside down, fly under a bridge and still drop a cluster-bomb on that oncoming column of tanks, there were ten chumps who’d leap into the cockpit and fly their multi-million dollar charge into a tree. By hanging around miles from the main conflict and depleting the fighting force, Battlefield 2’s idiot pilots killed the game for the rest of us with our feet on the ground.

Battlefield 3’s jets are confirmed, and I pray that DICE have found some way to kill the plane-camping trend. Maybe by introducing a short test before players earn their air-driving license, including reading and writing comprehension. Inclusion of the word ‘lmfaooo’ would constitute an insta-fail.
Rich


2. A Steamworks server browser
We tried "Make a new server browser!" Then we tried "Make a better server browser!" Then "Make a server browser that works!" It didn't work. Bad Company 2's is marginally more usable than the previous Battlefield games, but it's still bad, finding friends is still a pain, and the 'Play now' button is still the 'Play never' button. I tried it just now - after five minutes of churning, it put me on an empty server.

Our revised request: "Give up. Use Steamworks. It's free, it uses Steam, and it works."
Tom


3. Infinite imagination married to absurd physics
This video sums up Battlefield perfectly for me. Bored of dogfighting? Get out of your plane, fire a rocket, and get back in. It’s easy for developers to stamp down on silliness and stupidity, especially when the game they’re making is so drawn from reality. But that’s not as fun as absurdity. My favourite Battlefield moments were the times when, on a private server, the PC Gamer team raced jets through dams, tried to park six tanks in a swimming pool, or swapped jets in middair. Whatever the Battlefield team decide to do with Battlefield 3, I hope it retains that core absurdity.
Tim
4. Co-op against bots
This may be futile - a co-op story campaign is already confirmed, and bots are already anti-confirmed. But I'll make my case anyway.

Co-op campaigns are great, typically much better than single-player ones. But they're essentially the same kind of thing, so they don't help the true multiplayer side of Battlefield. DICE are keen to stress that their efforts on the campaign won't affect the multiplayer, but the loss of bots really does.

Not everyone wants to take on a world of viciously proficient players in one of the most brutal shooters around. And even those that do sometimes just want to mess around. Even if they suck, bots let us do that. They're the perfect way to learn the basics of the game without being slapped in the face for not having unlocked the M60, and they're often more fun to play against with a friend than real people are.

Playing Battlefield 1942 with two players against hundreds of incompetent bots was amazing fun, and one of the only times Battlefield's ridiculous side - standing on aeroplane wings firing a sniper rifle - mixed with its brutal side.
Tom


5. Complicated sniping
The sniper rifles in Bad Company 2 came from some alien world that had its gravity turned up way too high. Long range shots would dip over their course, and this made them brilliant. For one, it made preternaturally gifted snipers less effective: those that survived on the speed of their right wrist alone suddenly had to calculate trajectories. It also made a successful, map-long headshot unbelievably satisfying. Lining up a sprinting target, judging his course, working out the height compensation, then lancing him through his stupid brain is a pleasure I’m desperate to recreate in Battlefield 3.
Rich


6. Huge maps
They don't all have to be vast, but there's a kind of experience you can't have on tightly focused maps - one I uniquely associate with Battlefield. It's being alone with my squad, miles from the action, lying on top of a gas tower - the fighting just distant booms. All other radio comms come through with a crackle, but when my sniper says 'Enemy spotted', it's clear and close. That distance makes the war feel terrifyingly huge, and your experience in it very personal. You're not just another screaming voice in the fray, you and your men are moving strategically through a vast landscape to achieve something specific in a greater conflict.

I think that's why I never got quite as immersed in Bad Company as the previous games: the tighter maps make it a frenetic onslaught like Call of Duty, without these moments of peace and perspective that make the war feel real.
Tom


7. Destructible buildings
Bad Company 2’s ‘collapsing house’ noise shot straight to the top of my list titled ‘gaming noises that make me go “ohshitohshitohshit!”,’ right next to the gurgle of Ravenholm’s headcrab-chucking zombie. Houses used to be my friends. Their walls would save me from bullets, their staircases would provide neat little fire channels. Bad Company 2 broke my trust in houses.

It was a game where the safe and mundane turned against you in seconds, and it made the battlefield fluid and consistently lethal. Every time I escaped from a collapsing building, I left exhilarated. I’d turn and look back at the empty air where, a few seconds ago, stood concrete and bricks.

Battlefield 3 promises to be a bigger game. When you hand sniper rifles to internet soldiers and tell them to go and play across a mile of sand and buildings, it means repeated long-range death. Frustrating death. Unless you play the sniper’s game better than he does, you’ll never shift him from his hidey-house. But if you can bring the sky down on him, crush his friendly walls thanks to the weird magic of the Frostbite engine, you can turn the tide of the battle.

I’ve had a good taste of what previous versions of the Frostbite engine can do, but now I want more. I want to be able to accurately punch holes in rooftops, I want to be able to extract the core of a building with such precision that it topples. And I want to be able to blow everything - everything - into small chunks of masonry. Cover is so last year.
Rich


8. Defibrillators
The shock blocks, the shooter rebooters: they make you hardier against ventricular tachycardia. When the Battlefield series introduced these, I discovered I find saving lives as satisfying as taking them. Healing isn't enough: that's just buffing a number so it doesn't drop to another number. Running through a firefight to a fallen comrade and bringing him back from the brink of death is saving someone, and it feels amazing.

Given that they've typically died of a gunshot wound to the head rather than a heart attack, I realise the mechanic makes absolutely no sense. I just hope DICE know that's no reason to take it out.
Tom


9. Clear objectives
The Rush games mode introduced in the Bad Company series had one major success: team focus. Battlefield’s traditional flag-capturing is creatively stupendous fun when you’ve got a crew of communicating squadmates, but dipping into a server and pootling between unmanned flags alone is a lonely experience. Rush - with its two objectives, and two sides fighting to destroy/protect them - guides players into choke points. By doing that, it creates the kind of ridiculous firefights and moments of personal glory that make you alt-tab out of the game, IM your friends and type “GUESS WHAT I JUST DID.”

Even the most ham-fisted of Bad Company 2’s teams eventually point themselves at the right target in Rush mode. The game’s long, narrow maps corral have drawn battle-lines, letting two great waves (both armed with automatic weaponry) crash into each other. Conquest maps are more amorphous. When I hop into a Rush server, I’m guaranteed satisfaction; in Conquest, I get frustrated and self-important.

I’m not suggesting Battlefield 3 drops flag-capturing entirely. I’m not even suggesting DICE port Rush mode over verbatim. Instead, I’d like them to take Bad Company 2’s excellent lessons on board. I want to be led by the nose, given reasons to push toward the largest concentration of enemies. I want to be yanked into valleys of death, be a willing participant in the game’s killing fields, not a solitary figure skirting the outskirts.
Rich


10. Chain of command
I understand the simplification in Bad Company 2: you don't want squads to be these ultra hardcore private clubs with a leader shouting at everyone and ruining their fun. So there's no leader, squads are just little friendly gaggles of soldiers who happen to be able to spawn on each other.

It works for getting a few people to stick together, heal each other and improve their chances. But without prior organisation, squads rarely achieve anything. Everyone can designate a target for the squad, but precisely because of that, no-one pays much attention when they do.

Battlefield 2 might not have been as noob-friendly, but it was clear and decisive. Squad leader says we go there? We go there. Squad leader says hold? We hold. Whether he was a pro or a noob, we'd follow his orders - frankly because we got bonus points for it. I was as happy to follow orders as give them, because in either case, anyone who doesn't like it can just leave the squad.

It meant Battlefield 2 - and 2142 - had an uncanny way of forming relationships between players. Anyone can make a game that's fun if you play with friends in an organised squad. Battlefield 2 was one of the few that could inspire that experience between total strangers. Back in Karkand, I'd follow ^^andy^^05 to hell and back. On Oman, mrbuzzard and neurax executed my orders perfectly. And I got so attached to my squad in Dragon Valley that when my commander asked me to send them on a suicide mission, I countermanded the order and went rogue, leading them to a better point of attack and winning the game. I want that feeling back.
Tom



Those are our ten. What are yours?

You've read our impressions, now see it for yourself. Yes, the single player campaign of DICE's new shooter looks unbelievably gorgeous. The multiplayer will support 64 players on PC, and the new engine lets you destroy even more of the terrain than Bad Company.

It’s loud. So very, very loud.

The first public showing of Battlefield 3 took place this evening at an off-site event at the Game Developer’s Conference. There, select press were shown the first chunk of a the single player campaign, and what the technology behind the game; the Frostbite Engine 2, is capable of.

Last year, EA attacked Call of Duty’s hold on the Christmas shooter market with Medal of Honor, with limited success.

This year, Battlefield is going to mount a full blown assault on CoD’s dominance. The good news is: it’s built for the PC, to showcase what the PC is capable of. And it’s the best looking PC game in the world right now.

The demo opened with a precis of the tech. Frostbite 2 uses animation systems developed for sports games to give characters heft and weight. As the soldiers turn into doorways, you can see the weight shift on their feet. The destructability of the old Frostbite engine has been ramped up; bullets can chip away at masonry and concrete, while full bore explosives can tear down entire buildings. And when buildings collapse, they don’t vanish in a cloud of smoke and magically transform into burning husks - the destruction is more complex - signage wobbles and shakes, concrete awnings tumble down. The sound is as violent and deafening as Bad Company 2; bullets echo and snap with nightmarish cracks.

But it’s the sheer visual quality that’s the real star. I think it’s down to the lighting - the bright sunshine of the Iraq level was extremely impressive. When the demo transitioned to the indoors, shafts of sunlight shone through any open windows, creating gorgeous pillars of dust. It absolutely looked a step ahead of last year’s big shooters.



The game demo was split into four sections all taking place in Iraq. The storyline states that the PLR are involved in an insurgency on the Iraq border. US soldiers are sent to blow them up. Or something. I don’t think the Battlefield 3 team are overthinking the story.

The first slice saw the team drive into a staging area in a APC, while one of the lead character’s team-mates complained of not doing his taxes, the other worried about how they were disembarking way off their expected position. As they exited the APC, they walked through a very busy US checkpoint. Following a briefing from a commander (find the missing US soldiers. they’re.... over here somewhere) the team run through abandoned buildings, kick in a few doors, and dodge a PLR patrol. At one point, the team pause as the ground beneath them begins to shake. “We’re on a major faultline,” remarks one. That’s called foreshadowing.

As they exit a garage, the game enters slow-motion, and one of your friends is sniped. Nooeees! The dev playing dragged him back into cover a mini quick time event. Minor point - it was pretty cool to see the usual Press A or B replaced with WASD. Then, a full bore firefight broke out.



This is where the demo was less impressive. Battlefield’s single player campaign is clearly a tightly scripted, tightly controlled shooting gallery. In the demo, there was little evidence of enemy soldiers using their own brains to find cover and avoid getting shot. Nor did your team-mates do anything to really help out. The player simply pointed the gun at the baddies heads until they fell over. There was a brief moment when the developer used a grenade to blow a chunk of balcony away to reveal a sniper (complete with satisfying ragdoll wheeling through the air), but mostly the player lined up headshots until the PLR began to retreat.

Following the retreat, the player attempts to track down the source of an IED, following a long wire into a basement bomb factory. He crawls through a ventilation shaft (yay, shafts! it’s a PC game alright!) before finding the remote detonator. As he tries to unplug it, he’s punched hard in the chest by an enemy. There then follows a vicious no holds barred fight from first person in which prompts to click the left or right mouse button in the appropriate corners of the screen are followed by punches, kicks, and a quite brutal knee to the tummy. It reminded me of a more controlled version of Mirror’s Edge’s melee fighting. In fact, the whole game reflected DICE’s experience with Mirror’s Edge - there was a real emphasis on maintaining the first person perspective while constantly reminding you of your own physical presence. It’s always good to look down and see your legs.



The third section of the demo was more interesting, and used the destruction tech in a more creative way. The player’s squad comes under heavy sniper fire on a rooftop. Each rifle bullet creates a shockwave in the air - and pings off plantpots, concrete, and the pipes and air-conditioning units that offer your only cover. The player crawls to the edge of the rooftop with his squad who, on a count of three, all offer suppressing fire while you fire an RPG into his spider hole. The RPG round is a little bit too effective - the entire frontage of the hotel the sniper has been hiding in collapses. “Good effect on target,” jokes your team-mate.

The final section of the demo was a full blown ground battle in the heart of the city. Infantry were joined by tanks and helicopters in holding a vital pedestrian bridge. Now I write that, I’m wondering exactly what was so vital about the bridge. Is the green cross code considered destabilising?

The player lay down and used a machine gun to mow down dozens of soldiers, while the helicopter hovered above, hosing incoming jeeps with round after round of tracer. As each wave was pushed back, the player shifted to another side of the intersection, until finally, he leapt onto the back of jeep, and used the mounted turret to hold back the hordes.

“Great,” I thought. “A mounted machine gun bit. That, right there, is the future of games.”

But, immediately, the ground begins to shake violently. It’s an earthquake. The concrete splinters and shatters in a terrible wave, infantry are knocked off their feet, and the player is bounced out of the jeep. Then, the buildings around him start collapsing, one by one. At the final moments of the demo, a skyscraper falls directly onto the helicopter, which crashes onto the player.

I was impressed with almost everything about Battlefield 3. It’s beautiful, sounds awesome, and has some impressive destruction tech. But I wasn’t entirely convinced. For all the fire and fury of combat, the AI of the enemy soldiers didn’t impress, nor did your team-mate seem to want to help. That needs work. And I’m desperate to see what the developers do with Frostbite 2.0 in multiplayer. But, I came out grinning, if deafened. I can’t wait to play it. And I can’t wait to play it on PC.

Battlefield 3 is out in Autumn. You'll hear it coming.

2005’s Battlefield 2 was an amazing game. Huge, 64-player wars on sprawling maps with every kind of vehicle. 2009’s Battlefield Heroes, on the other hand, was an interesting experiment. It was a cartoon shooter in which you created a character, rather than picking a class and team each time you spawned. You could buy new guns with an in-game currency that could be earned or purchased with real money.

Now EA are combining the two into a new free-to-play multiplayer game, based closely on Battlefield 2 but with the character progression and item purchasing of Battlefield Heroes. Battlefield Play4Free is currently in closed beta, due to launch early this year, and we’ve been playing it.



It’s an exciting idea. I love Battlefield 2, more than any other game in the series, but it’s too old and too clunky to have much fun with today. The player base has been whittled down to the hardest of the hardcore, and the eternally shonky server browser is something I never want to have to deal with again. A free remake, with a slicker, faster engine and matchmaking that actually works, could be perfect.

The reality, going by the beta, is more of a compromise than the best of both worlds. Games are limited to 32 players and smaller versions of the Battlefield 2 maps, and the squad system that made Battlefield 2’s teamwork intuitive has gone.



The combat is functional and familiar – snipers camp rooftops, engineers blow up tanks, medics spam medkits and assault troops play team deathmatch. But it’s not quite as punchy or lethal as Battlefield 2 was: you’re never scared, or overwhelmed, or shellshocked. People take a few more hits to go down, presumably a nod to accessibility, but most of your deaths are still sudden and from an unseen source.

What is better, though, is getting into a game in the first place. Admittedly this is a limited beta at the moment, so the player base is probably easier to handle. But this is the first version of any Battlefield game where the automated matchmaking has reliably put me in a working, responsive match – quickly, and without any fuss. It’s also the first one since Battlefield 1942 that has run well on the PC I had at the time. The scenery is not stunning to look at, but smooth performance is a much more important payoff.



The character progression is divided between cosmetic customisation options, weapon unlocks, and passive upgrades to your abilities. The cosmetic stuff is absurd: it costs a ridiculous amount of hard-earned money to buy something as pointless as a visor, and the affordable options use Battlefield Heroes’ unpleasant renting system, where you permanently lose the cash but only get the item for a day. Besides which, you start out as a bland, sandy-coloured soldier, so practically everything you can add to your character makes you easier to spot and shoot in the field.

The weapon unlocks vary: some are whole new weapon types such as shotguns, others offer only imperceptible boosts over the default kit. Probably a good thing. The juicy stuff is in the upgrade system: it includes such standard skills as the ability to use hand grenades, but also some more interesting ones. One for the medic gives you an audible warning when any sniper targets you. Others let you fall further without taking damage, and one amusing one increases your ladder-climbing speed.



But the character system all this slots into is clumsy. You have to choose a class when you create your character, which means there’s no way to change it in-game. If your team simply doesn’t need another engineer because the enemy aren’t fielding many vehicles, tough. The only way to switch classes would be to quit, fire up your browser, go to the Battlefield Play4Free site, create a new character of a different class, think of a new name for him, then restart the game and hope the matchmaking puts you back in the same match (there’s currently no server browser).

Battlefield Heroes lost its appeal when significantly more effective weapons and perks became prohibitively hard to earn without spending real money. Play4Free has the same dual currency system – one type you can earn, the other you have to buy. So they have the framework to make items you can’t buy without real cash, but they haven’t implemented it yet, so we can’t say whether it’ll become a problem.



It’ll be interesting to see if this starts to feel more like Battlefield once maps with helicopters and jets are added – right now it’s just Strike at Karkand. But the loss of the squad system hurts it more than I think EA realise – it tied players together in close knit groups, cleverly incentivised close cooperation, and gave them clear objectives they could achieve together. So far, Play4Free feels much more like a team deathmatch game with some flags in it.

Battlefield Play4Free is a free to play Battlefield game that uses Battlefield 2's maps and Battlefield: Bad Company 2's weapons and class system. A closed beta for the game kicks off tonight for all those lucky players invited.

If you want to know more about the Battlefield Play4Free, check out our preview, or head over to theBattlefield Play4Free site. If you haven't received an invite yet, don't fret. Minecraft creator Notch might be able to help you out.Notch announced on Twitter earlier that he'd received a bunch of keys from EA. Too many keys, in fact. He's planning on giving some away once the beta goes live. if you fancy grabbing one, keep an eye on Notch's Twitter account and his blog.