The General Manager at DICE isn't very credible on this. Nothing against him personally, but nobody is going to come out and say "Yeah, you're right -- this game needs another three months of development but Christmas is coming and we need to get this puppy out the door now, bugs or no bugs."
I put a lot more stock in what I can see with my own two eyes than the empty promises of somebody who's trying to get me to buy his product.
@kra...
I was going to preorder this for sure, but after playing the beta, I'm going to wait and see what the game is like on release day first. I fell for this "It's only a beta, not a demo" crap with Killzone 3, and sure enough the final release of that game was every bit as bad as the beta suggested it would be.
My guess is that DICE was pushed to get this game to market for the holidays, so that what we're actually playing now is more like an alpha, with ...
To quote from the greatest review of all time:
"The trend in hard games these days is to unlock “Easy” mode for you once you’ve died enough times. Do you think Demon’s Souls does that? Do you think Demon’s Souls is so much as aware of the concept of “Easy” mode? NO IT IS NOT. If Demon’s Souls even knew we were talking about “Easy” mode, it would come over here and kick the #### out of all of us. And we would deserve it.
I’ll tell you what happens in Demo...
Well said.
Dark Souls arrives on Tuesday thanks to Amazon release day delivery.
I'm passing on BF3 thanks to the atrocious beta. I'll revisit this after release day, but it looks like they made some gameplay changes that I'm not interested in (low health, prone).
I don't know how I'm going to find time for Skyrim and Uncharted in November. I'll probably still be playing Dark Souls then, but I can't imagine passing on either of those heavy-h...
If you want to be a real soldier, you should enlist. For the rest of us, we're talking about a video game, which is supposed to fun. The fact is that prone encourages camping, and it makes the game less fun for people who don't enjoy that sort of thing.
Is it realistic that BC2 didn't allow prone? No. Is BC2 a better game for not allowing prone? Hell yes.
Sometimes gameplay factors have to outweigh pure realism.
I decided to pass on this game after the playing the beta. Ironically, the reason why is because this game borrows too much from COD -- it was clearly designed to appeal to that audience, so it's kind of odd that you used that as a point of reference.
@Fil101. I'm not complaining about the glitches or even the atrocious choice of maps. I know they'll they'l fix the bugs and I know the other maps will be better than this one. I'm talking about core gameplay elements that make this game play less like BC2 and more like CoD. Those represent decisions that were made early in the design process, and they can't be fixed since the maps were designed with them in mind.
@DeadlyFire. 100 health doesn't m...
Can't wait for Tuesday to get here.
They can patch this all they want, but until they start removing the gameplay decisions that made this more CoD-like (low health, prone, dropshotting, etc.) I'm not buying it. Sorry.
Loved BC2, hating BF3.
Nope, sorry, not buying it. People said the exact same thing about the horrible Killzone 3 open beta ("It's just a beta, they're just testing the servers, everything will be fixed on release day, etc.") and they had to eat those words when the final release was just as bad as the beta.
When developers release a "beta" three weeks before launch, the game is basically done. You're not going to see any major changes between now and the end of ...
I was originally almost 100% certain to buy this game, but after playing the beta for an hour or so, I'll probably pass on this. Bad Company 2 was awesome, but this games kind of blows. The lack of health means that it plays a lot more like CoD than what I'd prefer, and that's a key design decision that isn't going to fixed with a Day One patch.
Edit: Not a fan of prone either.
@Alpha -- I'm thinking of how Uncharted differentiates itself from the Killzones and Gears and Halos of the world. The modern, semi-realistic approach really does set it apart from some of those other tent-pole franchises.
Almost done with my first run on the PS3 version, having beaten the PS2 version 15-20 times. This port looks great and the gameplay is still as much fun as ever. Fantastic game and easily worth $20, even for those of us who played the hell out of previous releases.
Whoever decided to make this game more "realistic" by turning Drake into a modern-day Indiana Jones deserves a raise. Strange as it is to say, it really makes this franchise stand out that it isn't about orcs (or space marines, another cliche).
I'm getting it for the PS3 anyway, but one week is no big deal. Nothing to see here.
Excellent article. I especially like how the author contrasts the BF and CoD franchises without being a fanboy about it. Good job.
Bioshock? Bioshock?! WTF? Seriously? I beat that game 3 times, and even on Survivor that final boss fight was laughably easy. All you had to do was spam electric gel and it was over in 30 seconds.
So we're doing timed exclusive skins now? Lame.
Obviously the final release will be better than the beta. But the beta also makes it pretty obvious that this game needed more development time instead of being rushed out for the holiday season.