Battlefield 2 never did
Too many tanks and cars and silly things to be taken seriously by the uber leet pr0 gaming crew.
Plenty clans will play it properly online in ladders though. But it will never get to the levels CS 1.6 did, its not that sort of game.
You're right and wrong at the same time.
Dice have specifically said during all the marketing usuals for BF3 that the competitive "scene" was something that they wanted to focus on. I think it is kind of obvious already that there's a $1.6million tournament now taking place for console gamers specifically for BF3.
The Electronic Sports League (ESL) have adopted BF3 already and have made quite a lot of plans for some cups, leagues and ladders.
The thing that will set this apart from BF2 in terms of competitiveness is that BF2 was limited to Conquest. No mainstream league would ever pick-up a game as a common league item if you need 32 people in a single team. This is where BF3 has the advantage.
Current plans as far as I can tell are for leagues to do with 8v8 Conquest game modes, 6v6 Rush modes and 4v4 Squad Deathmatch. This is where the competitive scene (PC at least anyway) will flourish.
The big "eSports players" need something new and this is exactly it. Old games like 1.6 and CS:S no longer have the mass appeal that they once did. They no longer bring in huge prize pools or as many tournaments as they have in the past. Fair enough there is still the big sponsors around (Intel, AMD, Razer etc) but there's nothing lending to the tournaments - they're for old games targeting the
minority of the audience in terms of PC gamers.
BF3 should change all this. It is arguably one of the most anticipated games in the modern age, and has such a large fan base and user base to appeal to, I can see tournaments and leagues literally being thrown at the end users to try and revive and save the slowly dying and dwindling industry that is competitive gaming.
Dont want it to get lost in this thread lol (barely keeping track as it is!)
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