It’s been an unusual past few years for PC gamers, particularly so for first-person shooters. As the genre’s success and popularity on console platforms rapidly eclipsed its traditional PC home, publisher focus followed the money and desktop gamers began to feel like more and more of an afterthought.

With Moore’s Law still in full effect, the dynamically upgradable PC platform never stopped improving, but in 2011 even the grandfathers of PC FPS at id Software have climbed on the “platform parity” train, launching their latest game RAGE with it looking largely the same across all platforms -- despite recent comments from id’s John Carmack acknowledging that a high-end PC today is now 10 times as powerful as an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.

So with the current console generation now getting quite long in the tooth -- to put things in perspective, this many years into the life of the original Xbox, we were already playing Xbox 360s-- it was naturally only a matter of time before game developers came back to genuinely push the tech on the PC frontier to wow us once again and I’m elated to report that the launch of Battlefield 3 marks that moment.



That’s not to take too much away from the console versions of the game though -- having played portions of the PS3 version at demo events, it’s easy to say that it’s still at the top of the pile of best looking games on that system -- but PC BF3 is just in a whole other league. Even before you get to the advanced multiplayer features, the game benefits immensely from both the higher screen and texture resolutions and the potential for silky 60-FPS frame-rates.

Powered by DICE’s homegrown Frostbite 2 engine, the technical marvel is not just the face-value visual effects -- glorious lighting, smoke, lens-flare and particle effects -- but equally importantly, the epic-scale level design that doesn’t skimp on the finer detail, an amazingly fluid and dynamic animation system, an absurd amount of authentic weapons and vehicles with an audio-system and effects that creates an eerily realistic soundscape and, of course, destructible environments.

As the name suggests, Battlefield 3 is intended as a true sequel to 2004’s Battlefield 2 and 2002’s Battlefield 1942. The series hallmark has always been about large-scale military combat and BF3 continues the evolution of its predecessor’s experiences.

The biggest additions this time around are the inclusion of a story-driven single-player campaign and a set of supplementary two-player co-operative missions. Both the aforementioned prequels were multiplayer-only affairs, and successful in their time, but the landscape has changed a lot since then and with most competitors now offering the complete package - and as EA are so clearly posturing the Battlefield franchise for genre-domination - a solo-campaign has arguably become a mandatory ingredient for that level of success.

No doubt many of you reading this will never even load Battlefield’s solo campaign -- heading straight for the multiplayer servers and never looking back -- but it’s difficult to deny the strengths of a good solo experience as a gateway to online play, giving us more new blood to punish. The risk, however, is that a poorly executed single-player offering can tarnish an otherwise good multiplayer game, as we saw all too recently with the likes of Brink and Homefront.

DICE have cut their teeth on campaign narratives with the Battlefield: Bad Company line, but they were very light-hearted and comedic in tone and didn’t speak to their ability to craft the serious war drama that BF3 intended to be. So after enjoying the Battlefield 3 PC Beta and seeing the huge potential there, single-player letting the whole thing down was a big concern.

It’s a relief then to say, that although it’s not right up the with the greatest, Battlefield 3’s single-player campaign is wholly adequate. Clocking in around the seven-hour mark, it might feel a bit brief for some tastes, but high-octane action and blockbuster presentation result in very few dull moments.



Set in 2014 and loosely based around real world locations in Europe and the Middle-East, the story is told as a retrospective from a US Marine Sergeant who relates his tales to a pair of interrogating government agents. These stories put the player in the boots of Staff Sergeant Blackburn and other various soldiers as the narrative slowly comes together.

The game is actually surprisingly mature and responsible with its narrative too. Having an American protagonist and using real-world countries could quite easily have been a recipe for a lot of cultural stereotyping and insulting references, but even with Iran being the game’s terrorist hotbed, it’s careful to note that the fictional PLR is a radical insurgent faction. And in the case of the Russian involvement, it makes efforts to paint both sides of the story as things get politically grey.

Disappointingly, however, the game’s prominent characters all develop quite slowly. The action is almost always so furious that there’s not much time to get to know anyone properly, so when the obligatory deaths of people you’re supposed to be closed to start happening, you haven’t really been given the motivation to get properly attached.

That’s not a huge dealbreaker though, because the real stars of the show are the environments, such as the meticulously crafted alleyways of Paris, the rooftops of Tehran or the mountainous vistas of Azerbaijan. As great as the tech makes them look, a huge amount of credit has to go to the level designers.

The attention to detail is continually boggling and the environmental destruction that occurs dynamically during fire-fights continues to enhance that. The novel idea of an earthquake -- that the player actually experiences in real-time -- serves as a vehicle for more great artistic expression and the scale of these areas really creates the illusion of traversing a real-world city.

The whole game is very heavily scripted and quick-time events are used liberally for close-quarter encounters. For the most part this has been well-executed and works quite well at creating that Hollywood blockbuster feel and orchestrating some truly epic moments. However, having to always wait for your AI buddies to follow their path before you can progress can become tedious, particularly since a lot of the save checkpoints seem to be immediately before long scripted sequences.

Similarly, there are several on-rails sections in vehicles that have a lot of wow factor the first time through, but lose their lustre rapidly if you fail and have to replay them several times.

During my first play through I also encountered a couple of game-breaking bugs where my buddies became stuck, or deviated from their path, halting my ability to progress and necessitating a long checkpoint replay. There was even one pivotal moment during a melee QTE with an important antagonist where the character model vanished entirely.



Beyond that, the only other bugs I encountered were a few very minor clipping and shadow issues. Bugs are always a sour-point though, and as these were all on my first time in the game, I’ve no doubt others will likely experience worse. All told, they weren’t persistent enough to spoil the whole experience for me, but if you have a low tolerance for such glitches, then you might want to wait for a patch or two before jumping in.

Like single-player, the past few years have seen cooperative support also slowly becoming an expected staple of any top-tier multiplayer shooter, with most games opting for an auxiliary set of missions that pit the player and an online friend against waves of AI. In a nutshell, that’s what Battlefield 3 has on offer. Supplementing the solo campaign story, BF3’s six cooperative missions tell other tales in and around some of the same locations you visit in single-player.

With the ability to revive each other if you fall, you begin each mission with a set weapon load out and can pick and choose from a few others before the offensive begins. There are three difficulty settings for each co-op scenario and Hard mode should prove quite challenging to even hardened Battlefield veterans.

With that out of the way, let’s move on to the real reason most of you want to play this game -- multiplayer. To put it bluntly: five game modes, nine maps, dozens of weapons, land, air and sea vehicles - epic.

Departing from the traditional in-game server browser or console style lobby matchmaking, DICE have instead created Battlelog -- a social networking, stat-tracking system for the game that also serves as a leaderboard, clan-coordinator, voice chat service, server-browser and the launching-point for the game’s executable for campaign, co-op and multiplayer.

In essence, it performs a lot of the same functionality that Valve’s Steamworks offers, but serves as a nexus for everything you do in Battlefield 3. Speaking of Steam, it’s obviously to the chagrin of some PC gamers that BF3 isn’t showing up on their favourite e-store, EA are instead currently only using their own Origin digital delivery service for the game due to reasons not completely disclosed.

Now I know it’s nice to have all your purchases neatly in one little service, but having to remember yet another Internet login is not something that I can fault EA or Battlefield 3 on. That Blizzard’s games aren’t available on Steam receives very little criticism from PC gamers, yet when it’s an EA game, tempers flare. As community-serving as our benevolent Valve overlords have always been, healthy competition is still a very good thing for consumers... but I digress.

Browsing servers from an external web-application works surprisingly well, and Battlelog’s slick Facebook-esque presentation is very nice to use, but not without issue. For one, alt-tabbing in and out of game is nice and fast, so you can flick out in between rounds to check on things and check other servers, but if you want to change servers at this point, the game will completely quit out, then load again, taking far longer than if it just connected to the same server.



Secondly, Battlefield 3 supports the Origin overlay in-game, so you can actually bring up the Origin web browser in-game and open Battlelog, but you’ll be met with an “unsupported browser” and not be able to use any of the game-launching functionality.

It’s inconvenient enough have to run both Origin and Battlelog -- not to mention being forced to leave a potentially memory-chewing external web-browser running while you’re gaming -- but that the two applications don’t play nice with each other is quite boggling. That said, when you do get used to the procedure, it is quite effective and easy to find the right game.

In the game itself, those that participated in the excessively locked-down multiplayer beta test will be happy to hear that you can access the in-game menu system at any point and tweak your video settings, key bindings etc at any time. There’s even a command console accessible with the traditional tilde key.

Nine maps at launch for any modern shooter would seem quite generous, but with the scale and the level of detail offered in these, it’s frankly astonishing. The maps also play remarkably different in each different game mode as play is limited to smaller areas for the tighter modes and opened right up for Conquest. Add on the four Battlefield 2 map remakes also coming in the already announced Back to Karkand DLC and it’s going to take a while for these to get old.

The game modes on offer are Rush: the objective-based mode where two large teams have to either attack or defend a series of detonation points, Squad Rush: the same as Rush with smaller four-man teams, Team Deathmatch and Squad Deathmatch: good old vanilla frag-fests and finally, Battlefield’s iconic Conquest: the map-domination mode with the largest scale and 64-player skirmishes.

You have the option of playing as one of four classes Assault, Support, Engineer and Recon, all balanced quite well and good at promoting teamwork. The biggest change from previous games is that Assault -- as the primary frontline fighter -- now has the medic abilities. Support handles the heavy weaponry and can dispense ammunition, Engineer is your anti-vehicle man and Recon is the sniper class.

Also on offer is a huge amount of rewards to unlock -- some class-specific and others available to all. Each class has an assortment of advanced abilities and gadgets to attain and most weapons and vehicles have a complete assortment of attachments and enhancements to collect.

The sheer quantity of weapons in the game (I’m not even going to attempt to count them all here, so let’s just go with dozens) and the variety of other modifiers creates enough goals to keep the average player busy for a long time to come.



On gameplay itself: as those who played the beta can likely attest, combat in BF3 doesn’t have quite the degree of tactile precision as some of it’s more twitch-centric competitors. The hit-boxes don’t always seem completely accurate and player movement -- particularly when vaulting over objects -- can be a little sketchy. But when the game looks and sounds as good as it does, the maps span square kilometers and you’re jumping in tanks and jets and parachuting from hundreds of meters with walls exploding into rubble, it’s difficult to get hung up on those little nuances.

Speaking of vehicles, their implementation here is also surprisingly balanced. It’s not game over when an enemy tank rolls in, if you have the tools to take it out. Jets and helis also have their strengths and weaknesses and the ability to paint an enemy target for your team and give orders as a squad leader aids a coordinated response to take them down.

In the larger vehicular modes, if your base has unoccupied aircraft sitting around -- or a spare gunner seat -- you have the option of spawning directly in them, mostly removing the tedium of standing around on the tarmac waiting for one to respawn. The only let down with vehicles however, is a lack of a training option. One of the cooperative missions lets you learn the ropes with a helicopter, but it’s still far from ideal and there’s no equivalent for jets as the only jet-related portion in the solo campaign is on-rails.

Which leads me to my next hang-up: the closed-server model. Yes, Battlefield 3 on PC will have an abundance of premium dedicated servers hosted in data centres dotted around the globe, enabling the 64 player games that the console’s client-hosted matchmaking can only dream of. But the rub is that the only people permitted to operate these servers are commercial service providers that have been specifically authorised by EA DICE.

Now on one hand, this aids the integrity of Battlelog stat tracking and helps keep a lid on hackers and pirates which all sounds great, but if you want a private server to play with your friends, your only option is to rent from one of these companies and -- if the currently announced per-slot rates we’ve seen so far are any indication -- at steeper charges than any other game.

A closed server model also means no LAN play, so if you cart your PCs to a friend’s house or want to organise a public BYOC event, you better make sure there’s an Internet connection with enough bandwidth to accommodate everyone there. And finally, it fundamentally prohibits mod support.

I’m not necessarily talking about the kind of total-conversion modding we saw with Battlefield 2 here -- as for DICE to release those kind of tools for BF3 with all the middleware considerations et al would be a massive undertaking -- but with an open/unranked server option and even the most basic modification-support, the example of not having a vehicle training mode built-in would be a non-issue; you could just fire up your own game and fly away to your hearts content in an invulnerable jet.

It’s largely a philosophical impasse between the publisher/developer’s desire to protect and enforce the integrity of their product and the gaming community’s desire to extract more emergence from a game at a faster-pace and with more variety than any dev studio can hope to supply with such a walled-garden approach.. but I digress once again (last one, I promise).



The evolution of the genre has meant that successful FPS games today do admittedly provide much of what the majority of players want and need right out of the box, and DICE have undoubtedly made their best-efforts toward that goal here in Battlefield 3.

After a rather a considerably buggy beta, I was quite astonished at the overall integrity and stability of multiplayer. It was only a few short weeks, but DICE appear to have ironed out most of the serious issues experienced during the test. There’s sure to be some left lingering, and your mileage may vary depending on your hardware configuration, but (running on a GeForce GTX 560ti) in all of the hours I clocked in multiplayer, the only obvious bugs I encountered were an occasional stutter in the kill cam, some minor model clipping and what seemed to be a memory leak that occurred after a few hours of consecutive play -- all more than reasonable from a game of this magnitude and technical ambition in it’s launch-state.

The main point I want to make here is that all of the negative spots I’ve touched on above amount to nothing more than minor gripes or contrary personal preferences that are largely eclipsed by everything else the game has to offer players.

There’s certainly room for improvement, but there’s no denying that so many different aspects of the first person shooter experience being dished out here are best-in-class. The multiplayer component alone is more than worth the price of admission and the solo campaign and cooperative offerings thankfully bring more to the table than they detract.

With Battlefield 3, DICE have at long last raised the bar of PC gaming above the long-held bottleneck of console-parity, to bring us a game that’s finally worth upgrading for and I dare say it carries with it a potential for a renaissance of the PC first person shooter.