Battlefield 3 Back To Strike At Karkand?

Martin ‘nKM’ Bowman comes out from his study hole to examine Battlefield 3 and what DICE needs to get right to bring him back from Real Life to competitive gaming.

It’s been a while since I played a competitive game of anything lately – like many others of my age my online persona has succumbed to the realities of real life; getting my academic house in order, getting my bills paid and spending my rare moments of quality time with the missus. Other than trolling Call of Duty 4 public servers and bantering with the pub heroes out of sheer boredom, I really haven’t considered gaming at all.

Some could say I gave up after the efforts of putting Bad Company 2 in the spotlight and achieving nothing of significance for my peers in the Battlefield community. Everyone who watched my forays into gaming journalism knows how disappointed I was to see my beloved FPS series crash and burn under the weight of broken promises and lack of competitive functionality; I watched the once burgeoning competitive BF scene shrink over time to a shrivelled, nonsensical and ultimately disappointing shadow of its former self. Retreating to the relatively stable routine of studying endless Cisco modules and IT systems at University actually came as some sort of a relief to me.

Yet I find myself, on my first day off work in about three weeks, spending a rainy afternoon in Glasgow writing this article for Cadred, gearing myself up for another stab at underlining the importance of a game developer making concessions to a competitive community that threatens to care not a jot about its new Frostbite 2.0 baby. With many other developers bringing out games in the FPS genre with useful competitive functionality such as Brink or Heroes of Stalingrad and many players outlining their intentions to move on, it seems that the ever growing eSports scene may indeed be able to transcend Battlefield 3 without too much of a grumble - except from the most hardened of BF fans who have stuck with BC2, despite the flaws.

BF3 is visually stunning, but it holds little weight with competitive gamers

It is not, however unlikely, a scene which DICE themselves want to lose. Community Manager Daniel ‘zh1nt0’ Matros has been animated in his protestations that the competitive scene is an important part of the Battlefield community and that their needs are very much in the thoughts of the developers. However, those recently departed from the scene exude a rather opposite story – Battlefield competitive players have been let down and overlooked by DICE (and ergo, EA) in favour of an unquestioning console community and a new generation of PC gamers who do not have the experience or foresight to see that these big-budget games are pushed and prodded to make money. A strategy of short shelf-life titles, expansion packs and in-game freebies may indeed entice the less aware of young gamers out there to part with their pennies, but those who wish to push Battlefield in the eSports arena are battered and bruised from previous altercations with the vilified developers; deprived of the tools to help themselves, they have languished and expired. My default assertion, therefore, is that this is not going to change when BF3 hits the shelves in Q3 or Q4 this year.

The battle lines have been drawn in previous debates, a number of features and requirements for amateur, semi-pro and professional gaming that are absolutely required to progress in eSports. Themselves intertwined with community wide benefits such as securing game servers from cheats and exploits; allowing all parts of the community from casual players to hardcore pros, to develop the scene with a certain freedom and security. Longevity in gaming is achieved by providing the consumers with a fantastic product that caters for their needs and is mature enough to stand up against the competition on all fronts, something Battlefield has consistently failed to deliver in my opinion. It is with a mild indifference that many of the old brigades will view the release, amid much fanfare, media coverage and one-sided interviews with those paid to say good things about bad games. We’ve seen the trailers and interviews, and yes, the new engine does indeed look and sound splendid, same as the last one did. But if DICE cannot get the basics right, as I will detail on the next page, then once again we will see a new Battlefield release with much unfulfilled potential - itself another blow to those following eSports who could get their teeth into a new contender.

Battlefield developers need to be willing to open a dialogue with competitive gamers if it has any hopes whatsoever of winning back the thousands of players who gave up their hard earned buying servers and expansions packs for this series since the 2000s. Development is well ahead in BF3 and with less than 6 months to release, it will be interesting to see if anybody actually listened over in Stockholm.

With that in mind, here’s a summary of what’s missing, and necessary, to bring Battlefield back to eSports. Some points are small fixes, some are major features.

Demo Recording:

The ability to record in-game demos of matches for anti-cheat purposes, as per default requirements of professional gaming leagues, is a must. By offering enhanced abilities to server admins, we can keep out cheating and glitch abuse by way of reviewing verifiable demos which are playable in-game. This also provides the community with the ability to record movies of game play, thereby enhancing the interest and longevity of the game as was seen with previous Battlefield titles and is well known in other games.

Without demo recording, we cannot monitor matches for unfair/rule breaking play and check for people using cheats not yet caught by PunkBuster or 3rd party anti-cheat stream, which undermines competitive play completely and makes it unsuitable for eSports.

1st and 3rd Person Spectator Mode (freecam):

The ability to stream live matches to the community is a cornerstone of the competitive scene (see RushTV, QuadV, H2k-TV, ESLTV and many more across the world); 1st and 3rd person spectator mode makes this possible. There are many organisations that use this functionality to bring the competitive game to the masses, and it is the basic feature which allows new games to be broadcast at expos and across the internet for thousands of interested gamers out there. Inarguably, this functionality is helping develop eSports for experienced gamers and for those new to gaming. It also provides server admins the opportunity to monitor suspect game play 'live', thus enhancing the game play experience and providing a solution when anti-cheat measures fail. Combined with demo recording, huge communities have been built in the past for gamers who wish to make game movies, as can be seen with COD2, COD4, Quake series, CounterStrike series, etc. It's important to state that demo recording is not the same as recording with a 3rd party tool such as FRAPS or using a capture card, for those unaware.

Many Battlefield veterans have been lost to other games due to problems with functionality - will DICE get it right this time?

Functionality for competitive play:

Primarily to promote balance, and enhance functionality with customizable features such as a scoreboard with ticket count, round start, round pause, round restart, global messages, 'ready-up' mode, kit/weapon limits, round timer, ticket bleed and the like. Such basic options were standard in previous BF titles and are standard in most other multiplayer FPS (CS, CSS, COD, UT, Q3, ET, TF2 etc). It is important to state that competitive games are on unranked servers for this reason. Giving better support for managing games allows competitive organisations to set out fair and balanced rulesets, allowing more players the chance to play matches with friends and against teams in a competitive environment and fast-tracking the development of the scene as a whole.

Client-side improvements:

Extra options for all players such as: extra options to customize sensitivity of vehicle turrets and helicopter manoeuvrability, option to bind individual keys for picking up kits and planting/defusing bombs (common complaint), key bind for new squad, key bind for in-game weapons/squad menu, better in-game menu behaviour (squad menu should disappear on key-off), possibility of faster kit switches (artificial delays for switching weapons are too long) and complete removal of mouse acceleration would be a great boost. Also, server browser improvements allowing for all-case search strings and better filters are much needed and appreciated. Competitive players are used to performing multiple tasks and thinking ahead in team-based game play and relatively minor improvements such as putting these options back on the keyboard will restore the fluency of game play and be beneficial for everyone playing the game who wants to concentrate on the game instead of constantly looking at the squad menus to switch weapons and squads, as per Bad Company 2.

Modding:

Simple one this - competitive mods are king. COD4 Promod is a great example of what experienced modders can do for the competitive community.

I would love to be as motivated and dedicated to the cause we have in the old Battlefield community of pushing DICE to give us the features we want. The truth is that for me, time has moved on and there comes a point when you realise that you are repeating yourself and getting nowhere, like the proverbial smashing your head against a wall. I would be absolutely delighted to be completely wrong in my assessment of how this whole charade is going to turn out, and I’ll take it on the chin from all those concerned who could possibly berate me for not giving them another chance.

It's about time DICE stepped back and re-evaluated its attitude towards competitive gaming - we've done enough to warrant our inclusion and our requirements are neither unreasonable, nor unprecedented.

Prove me wrong then, boys. We’re all winners if you do, aren’t we really?