First impressions of the full release

So I managed to get on this fairly early last night and got a good couple of hours of play in. The game has come a long way since we first got involved with the beta, however it still has some way to go.

One of the biggest concerns since start of beta has been performance, as despite not having bf3 standard gfx (still good though), the game is quite taxing on even top end systems. My PC isn’t top end, but it runs BF3 at 60 frames pretty easily, which PS2 doesn’t. The game automatically (I guess) detected my hardware as sufficient for medium settings, and while it looks good and is more than playable, I was getting maybe 45 fps average in the biggest fights. In any shooter you need 60 fps, so this was a little disappointing, but turning everything to low achieved that for me, but I suspect it won’t for all. I expect this to be an area they continue to work on, and one thing people with NVidia cards might want to do, is download their new drivers, which contain some tweaks for PS2 specifically.

Also on their list of priorities has for a while been ease of access for new players, since if you joined us early on, you’d have noticed quite a steep learning curve, which we all had to struggle through without assistance. With a bit of (sorry a lot of) patience we got through it and started seeing a game emerging which a good number of have been enjoying for a good 3 months now (and that’s despite the bugs of beta). They have now at least significantly improved on this, and produced (with the help of some youtubers you may recognise) some good tutorial videos which will show you how to get into the fight, and explain how the spawn system works amongst other things. You can easily get involved in the big fights using instant action tools, and you can deploy direct on your squad leader, as well as on any deployed spawn vehicles (sunderers) across each continent. Redeploying no longer costs you a death as well which is good. Oh and when you first load the game (after installation), you’re automatically added to a deployed into a fight, so be ready for it!

There are some minor bugs I’ve noticed, and last night got quite laggy towards the end, but I guess the load on their servers must have been pretty heavy, so I’m not so concerned by that. I haven’t noticed any bugs yet which could be considered game breaking, unless some people vanishing in front of my eyes was a bug with their camo rather than simply lag.

As for the gameplay, it took me a while acclimatise to it again, as I struggled with the recoil initially, which felt different from beta, however I noticed a field of view option automatically set to 55, which when set to max seemed to restore the feel I was used to – so take note of that if you experience the same).

The alpha squad pack is not how I first thought, in that you don’t choose your 12 free unlocks, they’re chosen for you. So far I’ve mostly been sticking with the default weapons, slowly trying out the new ones as I get used the game’s feel again. You can of course choose your own stuff via the 4000 station cash, but I’m holding off atm while I figure out what I want most.

Finally, there are so many new players about it’s ridiculously easily to rake up the XP. Attack the biolabs, and laugh as the noobs line themselves up outside shielded rooms, and lap up the free certs. I got about 150 kills and 100 certs from noobs doing this last night, over maybe 2 hours. Make the most of it while you can.