Came into work late today. Got yelled at for it. Didn't care a bit. I spent most of this morning and early afternoon playing with about 40 testers and developers on an official developers server. We played round after round of Gulf of Oman looking for issues. Afterwords I had to just sit there and stare at my monitor. It was fantastic. The graphics and destruction are insanely improved, even over BC2. The map itself is immense with plenty of room for spectacular dog fights. The flight physics themselves are much more realistic and a butt load of fun. The only real complaint that I had was that the programmers who actually input the physics for the weapons and ammuniton should not have been allowed to snipe. Sons of bitches never missed. More importantly, I got a ton of very unique developers dog tags. Too bad the stats will be zeroed back out once the testing is complete. Still haven't been told when the open beta will be, but they are doing a 24 hour per map, one map a day marathon. Soon we move onto Wake Island. May have to take a sick day.
Wake Island. F'n rocks! Flying the "unnamed but kick ass" jet over the enemy base and just unloading falling death is fantastic. Specially, when you get multiple kills with a single bombing run and the pilot yells out "****in' take that bitches!". Also noticed for the first time today, when you get a headshot while coming down in a parachute, your soldier yells out "Death from above!" As for the map itself, other than the island shape, you won't recognize much. As expected, the graphics are insane. There are a lot of places to hide and snipe from, but just like in BC2 a lot of those spots are destroyed or uncovered before long. Also as expected, I was gettin butt raped in the dog fights, but they were serious fun. Ground fighting was intense. We had a full server this time with 64 people. You basically had an entire airforce flying above and killing everything that moved, and a butt load of soldiers and vehicles doing the same. Oh yeah, little.... ****in.. bird!
Side note 2: Yes, you customize your dog tags. They track one stat and have an image of your choice on them. Currently, mine tracks knife kills. 97! Some of you are already aware of what I am running and it doesn't make any difference to you. I have been fortunate enough to be able to build a serious gaming machine recently and for the average user, your just not gonna be able to match it. Just make sure you have a minimum of 1Gig video card, as much ram as you can reasonably afford, a quad core CPU, and very little crap running in the background. (yes, that means you to Insul8tor) As EA has previously stated, Vista or Win7 and DX10, DX11 ready. I'll be gaming with my DICE friends tonight and let you know what they say.
Do NOT expect to run BF3 on maximum graphics settings. There aren't many machines out there at a reasonable price that can. Fortunately, I'm an unreasonable guy.
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