Caspian Border is an awesome map. They finally opened it up to the public. It really feels more like BF2 than BC2. It's absolutely massive, and has tons of vehicles, including fighter jets and attack helicopters. I have no idea why they went with Metro initially to showcase the game. This just went back into the "must buy" category.
Battlefield 3 - Limited Edition [Download] $41.99 at Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Battlefield-3-Limited-Edition-Download/dp/B005Q47M56/ref=sr_1_10?s=videogames&ie=UTF8&qid=1318369579&sr=1-10 The Pre-order Battlefield 3 Limited Edition Pre-order Battlefield 3 Limited Edition to get the "Back to Karkand" expansion pack at no extra charge. The complete pre-order limited edition release includes: Four legendary maps from Battlefield 2, including Strike at Karkand, Wake Island, Gulf of Oman, and Sharqui Peninsula. Iconic Battlefield 2 weapons reworked with the Frostbite 2 Engine. Four brand new vehicles. Unique rewards, achievements/trophies and more.
Most wont have a problem playing on high, but can you play on Ultra Quality? My 5850 will probably get around 25fps.
It looks like the 360's version is gimped if you don't have a hard drive. There's a HD texture pack download to match it up to the PS3/PC versions. Apparently they cite texture streaming from hdd as the reason for this, but devs have managed to use streaming from disc on PS3 titles like Uncharted and Killzone 3. Even the PS3's slow ass bluray drive.
I'm getting close to 60 fps in BF3 with CF 6950s. Afterburner shows GPU% in the 80s to low 90s, so my guess is 2 6950s is about what you'd need to get into the 60 fps/ Ultra/ 1080p range. 6970s or a 6990 would probably get you a smooth 60 fps all the time. I may try fiddling with some of the settings. I think I turned down a couple of things to get a bit better frame rate. I'm usually at just below 60, maybe 55 to 60 most of the time with FRAPS depending on what happens. I think I'd probably get 60 with FRAPS off. I initially had CF off without realizing it, and the results weren't pretty. You do need reasonably powerful cards to go all out with Ultra. High settings were very playable, though. If you're going with a really high resolution and multi-monitor, I have no idea what you'd need. I also have no idea about Nvidia. They seemed to advertise Nvidia all over the place with this game, so perhaps it's optimized a bit better for their cards. The game itself looks very nice most of the time. I was getting irritated with the constant moisture and whatever other crap on my visor and whatnot. I was starting to miss lower end graphics because it was a bitch to see anything at times, and I got lit up in the dark because I couldn't see the target. I walked right into a shotgun blast for an instant death. Some moments it looks sensational, approaching photorealism, such as the automated stroll indoors on the aircraft carrier right before you jump into the fighter plane. I've only played offline so far. I wanted to be able to play around with the settings and test it.
My GTX 460 suddenly decided to shit itself (artifacts, crashing, "display driver has stopped responding" errors, etc) and had to be sent off for replacement, so I probably won't be playing this for a few weeks. I've heard Gigabyte has really slow turnaround for RMAs.
This didn't pull in the kind of reviews I was expecting. Gamespot only gave it an 8.5, which isn't that great. I may hold off for a sale.
Aren't reviews based off single player? Despite the brilliant vids from earlier in the year teasing single player, I never desired the game for anything other than multiplayer. I'll likely pick it up soon, pretty sure my 5870 is going to crap its pants and die. Although it doesn't seem any more demanding that the original Crysis by the looks of things. Hard for me to compare since I have a 1GB 5870 and I'm unsure how much the extra VRAM of the 2GB version above would help.
I've made an interesting discovery. It's the antialiasing deferred setting that has been killing my frame rate when I turn up the settings. I'm at a very playable framerate with everything else maxed when I turn antialiasing deferred off. I haven't tried benchmarking it yet, as I'm toying around with the settings still, but the CF update from a couple of days ago plus turning that off has let me run everything else at the top setting. I turned off the in-game AA and have forced MLAA from the CCC settings for now, which looks very nice. I'm still trying to figure out what will work best for my setup. EDIT: Those settings, which are working quite well, put my GPUs at around 95% each. LOL. Evidently I have just enough power between them. Thus, I probably can't go any higher without an additional driver update. EDIT2: That max business does not apply to the huge battlefields with planes dropping things. That slows things down quite a bit.
So I've been playing the campaign and I like it very much. I've came to the conclusion that it's more popular to show another country's elite unit in these types of games (British SAS in modern warfare and Russian Spetsnaz in BF3) rather than America's. I keep saying to myself LESS BLACKBURN MORE DIMA. MOH showed the whole story as US rangers and special forces... obviously not as popular as battlefield and cod mw.... what happened?!?!? edit: aaaaand I just beat it. that was kind of short. 6 or 7hrs maybe?
What's you Origin experience so far? I had all kinds of problems getting my account to work and when I got it working it had to download BF3 again.
negative. these days, I only coop games online. bf3 coop mode seems questionable on how fun it'll be.. plus none of my friends got the game so it would've been $60 campaign game for me. $10 per hour game in my case.
I kid. I kid. I'm a thieving pirate too. Just not with this game because I'd like to be able to play online.
Apparently all of the people saying this game would require a monster CPU couldn't have been more wrong. BF3 isn't really CPU dependent much at all and runs fine on dual cores. Performance depends almost entirely on which GPU you're running. I really think BFBC2 was just a horribly optimized console port similar to GTA4, and that's why it had such crazy CPU requirements. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063-13.html
Anyone have thoughts on the multi-player? Overall the game is very balanced. No particular weapon, class, or vehicle is overly powerful. Jets actually seem gimped and I don't see many kills with them. Attach helicopters don't seem as powerful as they were in BF2. Tank shells have very small explosion radius's and are also weaker than in BF2. Compared to BF2 I think the 64 player maps in BF3 are too crowded. Many of the maps have choke points and 64 players gets ridiculous. I've actually had the most fun on 16 player maps which makes me feel like BF3 has failed to some degree. I'm not a big fan of destructible environments but I also don't hate them. I think BF3 does a better job at it than COD. The game play is probably B quality but I find I can't stop playing because I'm always waiting for the next unlock. Laser scopes, flack jackets, ribbons, medals, pistols, dog tags, so many things to unlock. I think at some point I'll probably stop playing and move on to something else. My ranking so far of the BF franchise excluding Bad Company which I haven't played. 1942 > BF2 > BF3 > Vietnam > 2142
Yeah it looks rather mediocre. Haven't picked it up because I had to send my video card off for replacement, but I think I'm just going to wait for it to get cheap. Doesn't look like it's worth $60 tbh.