After spending hours poring over every nook and cranny of the multiplayer beta, I' ve decided that it would be more effectual to simply post a pros and cons list. The multiplayer is fairly straightforward, why shouldn' t my impressions be the same?
PROS Brilliant firearm and ambient audio.
Satisfying kills.
Effective grenades.
Entertaining vehicles.
Versatile class and weapon selection systems.
Small scale squad-based firefights.
Massive map-wide war scenarios.
A plethora of options with the destructible environments.
A Pavlovian defensive kill/headshot/level up system.
Vehicles designed to provide useful functions for multiple users (IE, not a driver, and 3 passengers).
Good communication between those with microphones.
Large health bar.
Helicopter controls.
Grenade launchers for advancing through buildings in maps.
CONS Grenade launchers for everything else.
At-times-unplayable connection speeds.
On occasion, you wind up in a vehicle with a player on your team, but not in your squad, making communication impossible.
Ineffective vehicle kills, air strikes and rocket attacks due to connection speed.
No player-has-microphone indicators, and little communication in many matches.
Enemy also has a large health bar.
Helicopter controls.
The health issue is debatable, but I found that the more I played, the more I became accustomed to the larger health bars, both with myself and with my enemy. I learned how to better adapt to cover, and that watching my health bar, and using my adrenalin shots was vital. I found that the health system does feel slightly archaic in the wake of titles like Call of Duty, Gears of War and Uncharted.
The connection speed I list as a tentative " con" . Many matches it was no problem whatsoever, other times I simply returned to dashboard, and started over. With a weak connection sniping becomes nigh impossible, especially with your limited bolt action rifles.
Vehicle controls have been widely criticized in Battlefield titles before, but I felt there was merit in listing the helicopter in both categories. On the one hand, they are incredibly frustrating to figure out (for those still wondering, left stick controls altitude and left-right strafe, right controls pitch and yaw), however in DICEs defense, the controls prevent the chopper from becoming the end-all be-all of vehicles, prevent the entire team from flocking to them, and bring a good sense of balance to the map.
So, in conclusion, I believe this will become my new First Person Shooter fix for quite some time. It' s fun. It' s engaging. It' s large, while still maintaining a smaller " firefight" mentality at times.
Now, with that said, the title is not without it' s flaws, the biggest of which is the connection speed. I would say for every three well-connected matches I played, there was one I simply couldn' t sit through, which is in my opinion unacceptable. DICE need to work on finding some way to reduce the amount of data required (a task I don' t see them attempting) or to better optimize their system for determining hosts (a more likely proposal).
Now... stop listening to me, and go play the demo. I' ll be on for a little bit tonight.
< Message edited by eddie_the_hated -- 9 Jun 08 3:26:34 >