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Battlefield 3 is Not Broken, The (Almost) Final Build is Magnificent

Dave Oshry — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 02:47:25 +0000

For the last three days, I’ve been playing Battlefield 3 on a decommissioned aircraft carrier floating in the San Francisco Bay.

If that fact wasn’t surreal enough, I was playing with hundreds of other PC gamers on top-of-the-line gaming rigs custom built by Nvidia to provide us with the “ultimate” BF3 experience. This event shall forever be known as the GeForce LAN 6.

However, the Battlefield 3 beta was anything but the “ultimate” BF3 experience.

That Ain't Right...

This glitchy, buggy, unfinished mess that was released as a public trial only a month before the game was to go on sale left us with many questions and legions of gamers were ready to give up on Battlefield 3 all together and cancel their pre-orders right there and then.

Many of us old time testers shouted, “Hey, it’s a BETA, it’s supposed to have issues, this is an old build!” But the masses cried foul. ”There’s no way they can fix this mess in one month, I don’t care how old the build is! How dare they release this to the public, don’t they know any better?!”

Fair enough.

However, the build I’ve been playing for the past few days is literally light years ahead of the beta. While not the final product, Nvidia and DICE confirmed to me that what we were playing was “damn close” to final build and if this is any indication of the final product… I’m sold.

That's More Like It.

There were no bugs, no glitches, and the Ultra quality visual settings actually looked “Ultra”. Being a high end PC gamer and a member of the press who gets to test damn near every PC game, I’m as jaded as they come. Yet everything about this build was downright beautiful. I played on new maps like “Operation Firestorm”, “Damavand Peak” and and “Grand Bazaar” and the first time I deployed on each – I did nothing but stare. The first time you see each of these landscapes laid out before you on PC, you will be in awe. Wether it be the burning oil fields of Operation Firestorm or the magnificently detailed snow capped mountains of Damavand Peak, I’ve never seen anything quite like it, especially in a first person shooter, and that’s certainly saying something.

Operation Firestorm

Damavand Peak

Hell, I even noticed little things like the fact that the UMP-45 had been nerfed a bit. DICE had clearly been listening to the player feedback, even at this late stage of the game. The entire experience felt balanced, focused and rock solid. It’s a testament to DICE’s commitment to PC game development and pushing the envelope with their Frostbite 2 engine.

Their developer commitment is also evidenced by the fact that I saw no vehicles flipping over, nobody falling through the map, no flying corpses hitting me in the face and no crazy giraffe neck dubstep.

I am proud to report that Battlefield 3 (on PC at least) is finally ready for action.

Are you?

Want to know more about the GeForce LAN or my experience with the latest build of Battlefield 3? Find me anytime on Twitter @DaveOshry or shoot an email over to Dave@RipTen.com

All-Disappoint-Bulletin: Is APB Already Dying?

Dave Oshry — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 20:25:44 +0000

The following editorial was written by a friend of Ripten who has been playing APB since the first beta phase and is a senior member of one of the top APB clans.

APB had a huge chance to make it big in the MMO market with its dynamic customization and fun gameplay. It was hard to see this game becoming anything but a real contender amongst the big name MMOs, but I don’t see that happening now. Sure, Realtime Worlds has come out and said that they are fully committed to keeping APB alive, but there are many factors that could prove otherwise.

I’ve been playing APB since the first phase of testing. I can still remember my first day of gameplay- it seems so long ago. Although people can still have fun in APB with population rates dropping (population is down to about 30-40% what it was at the game’s release two months ago) with no anti-cheat system in the game, you’ll find yourself getting flipped back & forth between legitimate players and “suspected” players. At this point, it seems like 1/3 of your matches will be against a, “hacker”, unless you don’t play at peak hours. I guess my question is- why is this allowed to happen?

"Hacks!? Is That All You Got!?"

Realtime Worlds normally uses Punkbuster as its anti-cheat system, and that was up for a total of about two days, a month ago. I believe they brought it back in once more after that, but it didn’t stay up for more than a day. During the time Punkbuster was up, clans of suspected hackers disappeared off the league boards- but it didn’t last long. Another reason this continues is that when people are reported hacking (mind you, it’s up to the player base to report hackers in APB, which it really shouldn’t be) and are caught, they only receive a friendly email asking them to stop- no ban, no major punishment. The only times people were banned were when they posted videos of themselves breaking rules.

When it comes to anti-cheating, Realtime Worlds has completely dropped the ball. There isn’t even a way to report any offenses in-game- there are NO GM’s. You have to go to the website and make reports through the support pages. If you go to the APB forums and look through posts the players left, you will notice that hacking is the main reason the player-base leaves. And speaking of forums, the APB forum community may have the highest population of trolls ever seen in an MMO forum. You will see the same exact people trolling posts on a daily basis (The same people who suspiciously deny there’s any hacking problem.)

You also might have seen recent news that Realtime Worlds is letting go of a portion of their work force. What I find funny is that the day before the news hit the web, APB’s month, 3 month, and 6 month Game Time buy options were gone, leaving only a 20 hour Game Time option. Could this be a sign that the game is getting ready to move to a free-to-play or a buy-to-play format?

The real question is, with the lack of an anti-cheating system, an increase in hackers, no in-game support, a declining player base, and a real lack of communication with its players, can the game be saved even if changed to a free-to-play format? Or will APB forever be doomed and written off as another great MMO idea ruined by a company that couldn’t connect with its community? Only time will tell, but the outlook is grim.

I’ll leave you with a few videos my clan made, showing just how awesome APB can and should always be.

Gaming Dilemma: Why Re-Make When You Can Just Make?

Sam Naylor — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:08:50 +0000

The online marketplaces of XBLA, PSN, and WiiWare have been a great place for gamers and developers alike. We’re seeing more small (and large) developers than ever before pushing out great games for these platforms, and the market for them can only get bigger. We’re seeing more original game concepts than ever before on these platforms, alongside a collection of classic games.

The current generation of consoles seems to be a perfect place for development teams to test news ideas, push out interesting concepts, or just work on short, well designed games. Think about games like Braid, Flower, Cave Story, or World of Goo. These games were released to great critical acclaim, and featured great, original concepts which were very well executed.

However, these markets, along with the DS, seem to have promoted quite a few remakes of old games. It’s not just the new markets that we see remakes for, but they are what prompted me to write this article. The classic games available on the virtual marketplaces (i.e. the Virtual Console) have been great, but full remakes of games have started to pop up everywhere. Perfect Dark was remade for XBLA, along with Earthworm Jim. The first two Monkey Island games have been updated for most platforms, as well as the original Prince of Persia. Boy and His Blob was even remade for Wii.

I see this as a problem. Not because these are not great games, or indeed great remakes. The remakes of Monkey Island, for example, were very good indeed. In fact, I enjoy playing these remade games a great deal. The problem, I feel, is that they represent a wasted opportunity.

The teams working on these games clearly have a lot of really good developers working on them. The quality of the remakes is testament to that in many examples. Why then are these people not creating new and innovative games? I realise that games are made to make money, but that doesn’t mean that new games don’t sell. If, for example, the development team that created the brilliant remake of Super Street Fighter II Turbo had been put on to a team to create a completely new 2D fighter, I feel that the quality would be high enough for the game to sell perfectly well. We’d also have a brand new fighting game to sink our teeth into, and new players would have a great place to start.

Even Nintendo are guilty. In fact, they might be the worst offenders. We’ve already seen two remakes for a platform that has not even been released yet- Star Fox 3DS and Ocarina of Time 3DS. Don’t get me wrong, I will buy and love these games, but I still feel like the development teams on these games ought to be spent on creating new games with new characters, or even just new games in a series. Just think- we could have had a new 3DS Zelda game (or indeed a new IP). Obviously a remake is much easier to do than a brand new game, but as I have said- the potential to create new rather than old is there.

Although there are a lot of good remakes, sometimes they just cannot capture the magic of the original. Perfect Dark, Earthworm Jim and Vigilante 8 were all great games. When released, they were some of the best games that one could ever play. Now, though, they are not. They have all had remakes, and they seem antiquated and just do not play well. That’s because these old games were not designed as well as games are now. They were good when they were the best available, but game design has advanced so much since then that they end up being purely nostalgia trips. That’s fine for some- but again, the resources pumped into those remakes could have been put into something much more interesting and well designed.

Games remain an artifact of their time. This is why I am skeptical of the new GoldenEye game for Wii, for example. Although going back to GoldenEye on N64 is a nice little nostalgia trip, one can tell straight away that it is just not a good game by today’s standards. For PC gamers, it wasn’t even close to being the best shooter, but for console players it was the messiah needed to push the genre onto their platform- and with four people playing, it was an absolute blast. Imagine playing a brand new game, with a great multiplayer component and great level design- one designed not for online play, but for you and your mates. Why must that game be trying to be GoldenEye? Well, because it sells units- and it will be of a lesser quality as a result, because they’ve got the name, and don’t need the review scores.

Think about the God of War Collection for PS3, as well as the upcoming Sly Raccoon collection. There are development teams that have spent a lot of time converting these games to the new platform. Once again, why couldn’t these teams be creating a brand new game instead of making some not-even-old games HD? God of War II is only three years old- no matter how good, it just doesn’t need a remake.

Obviously they did a great job, and have created a new audience as well as allowed people who might not have had a PS2 to play these games, but the time used to make these things happen could have been used to begin on a new game that will create an even bigger audience. Perhaps they could have even spent more time on God of War III, or InFamous, to make them even better. Perhaps the funds that went into updating the old games could have gone into marketing the new games better. In a way, a really good remake is even worse; when it’s obvious there was a lot of love in a remake, it just makes me feel bad that that love could have gone into a brand new game.

I’d like to reiterate just once more that I have played and loved a good number of remakes. In fact, almost every time Nintendo remakes one of their old games, I’m straight on them. However, as I play, the childlike glee that happens on the outside is undercut by a feeling that had the development time gone into something new, I could have eaten my cake and had it too. I could have been playing Mario 64 on my N64, and had a new Mario game to play on the DS. I could have been playing Pokémon Red on my Game Boy, and had a new Pokémon game to play on the GBA. I could even have been playing Monkey Island on the PC, and had a new 2D adventure game to sink my teeth into.

Even PS3 Owners Rate Xbox Live Best

Dan Landis — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 02:19:34 +0000

In a recent opinion poll, 74.7% of the PlayStation 3 owners surveyed considered Xbox Live to be the online service with the best feature set when compared to PlayStation Network and WiiConnect24. In addition, 71.4% of the people that actually own an Xbox 360 feel as though Xbox Live is worth the subscription fee.

Possibly even more intriguing is the fact that of the people that owned all three consoles, meaning they had the option of playing multiplatform games online for free, 63% still found Xbox Live to be worth the price. Another statistic that I found particularly interesting is that an in-game XMB is the feature most wanted on PSN, even more so than Home, Trophies, and further PSP integration.

The survey was conducted by Game Informer and printed in their August 2008 issue.