- A Dumb Door
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- Fabled Mythic Member
*DISCLAIMER* I am well aware that this is a multiplayer game. However, this is a discussion of the CAMPAIGN'S flaws, not how exemplary multiplayer may be. If the campaign does not equip the player with the adequate tools to know what they're doing in the game, the multiplayer does not deserve as much credit as it gets.
On a whim, and thanks to low prices on things this holiday season, I decided to purchase Battlefield 3 for PS3. After hearing my friends, colleagues, various reviewers, etc. all gush and rave about how good this game is, I was expecting a good time. Especially so since I expected to play this with my friend. I was determined to enjoy it and have a good time!
About ten-twenty minutes into the campaign I shut it off and decided I was more interested in doing some cleaning of my house.
Why? Was it due to poor gun mechanics? Nope. Gun mechanics are perfectly fine. Is it because I didn't like the characters or dialogue? Well, aside from a lack of character development before killing everyone, it had nothing to do with that. Was it too intelligent and complicated for me? It's a first person shooter. I've been playing these since I was a wee 'un.
So what was wrong with it, you might wonder? Well, let me describe myself for a moment:
I play a lot of video games of many kinds. I play everything from casual puzzle games to the Halo series to Dishonored, to Assassin's Creed to Scribblenauts to Oddworld to Katamari to Quake to Unreal to Skyrim... Need I go on? Needless to say, I play a lot of games in my spare time. I also play a large variety of games.
Outside of the virtual world, I am a student, I am a part of the SCA, I am a civilian, I am a regular attendee of conventions of all kinds, etc.
Now, what am I not?
I am NOT:
A soldier who has spent a long time in basic training and on the field fighting
A war obsessed person who has dedicated years of my life studying wars
A person who spends every other waking moment shooting guns and learning every nuance about them
Clairvoyant
Telepathic
Omniscient
A Time Lord
A political genius
etc.
Keeping those factors in mind, Battlefield 3 irked me very severely. It expects you to be at least two or three of those things that I'm not, and has no reference to anything else I may have learned.
Now, at the surface, that's fine. I understand niche games. I play/have played a few of them. However, the thing that Battlefield 3 lacks? A learning curve, a sense of agency, and information. Battlefield 3 needs a tutorial, it needs to allow for some flexibility in objectives, and it needs to supply the player with information.
Who in the holy mother of gravy are the PLR? A little tidbit of info about who I'm fighting would be nice. Now let's pretend that I'm not a gun nut. Can this game at LEAST give a small bit of information about how to use the guns properly? A tutorial on the various weapons, vehicles, heck, even the flippin' CONTROLS would have been nice. Instead, we're thrust into this world full of tons of things that I have no idea what they are with no idea what I'm doing, being given a couple of instructions here and there without knowledge of how to execute them. This is not how you bring a new player into your experience.
Also, I was given an objective early on in the game. I was to defend a few people with a LMG at the top of a "wall" as they called it. I sat back and sniped people, then got it, and died immediately. I crept toward it killing all hostiles until I got there, then died immediately as I grabbed it. I rushed it, grabbed it, died immediately. Finally, I just refused to use it and sat back and sniped, completed the objective, and had to literally go, "What the heck, game? Why did you want me to do this if it only leads to my own self-destruction? This isn't the frikkin' Kobayashi Maru! Losing isn't the objective here, as I am forced to go back and try again each time!
I was also crawling through a dark tunnel with PLR troops searching out my fellow soldiers to kill. I encountered a rat. My first instinct? I pressed the melee button. No response. I hit the fire button. No response. The rat starts biting my finger, I sit there as a little scripted action goes on. Finally, I shake the rat off of my finger, I press the melee button, but just HAPPENED to hit it at the same time as I was supposed to press the fire button in a quick time event out of nowhere. Killed because of a -blam!-ing rat... Never had that problem in Dishonored (despite an infestation of plague rats). Every time I died in that game it's because I did something stupid, or just royally butt-blam!-ed myself through sheer incompetence.
Also, is it just me, or does this game have an obsession with obscuring my view with crap? Everything from too stark and unrealistic contrast to ridiculous levels of bloom to blurring so much I have to stop and wonder if I'm not watching a French New Wave era film. There is so much crap like dust, or maybe dirt, or who knows what constantly on my visor preventing me from seeing clearly, scratches on my jet obscuring more of my vision, dust in the air making it hard to see, darkness with no flashlights or anything of any kind preventing me from seeing, and need I go on? The game is just a mass of "NOPE! You're not seeing what's going on! Enjoy this amazing amount of detail put into the dust and lens flare instead!"
Far more work should have gone into making the game accessible in the beginning. Heck, as notorious as Dark Souls is for being hard, it slowly introduces you to concepts and makes it easy to understand. Just running through once or twice teaches you everything you need to know about an area, and then you can breeze through it executing it properly. Psychonauts is controller-snappingly frustrating at the end due to its difficulty, but by then, you've already mastered how to play the game thanks to half the game just teaching you how to play! God of War thrust you right into a big combat scenario early on, but it doesn't add anything complicated, and keeps things simple for the beginning battle, which is still a tutorial.
Battlefield 3 assumes you know everything going in, and that's where it falls flat. Until I gain clairvoyant powers and can see into the future, the game does not properly introduce the player to the game.
Am I putting the game down forever? No. Am I going to sell it back to the store? Nope. I'm going to play the campaign all the way through and see what else it has to offer before I make my comprehensive opinion. However, first three levels have NOT sold me on it in the slightest.
(BTW, those who will criticize me for not doing multiplayer, I played a few games of multiplayer, and the problems still persist.)
Feel free to dispute me, counterclaim, argue, agree, etc. to prove your point here about what YOU think about Battlefield 3.
[Edited on 12.24.2012 9:24 PM PST]