Tuesday 28 June 2011

Why Battlefield 3 Should Wait Till The Next Generation (for consoles)

With more and more info pouring in about DICE's latest adventure into the Battlefield franchise, it is more and more obvious even to the most casual of gamers that today's consoles just wont cut it.
We got our first taste of console footage for this next generation military FPS on the Jimmy Fallon not too long ago and to say that the response was exuberant would be a tad too generous. The colours were slightly off, textures seemed muddier than previously seen on the PC side of things and the overall look just didnt seem right. All things aside, another glimmer of information surfaced confirming the frame rate of the title to be at an expectant 30 frames per second. Ok, fine, not a problem right?

Wrong.

One thing that I know COD got right was its 60 frames per second "smooth" gameplay. If I were to attribute the Call of Duty franchise's success to one thing, it would be precisely that. We know that given the design direction of a game like Battlefield 3, console gamers can continue to dream about higher resolutions, let alone higher frame rates. Coupled with other drawbacks including the inevitably poorer graphics and reduced multiplayer player counts (24 for consoles, 64 for PC), I cant help but wonder if DICE were doomed to disappoint someone somehow at the end of all of it.

My proposal from the start has been to continue with the Bad Company series for consoles as far as this generation is concerned, and give PC gamers what they want (and quite frankly should've gotten a while ago). I dont want a game like BF3 to end up becoming outdated once the looming next generation arrives; I'd like to see it as a fun, enjoyable and intelligent long term game as previous Battlefield games were.

Nevertheless, it is still too early to speculate; we will see how BF3 pans out.

2 comments:

  1. Well...because of the history of the consoles I'd wait for a little bit to see if either next gen console has issues or not. I bought a 360 long after people were having issues with the Red Ring and I STILL ended up having to send it in because it red ringed, too.

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  2. I think BF4 Will be amazing..I just got a little paranoid thinking BF4 wouldn't be on next gen consoles...!!

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