A Noob Plays Battlefield: Day 7

A week down of Battlefield 3, and a week to go until Modern Warfare 3 comes out. What will happen when the two collide? Will Modern Warfare squash Battlefield like a bug, and allows its servers to finally breathe as it steals 80% of its players? Will Battlefield hold strong and knock out the giant as it relies on the same tired tactics?

That’s probably the subject for the next installment of this series, but for now, I’m just going to focus on my experience with Battlefield over the last week. What I’ve found is a great game that’s doing everything in its power to prevent me from enjoying it.

I have never played a game with this many issues in its first week of release. The first three or four days after launch, the game was literally not playable during peak hours after dinner. The servers would crash, and Twitter would be flooded with a hundred messages a minute about how shit EA’s servers are. When they did go back online? The problems are far from over.

“Guys I’m right behind…” CONNECTION TO EA ONLINE LOST.

So far, I’ve experienced the following bug, glitches and issues while playing.

–          I have never once successfully joined a server on my first try, nor loaded my soldier profile on my first attempt

–          I’ve been separated from my XBL friends numerous times, having them be booted out of my squad, placed on the other team, or one of us being kicked out of the game altogether

–          My game has frozen completely about five or six times, required me to restart my entire system

–          MY HUD has completely disappeared, making the game unplayable.

–          My target reticle has disappeared, only reappearing when I switch to a new weapon and back again. This will not stop happening for one of my shotguns.

–          My classes don’t always save, and sometimes accessories I have selected don’t appear, like the tactical light on my pistols

All in all, the game is doing everything in its power to make me hate it, but fortunately, when you DO get to play, and things DO work, it’s pretty spectacular. But EA needs to resolves ALL of these things, as Call of Duty doesn’t need any more of a head start than it already has, and it looks like amateur hour when there are this many issues this soon for their biggest title of the year.

Does anyone’s game seriously look like this?

When I do get the game to work, I’ve mostly been playing Conquest, and it’s still my mode of choice even after trying out most of the others. I just think capture objectives is fun, and figuring out the best strategy to take down a fortified position requires teamwork and planning in a way that I haven’t normally experienced in an FPS before.

I was an Engineer for a long time, but have recently switched to Support for a few reasons. Yes, it was nice to blast tanks from afar with an RPG, but once I unlocked C4, I had a new vehicle destroying weapon of choice. While it takes 4 RPG shells to take down a tank, it’s far more exhilarating and satisfying to run up to a tank, throw two C4 packs on it, and walk away as you blow the thing to all hell with the press of a button like you’re in a Michael Bay movie. Also, my LMG with an extend mag has 200 rounds per magazine, and I haven’t hit the reload button in days.

Assault I’ve been in Team Deathmatch a bit (more on that later), but reviving people isn’t nearly as fun as blowing up vehicles, and though things like the grenade launchers are neat (and not nearly as annoying as they were in Call of Duty), it can be a bit of a boring class.

Recon, I don’t really understand. I’m already a terrible sniper in games like these, so I was predisposed to not really go for it in the first place, but once I did? Unless you score a perfect headshot, it usually takes about three different rounds to bring down a target, and usually once someone is hit with the first shot, they’ll run away and you’ll never find then. I suppose sniping can be fun in some of the more wide open levels, but it’s been frustrating and boring for me and it’s a class I mostly avoid.

“Bullet wound to the femoral artery? Zap him with electricity!”

I’ll take a brief pause here to talk about one of the most frustrating quirks of the game. While it’s cool the game lets you change your class and weapon attachments while IN game, there’s literally no reason it shouldn’t let you do that in between matches when you have about 40 seconds of downtime, and have usually just unlocked a bunch of new stuff. If we don’t finish by the start of the next match, boot us out of the screen, but I don’t understand why changing your class is not allowed during this specified downtime which is the time you’d want to mess around with it. Furthermore, I don’t understand why there’s no option to leave your current server in between games. You have to wait until the next game starts after the downtime and then quit out of it. There’s no way to go back to the main menu.

Vehicles have become way more fun now that I learned how to toggle the camera to 3rd person. That really helps for all of them, and though I do love the ground vehicles (tanks especially), I still have yet to get the hang of planes and helicopters.

They just seem like they’re from a completely different game. I’ve spent entire 20 minute matches trying to figure out how to effectively fly a jet. I even got an enemy plane in my sights a few times, but I wasn’t able to shoot it down with my machine gun, no matter how many times I had it in view. I killed zero people the entire game, and barely felt like I knew how to fly any better than I did when I started. The plane controls might be effective for someone who has played previous games where jets were used, but nothing about it is intuitive to me, and you really just don’t feel like you’re contributing to the game at hand. Planes just chase each other around in the sky, oblivious to what’s going on far down below. The game really needs some sort of tutorial training ground area for planes and helicopters, because there’s not really a good place to learn, and that will be especially true once the noobs have given up trying, and the skies are only filled with pros with IR flares and heat seeking missiles and the like.

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14 Comments

  1. Recon’s good for setting up a spawn point behind enemy lines, but other than that it’s mainly a sniper class. Sometimes I’ll equip a shotgun and rush to the furthest objective as quick as possible just to place the spawn point.

    When it comes to jets & helicopters I’m not really sure what to tell you, at first both were a pain in the ass, but then when I finally got the hang of helicopters it’s probably the most fun I’ve had in a while. Try to get with a friend in the co-op helicopter mission, that way you can actually pilot the helicopter without having to worry about being shot down inside of 1 minute. You may fail the mission a couple of times, but that’s to be expected if you dont know how to fly at all. Basically it’s all about small movements at first, slowly pitching your helo to whatever angle you need to get to and then from there hopefully you can figure out the controls from there. Co-Op mode is the shit when you play with a friend, try it out.

    I was pretty familiar with the jets because of Battlefield 1943’s Air Superiority mode, so I guess the best advice is to get that game, seeing as there wont be as many people there to shoot you down, but it’s still gonna take some time. I know that seems a bit extreme, buying an arcade game simply to learn how to fly, but it pays off in the end.

    As for the connection issues I’ve had a few of the same. Sqaud memebers dissapearing altogether, only me getting into a match, being on opposite teams, but that’s about it. I havent had the no HUD problem, the no reticle problem or even the additional weapon problem yet, and I hope it stays like that. First thing I did when I got the game was install, so maybe that helped?

    Here’s a link to some other user tips that we’ve been throwing around on the IMDb message boards: http://www.imdb.com/board/bd0000053/flat/190496886

    If you ever need assistance my gamertag is TheDukeOfDookie.

  2. I’m inordinately baffled by how many glitches and bugs you’ve encountered. Granted, I’ve only played a grand total of like 4 hours due to excessive schoolwork (fuck UofM triple majors…), but I’ve NEVER encountered ANY problems with joining servers, nor have I experienced in-game bugs.

    I really hope it works out for you soon, because every match I’ve been in I’ve had a grand old time.

    Also, my gamertag is SuperSalsaShark. I don’t really have many friends who play the game on XBL. Let’s play.

  3. i love how people complain about the killstreaks and claymors and how in this special game “When I die, there’s usually something I could have done to prevent it.”. if you were half way good at mw2, you would have had a class with coldnblooded and a stinger and shoot down any killstreak the minute it killed you once. If there were claymores everywhere, either shiled it or marathon through them, not to mention scrambler pro to delay them or flash bangs to disarm them temporarily.

    sounds to me like BF3 is marginal, with some pro’s and cons. i will wait for mw3, to hope its a blend of the playing style and feel of mw2 with the smart game play fixes of fail ops.

  4. the choppers are cool, but you really have to think when you are flying. half the time ill just be chillin and forget yaw ing and rolling and just go at the ground sideways in a blaze of glory.

  5. I found that the controls were easiest for me on the jet and helicopter when I set them both to Legendary Southpaw. Give it a whirl, might work. It allows you to roll with the right joystick and pitch and yaw with the left, effectively allowing you to slightly adjust the angle of your turn without changing your pitch.

  6. “…I’m not getting blown up by randomly fired noob toob grenades in my direction.”

    Obviously no one on your server has unlocked Support’s mortar yet. Then you’ll remember what “noob toob” means…

  7. Hey, so I’ve logged 20 hours so far in Battlefield, though I did not get it opening day (got it the weekend it came out instead) and I gotta say (in my defense, I am freshly graduated & unemployed and there are only so many waking hours I can spend applying to jobs before I don’t remember if I’ve already applied and I’m a dick for sending my 9th application to the same position).

    And I’ve had maybe… two or three glitches, none of them game-enders and not really glitches either.

    -I’ve had the game freeze once, but I think that may have been more my part for playing music and playing at the same time–that always ends badly for me (using the new, black & slim X360 here by the way). BUT, my friends have had it happen way more often, I think the reason may be that I am a former PC gamer, so I have a habit of installing the Xbox games to my HD always (more to stop that bleeding runway noise that emanates from the Xbox than for the performance boost though). See if that helps you?
    —Also, are you trying to join specific servers or do you just do quick match? Because I use the latter to no problems.

    -The other issues, and the only repeat one I’ve noticed is I’ll sometimes lose connection to servers (like 1/20 times) BUT, it ain’t no biggie because unlike CoD I’ve noticed that it saves what I’ve done up to that point in the game and any progress I’ve made (note that it does not resume with the same stats/points if I re-join the server though) is saved.. which is great because many a time in CoD the host is a total butthole and quits (by the way, how annoying was that?) which either resulted in a host transfer (meaning someone else got the BS advantage of being the host and the extra reaction time) or the game would crash and my party of friends would all get booted, nothing would be saved, and we’d have to all join up together again (more annoying than you think once it would get up to like 6-8 of us playing together).

    -Speaking of, I will acknowledge that in BF3 it’s difficult to get everyone on the same “squad”, much less the same squad, and I think this is a by-product of the ridiculous amount of users vs the number of official servers. I don’t know about you (because I don’t know what coast you’re on, but I feel like you’re also East Coast) but I rarely ever see a game with more than one slot open, much less 3 or more. BUT, I have to say, I don’t mind the game refusing to pair me and my friends together because it creates a fun additional twist to the game where we’re seeing who can rack up the most points and more importantly, the most knife kills among ourselves–so it always raises the game another level when you’re sneaking up on someone and you think it’s your friend or you’re watching yourself getting stabbed and pray that it’s not your best friend shanking you in that alley because you’ll absolutely hear it from him in a second.

    -The Recon class is what I primarily use and I love it because you can’t snipe in games like call of duty because the levels are so small by comparison but the Recon class is more than just sniping from a distance, it’s Recon after all, so mark targets, vehicles and opponents by pressing the back button (select, if you’re old school) on your controller to mark enemies, both for your teammates and yourself so that if you do miss that headshot you can track them as they run away.

    -As for your love of C4, wait until you realize you can stick it onto the front of a HUMVEE, drive that thing towards a group of enemies and hop out well before it gets there and see the momentum carry it into them and you pull that trigger. (it’s a trick I’ve used since battlefield 1942 on the PC)

    -I agree with you on planes and helicopters, because it sucks you have to unlock such basic things like IR flares (or you know, missiles for the jets) because it means that once you get locked onto you’re screwed and in the case of the jets it’s more than just slightly difficult to advance in the kit set when all you have is a machine gun attachment and you’re flying at 400mph (just a guess).

    -That’s about all I can think of for now to disagree/agree/comment about. Hit me up on Live if you want someone to run with that has a little more experience with the franchise: Beardrian

    PS

    To the guy above me with the Mortar comment, yeah but you’re a very easy target when you’re using that thing, especially for stabbings.. mmm I think that’s the only reason I won’t be purchasing CoD this year, I’ve convinced all my friends to get this game because of the uhh… Dogtag collection…`

  8. Your first problem like alot of Americans is you use a buggy as shit Xbox360. Why not buy a good console like the PS3 that doesn’t charge you to play the games you already own online (fuck you microsoft). Also I have only owned 1 Ps3 while I have owned 3 Xbox360’s before just giving my last one to a friend without ever plugging it in because its fucking shit. Also the controls are fucked on the 360, its like they don’t want you to ever play it.

    I am almost certain that most of your problems would go away if you used a good console (hell the Wii is better than a 360). Once you have done this (and don’t get charged to play online anymore which is one of the biggest scams ever and why only Americans fell for it I have no idea).

    From Ric The Real Stooge
    http://dailystooge.com/
    WELCOME TO THE STOOGE REVOLUTION, Unless you use a 360 then WELCOME TO RED RINGS OF DEATH (if it hasn’t happened to you yet its coming)

  9. All I can say is that this game is best on PC. I realize it’s expensive, but it looks amazing, just like the screenshots, and it plays very well.

    The mortars are annoying, but you have to work with your team to flank to take him down, he is just sitting there.

    The game is so much better than MW. I will stick with BF3.

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