Tag Archives: DICE

Soundscapes – Why Mass Effect 3 might be the best sounding game of all time

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Mass Effect 3 might just be the best sounding game of all time. This is quite an achievement for Bioware when you consider how the series started out. The audio in Mass Effect 1 was barely passable and in some cases even worked to destroy the drama rather than enhance it. Given that nobody pays any attention to sound in games apart from the music, they didn’t actually “need” to improve the sound. Nonetheless, I’m glad they did: there needs to be a benchmark for audio in games. Without a frame of reference for excellence it wouldn’t be as easy to point out the mistakes everyone falls prey to.

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A sincere thrill ride: a review of Battlefield 3’s single player campaign

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“The most realistic shooter yet.”

This line from an early review has been heavily quoted in EA’s aggressive marketing campaign for Battlefield 3. It’s absolute nonsense. BF3’s single-player campaign belongs squarely in what I like to call the “theme park warfare” genre, and consists of a series of entirely linear levels filled with set-pieces and high-octane thrills. There’s nothing realistic about it. This is a game in which your singular soldier will mow down thousands of enemies before the day is done. Your health regenerates, and all your named allies are invincible. Unused bullets from a cartridge magically transfer over to the next one upon reloading. And the game seems convinced that your soldier’s head is actually a camera, what with the dirt caked on the screen throughout half the damn campaign.

So those looking for a genuine military simulation should just go and buy Arma II.  But, of course, EA isn’t really trying to sell realism. After all, the steep learning curve and glacial pace of a true simulator would turn off the vast majority of shooter fans. What developer DICE has aimed for is a certain measure of narrative authenticity, and most of the time they pull it …

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10 tips and tricks to become a better Battlefield 3 player

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Battlefield is back. Veterans and newcomers alike are flocking to DICE’s trademark take on combined arms warfare, and already the digital body count is greater than any war in the history of mankind. It’s a lot of fun, but it can also be overwhelming: there are dozens of weapons and class abilities, a healthy assortment of vehicles, intricately detailed maps, and ten times as many unlocks as Bad Company 2. There’s a good chance you’ll be biting the dust a lot when you first log on, so I’ve compiled a few tip and tricks to help you get a leg up on your quest to dominate the Battlefield.

 

10. Start with small matches.

New players tend to rush for the biggest match size possible. On consoles this is just 24 players, but on PC it’s 64. Conquest Large is a sight to see, but it’s also the most difficult to play off the bat: there’s so much going on that it can be overwhelming, and you’re likely to die so often that you don’t get to do much between respawning. By playing 32-player matches on PC and 16 on consoles, you’re going to get shot at less and have fewer …

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EA Says Battlefield Single-Player Integral To Franchise

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Battlefield 3′s multiplayer has been getting rave reviews, but the single-player has been getting the cold shoulder. You’ll hear my take on Monday, but suffice it to say that a lot of folks are wondering why EA and DICE spent production time on what seems to be an ancilliary element to the multiplayer-focused franchise.

EA execs Frank Gibeau and John Riccitiello answered that question in a recent Q&A with Eurogamer. “The single player experience is important,” explained Gibeau. “It’s a great way to get fans into the experience, have them train up and get ready for multiplayer.” Riccitiello agreed, noting ” single player is often how new players ramp into the game. It’s a way for new players to get exposed to a franchise.”

On one hand, this makes sense – a lot of people play single-player first, and if the mechanics are the same they’ll learn something from it. But Battlefield’s linear, heavily-scripted campaign is the opposite of the free-form chaos of a 64-player Conquest match. I, for one, kicked ass at the single-player only to regularly feature in the bottom rankings of multiplayer matches. The traditional way to learn multiplayer was simply to host your own local server …

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Gamestop UK Lets You Trade Battlefield 3 for Modern Warfare 3

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The rivalry between Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 has been, up until now, innocent enough. Silly little pranks like modernwarfare3.com redirecting to the Battlefield 3 home page provided us with laughs and the current advertisements for BF3 featuring Jay-Z’s oh so delightful 99 problems gave us yet another reason to hate EA marketing.

This offer from Gamestop UK, on the other hand, is borderline diabolical. UK gamers who buy BF3 before October 27th will be given the opportunity to trade in the game before November 7th and receive MW3 for a mere £0.99. Talk about sleazy business practices. It’s sad to see what has been an entertaining exchange of jabs culminate into this.

My first inclination would be to feel sympathy for EA, but when you think about it, this will essentially boost the initial new sales of BF3. Since Activision recently increased the RRP of Call of Duty games to £54.99, leading to BF3 and MW3 costing £36.97 and £41.97 respectively, many gamers who have chosen MW3 will likely consider this offer since it will net them the game of their choice for a reduced price with the bonus of playing a similar game to tide them over until it comes …

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When War Was Fun: A Battlefield 1942 Retrospective

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It’s 2002, and I’m gazing in rapt attention at my monitor, a friend looking over my shoulder. It’s 1943, and I’m piloting a fully-loaded landing craft towards the Japanese air base on Wake Island. I wince as a Japanese fighter zooms overhead, but he seems more interested in dogfighting than dive-bombing my defenseless bucket o’ troops. As we near the shore, my fear turns to excitement. “64 players – and they’re all real people,” I explain to my friend excitedly. “No bots.” As we storm the beach, I repeat variations of this statement as some sort of mantra. Maybe if I say it enough times, I’ll believe it.

It seems silly now, but at the time it was mind-blowing. Only 2001’s Tribes 2 had been designed for so many players, and while brilliant in its own right it tended to devolve into a chaotic swarm of jetpack-clad warriors engaging in ritualized aerial battles. And while the Tribes series popularized the integration of vehicles into the first-person shooter, they only ever filled a support role. Battlefield 1942 combined the vehicles of Tribes and the class system of Team Fortress to create a combined-arms combat game that encouraged coordinated team play. Its bombastic …

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Frostbite 2.0 is a Hell of an Engine

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There are a few things about the handling of Battlefield 3 that are troubling – Origin exclusivity and the Online Pass come to mind – but DICE can’t be faulted for their new engine, which looks to be as cutting edge as edges get. The Swedish developer’s general manager Karl Magnus spoke at the Eurogamer Expo this week about what Frostbite 2.0 will deliver.

Magnus admitted that the company’s obsessed with visuals, but they don’t want to settle on being able to produce an amazingly detailed frame for a screenshot – they want to have depict the most realistic animation possible. They felt the animation in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 wasn’t up to scratch, so they searched for the best animation engine they could find.

“We were surprised and happy to discover that it was in the EA Sports games.

“So we worked with the sports team, we worked with a group within EA called EA Tech, and we implemented the ANT animation system into Frostbite 2 – we’re the first FPS to be using this animation technology, and for us, it’s a big, big difference; how the soldiers move, how they go into cover, how they look under suppressing fire …

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DRM removed from Bad Company 2

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Better late than never, right? Today Bad Company 2 received a patch that removes the game’s annoying SecuROM DRM, and provides some minor performance upgrades and bug-fixes. However, DICE seems to have decided to include ALL previous patches in this one. So even if you already have all the other patches, you’ll still have to still download the full 2.6 gigabyte file.

The full list of changes are as follows:

-Removed some memory leaks
-Fixed crashes when the game attempted to render lots of content (high detail, high FOV or
multiple-monitor modes); this should particularly help multi-monitor users
-Chat window no longer causes lag spikes
-Chat window reworked opacity & visibility-time is controllable through settings in settings.ini
-Clantag is remembered when using auto-login
-Banner URLs can be up to 252 characters in length
-SecuROM wrapper removed from non-Steam version
-Minor performance enhancements
-Reduced rubberbanding on servers with more than 24 active players
-PrintScreen takes a screenshot, file stored in Documents\BFBC2\Screenshots directory

Now, I’m glad they’re still supporting the PC version and all, but it seems kind of odd to bundle ALL patches with it. Especially when they’re not a lot of fixes. Kind of got a rude wake-up when I realized my PC was downloading a 2.6G file, but whatever.

For a …

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Battlefield 3′s Campaign Will Depict Intense, Authentic War

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Battlefield isn’t a series that sells itself on story. Sure, there’s a campaign component and there’s work put in to it, but it feels like something you play when EA’s servers go down. It’s engaging enough, but it’s got nothing on the multiplayer, and the writing in Bad Company 2 provided me enough cringe-worthy moments to disfigure my cheek bones.

David Goldfarb, lead designer and writer of the game’s single player campaign, would like to ensure that doesn’t happen again, and he’s written a blog post to accompany the game’s latest teaser about how Battlefield 3 manages to provide that intangible vibe of real, authentic war.

“We loved making Battlefield: Bad Company and Bad Company 2. They were great fun, they had their own theme, they were light hearted. In essence, they were adventure flicks. Indiana Jones with an assault rifle,” he writes.

“Battlefield 3 goes much closer to contemporary reality and current events than previous games in the series. We’re depicting a war and everything that suggests.

“We’re telling a war story now, and that means it needs to feel credible, it needs to feel contemporary, and it needs to connect with things and emotions that we have never really tried or had the …

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Mirror’s Edge Isn’t Out of Breath Yet

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Though DICE’s sights are set on making Battlefield 3 the COD-killer EA desperately want it to be, they still have their hearts set on the continuation of another IP, first-person platformer Mirror’s Edge.

“The only thing we can talk about and be open about is that we have not killed the franchise, and you can see that within these walls,” said the studio’s executive producer Patrick Bach in an interview with OXM.

“The only thing that we have decided is that whatever we’re doing in this office right now, when it comes to that we’re not talking about it. The only thing I can say officially is that we definitely haven’t killed the franchise. As you noticed, we still love it – we just need to find out how.”

So much so, in fact, that the game served as inspiration for Battlefield 3, as Bach explains.

“As you’ve seen, the movement system in the game is clearly inspired a lot by Mirror’s Edge, and some of the team who worked on that are now working on Battlefield 3. People here are still in love with Faith – I wouldn’t dare to say anything about the future, but it’s not impossible. Far from it.””

The 2008 game was praised for …

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