Preview by: Mitch Dyer

Full disclosure: I am a Battlefield fan boy. I’ve poured what must be 150 hours into 1943, Bad Company 2 and its Vietnam expansion. I am and have been obsessed with Battlefield for some time. All the trailers and marketing stuff EA is doing? I’m way into it. I tell you this so you know how crazy-excited I am for Battlefield 3. I tell you this so you understand what it means for me to be worried about it -- especially the singe player campaign.

While we’re being honest and open, let’s look back on the BF3 beta real quick. That thing was a mess. It was, apparently, based on a version of the game from August or September. I didn’t like what I played, and it scared me silly. Headshots didn’t register, I fell through the world, servers lagged, the game crashed...the list of problems goes on. Those were beta problems -- those were what we were meant to help DICE iron out with the public play testing. Those issues were not what bothered me. The Paris Metro map relied on long-range combat, which gave the elevated defending team a remarkable advantage when it came to clobbering bomb-planting attackers. Snipers ruled, and it was remarkably difficult for the attacking team to push their way into the subway, never mind through it. I didn’t have much fun with it at all, personally. I was bored.

Metro is an anomaly. I played a half-dozen or so of the game’s nine multiplayer maps with EA and other folks from the press. The Grand Bazaar Rush map stood out above the rest, even though it doesn’t do anything in particular to make Battlefield multiplayer feel new. It’s just a well-made, infantry-centric small town with a lot of verticality. It reminded me a bit from Counter-Strike’s de dust, actually, with its tall, winding hallways and more open outdoor areas. It’s a sniper’s paradise, and its tight, interconnected indoor areas are a great change of pace after heated outdoor fights. This one has a nice balance of the long- and short-man’s game that Metro outright ignores.

The Bazaar was the best of everything infantry, but it also highlighted another concern I have about BF3: The destruction. DICE’s Frostbite 2 engine is a remarkable piece of tech. We’ve all seen the game in some form or another now, so there’s little reason to reflect on how gorgeous this game is. The main gimmick with Frostbite, though, has always been destruction. Blowing buildings apart in Bad Company 2 was more than a visual novelty -- it was tactically mandatory. Battlefield 3 has scales this back considerably. I chucked C4 against apartment walls to screw snipers and I punched a few holes in walls with rockets, but it rarely felt advantageous. I didn’t see anything fall apart in the Bazaar, and the height of everyone trying to blow everything to bits elsewhere was disappointing in its limitation.

Matches with vehicles embodied what I really want from a Battlefield game, though, and the addition (rather, return of) APCs, smaller transport choppers, and fighter jets rocked. I adored messing around in a jet (even though I scored an amazing zero points for my team, sorry guys). Dogfights are as intense as you want them to be, even when only four are in the air. Spawning into a plane straight from the spawn screen is far preferable to standing on a runway waiting for a plane to appear. If it’s not there, you know to jump on a squad mate elsewhere. A similar improvement I dug quite a bit: hopping into an airborne chopper from the spawn screen -- even if your squad isn’t in it.

So, yeah, BF3 has some weirdness to it, but it’s largely the same as it ever was. That’s a good thing. The frantic flow of each Rush match was as exhilarating and frantic as expected, and Conquest mode’s tug-of-war is a series classic that’ll never get old. Even good ol’ Team Deathmatch has its thrills to offer. DICE, despite my worries from the beta, seems to have nailed the multiplayer. The newness comes in when we start talking co-op.