Battlefield 3: Give you the most realistic experience to stimulate

How does it hold up on a non-top of the line PC?

First, I should note that I’m not running at the recommended settings for Battlefield 3. More like somewhere between the minimum and recommended settings with a AMD Athlon X2 250 cpu, 4GBs of memory, Radeon 5750 gpu with 1GB of memory and the 64-bit version of Windows 7. While I now have the intense desire to upgrade my PC, the Battlefield 3 beta is flat-out the best looking PC game I’ve played. The game started with the maxed out 1600×1200 resolution and ran at around 30 fps except for when the action got heavy. I dropped my resolution down to 1400×950 and the frame rate was much smoother. Not bad for a 5000 series Radeon. I just wish there was a quicker way to get to the game options to fiddle around with the settings.

Breath deep and remember, it’s a beta

Once I was able to connect to a server and jump on to the Operation Metro map, the first thing I noticed was that there is a giant hole in the ground around the ‘A’ objective on the first part of the Rush map.  Fortunately, an opponent fell through the game world near me and I got a cheap and easy kill. There are also many parts of the map where you kind of jiggle in and out of the map while laying prone as if the game engine can’t decide it wants to drop you all the way down and force you to commit suicide. Getting trapped in the map like this is really troubling when your squad starts to spawn on you and they all get trapped too.

This is a beta so bugs like this are to be expected but the area where you can fall through the environment is so large that I wonder how it made it this far. Not that big of a deal for now, but DICE games do have a history of coming out buggy, so this makes me wonder if we’ll see similar things with all the other map when the game releases next month. DICE developers say that the beta isn’t representative of the final product, so there’s obviously still a good bit of polishing to do.

Operation Metro doesn’t quite feel like Battlefield.

I would have preferred playing the Caspian Border map, as it represents the kind of maps I am accustomed to from playing Battlefield 2. But I missed out on the limited time that DICE allowed people on to password-protected servers running the 64-player map . Operation Metro is a different animal with no vehicles to speak of, but it serves its purpose well in changing up the formula. The infantry-only map affords plenty of hiding spots for the defenders to camp and pick off targets while offensive players will want to make sure they stay in cover and keep their eyes on that row of hedges across the way. The most interesting moments in the map open up after the first two Rush objectives are taken, and the fight moves into the Parisian subway tunnels. That first stretch from the outside into the hole leading into the subway squeezes the action into a more confined and intense space where it becomes a game of picking opponents off with sniper rifles or laying down heavy suppression fire with the rocket launchers or machine guns.