Battlefield 3: A New Era for the Battlefield Franchise

The ability to play it your way goes so much further than that. As was evident on the PC beta map,
Caspian Border, testers were quickly given the choice of how they wanted to play that map. A single
map offered variety of roles available to each player. If you preferred to keep your boots in the mud
with a rifle in your hand, you could easily play the role of infantry. Bases like Forest and Hilltop, are best
captured and defended when on foot. The steep hills of hilltop can bring a tank to a slow, rumbling crawl
up to its peak.

If you’re not very interested on sticking to the ground, you could always take to the skies in a large
variety of aircraft that is available in Battlefield 3. You could be manning a transport chopper, ushering
a squad of infantry soldiers from objective to objective. Very few feelings can be found in FPS gaming
than when you take off in a chopper, loaded up with 4 infantry soldiers and zip across the horizon, lower
into a hover above a roof top, allow your men to deploy and then take off again to fly off into safety,
knowing that your actions just allowed your squad mates to quickly get into the action and capture an
objective.

That’s not all that’s flying the skies though is it? For the more lethal minded among you, there is always
the variety of fighter jets and attack choppers that can put on an aerial show the likes of which you
may have never seen before in a previous FPS. Watching rockets race through the sky, chasing after an
enemy jet, seeing a helicopter come up over a hill top, its mini guns in full effect, an exciting, fast paced
and frantic dog fight taking place, trying to see which pilot will blink first before their plane is blown
to pieces. The aerial action junkies will eat this up. While this brings with it some negatives of having
people who will only leave their deployment if they’re in a piece of aircraft, or be so caught up in dog
fighting they forget that there’s actual objectives down below them. There is no denying the fact that an
objective minded pilot, who is skillful at his job, can be a devastating advantage to your team.

There’s so many ways to approach many Battlefield 3 maps, and we haven’t even touched on the
tanks yet! There is an excited feeling that you get when you load yourself into a heavily armored tank,
and hear that engine begin to roar as you start your slow march across the map, shelling your way
into objective captures, enemy tank destruction, and even some tools to take out those unsuspecting
choppers and jets going at it above you. There really does seem to be a variety of ways to play
Battlefield 3, and anyone who might fall back on the excuse of, “well it’s not my type of game,” May not
have done their due diligence in researching just what all is available to them. The perfect harmony of
Battlefield 3 will be realized when you have all of these players in the same game, working together for
the same goal, winning the match and having a good time. The team that makes a balanced use of all of
its tools available to it will most likely find itself being successful when the tickets reach 0.

This fact is made more evident by the introduction of the Team Death Match game mode. Let’s face it,
no matter how you might dress it up or disguise it, a very large majority of players just like killing each
other with as little in the way of distractions as possible. They want you to put a gun in their hand, give
them a beautiful, balanced map, and let them shoot people in their faces. That’s just the reality of FPS
gaming. In many shooters that have this game mode, you will typically find that it is the most populated
playlist. While the other playlists and game modes for those games are filled with players passionate
about those game modes, in many cases, the numbers simply do not lie. TDM is a big success in shooter
franchises. If you want more evidence, you need to look no further than the recent critically acclaimed
hit, Gears of War 3. For the first time in its franchises history, they introduced their take on the TDM
play list. The results have been a smashing success, making it the #1 most played game type, by a very
large margin. The previously top playlists of execution and warzone seldom manage to rake in half of
the population of players in the TDM playlist. Battlefield 3 has certainly made a key design decision by
incorporating it into the game if they are striving to keep hold of the kill first mentality of gamers that
have seemingly taken up an interest in this game.

With that in mind, we remain mere hours away from the release of one of the most highly anticipated
games of 2011; the Battlefield community waits eagerly to see how the new era of Battlefield will
progress. Battlefield 3 looks to act as the proverbial melting pot of gamers from all sorts of previous
shooter experiences. What the Battlefield community may take for granted, or certain cornerstones
of how past games in the franchise have held true, all of that could be changed in Battlefield 3. With
so many new players being introduced, each bringing with them dramatically different mindsets, and
a game, itself, that could truly be classified as an overused cliché of “Next Gen” FPS, Battlefield 3 is
bound to take on a play style and flavor of its own. I for one am excited to see what will come about as
different groups of people make their way into the game and begin to help sculpt the game into how it
will truly end up being. I know I’ll be out there on the battlefield, doing my part to help promote team
based and objective oriented game play.

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