Battlefield 3 – Issues From Beta Persist

Publish Date:

Battlefield 3 is

  • beautiful

  • slow

  • frustrating

  • not very accessible (slow and frustrating in UI)

And you’re driven into what in MMOs is called “grinding”. Into pure extrinsic motivation, and a high entry barrier in terms of fairness/balance.

I was gifted Battlefield 3, and thus could play it some again. From the game itself (Origin aside), nothing of the big issues I had with the Beta was fixed or changed. UI is awful as ever, and netcode didn’t seem to have improved – me shoots 2 ppl, they definitely should be dead, they shoot, I die, then they die. Welcome to time-travel.

Being under-geared plus inexperienced makes me want to stay back even more, although I would really like to get into the action. You die very fast, while others seem to take a ton of shots before dying. Oh well …

But the most frustrating thing to me is the UI. It takes away control, instead of giving you control. You die? Let the game handle the next 5 to 10 seconds or what. You either want to or do press all buttons, get very annoyed and frustrated, or you lean back, calm down, and wait a bit until the game continues (and you can game on, quit, or change the load-out again).