How to start on this. My first impressions of this game were, well, poor. I had a hard time jumping through the loops to get this game running.
It wasn't so much Origin, as it was the need to travel to my Internet Browser to join a game. My first thought as I saw the server browser wasn't negative, it was quick, and worked fine. However, it was when I started to try and join games that my disgust for it started to grow. To summarize how Battlefield 3's Server Browser works:
One finds a server on the list, and must click the large "Join Game" button to join it. A small window appears in the bottom left hand corner, that lists the map, the name of the server, and how many people are playing on it, and this screen goes through a series of texts that tell you what its up to. After a moment of trying to join, one begins to hear sound effects through ones headphones. However, you are not in the game yet, no you have to travel back to your internet browser, find the small window in the bottom left hand corner, and click the "Go To the Game" button that is now there.
I find it also quite annoying that, even though I was able to play this game without them, that it seems necessary to download the customized drivers for Battlefield 3 to even run the beta. While I will probably do it in the next few days, it just seems like a very unnecessary thing. In addition, having to download browser plugins to even use the Server Browser was a bit annoying, though over quickly, its more software on my PC that I really shouldn't need, after-all, the Server Browser should be in-game.
Once the game is actually started, it doesn't start in full screen mode, it starts in windowed mode, at the resolution the player has selected, and then the player must use Alt+Enter to bring the game to full screen. Again, not a difficult task, but it seems like yet another meaningless task to perform just to even start playing.
If however, this server browser was instead incorporated into Origin, joined a server, and then the game started in full screened mode, I would have far less of a problem with it. As is though, there is a lot of hoops to jump through to even start playing.
The beta is plagued by a plethora of bugs, which have probably all been well documented by now, so I wont even bother commenting on them.
I was disappointed to see no servers playing the large Caspian Border map, and so I spent my time searching for an East Coast server, that wasn't full, and was playing Metro. Metro starts out nice, a large open area, with trees, a pond, and plenty of room to move around in. However, I found it plagued by snipers, and men who somehow magically could spot me from long distances. Battlefield 3's graphical improvements alone made it very difficult for me to even see a lot of my enemies, let alone engage them with my gun bouncing around on screen and the recoil blasting away.
Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the immersion of the game. Every bullet, every bomb, every falling tree limb, and hole in the ground made it all seem very desperate. Made it very real. The recoil of the guns makes shooting a bit more of a challenge than I expected, with many games becoming rail shooters these days it was excellent to see Battlefield 3's weapons kick and recoil when I was engaging targets, and then for that to only increase if fire was incoming at me as well. Weapons are very effective too, deadly, and with a few placed shots in the right places enemies drop fast.
I'm still in the midst of a debate with myself whether adding prone back to battlefield was a good idea. While there's really no way to take advantage of it like in the past, sometimes prone men look like dead bodies, and its difficult sometimes to tell if that immobile figure is about to pull a trigger on you, or is dead, and especially in the subway parts of the map, prone players hiding in subway cars, on top of escalators, behind invincible trash cans, and in nooks and crannies in every part of the Metro made the assault very difficult, and an absolute blood bath.
However the game grows on you, and it is very fun once it does. I find that Battlefield 3 requires you to take a much slower approach to many of your objectives. Where as in Bad Company 2 I was charging at full sprint from cover to cover to avoid the overwhelming number of snipers with magnum ammunition, Battlefield 3 makes me think a little more before I move, and I found that our Squad was much more effective moving up slowly than it was just blindly charging down the subway tunnels or across the fields.
The spotting system has been improved. As far as I can tell, recon kits are the only ones that can actually create the 3D Spotting Icons, while all other kits can only simple Q spot on the map. I think that works well, and gives the Recon kit an added bonus.
I also noted that large amounts of points were rewarded for team efforts, such as kill assists, squad members spawning on you, squad or team members killing an enemy you had suppressed, giving out health kits and ammunition. It all seemed to be getting me far more points than the kills did, even if every kill is worth 100 points. However, despite this, there is a relative lack of teamwork in Battlefield 3. Hapless squads of four men are unable to communicate properly, there is no 3D Hud icons which any member of the squad can place, and every member of the squad is very quick to run off on his/her own. This inevitably is why playing with friends is crucial, even as difficult as that is in Battlefield 3. I hope that getting my buddies into a Squad of our own will be much improved before November.
I believe that Metro needs a bit of a rework. Its a very large, very long bottle neck, that sends waves of attackers into the well prepared light machine guns and sniper rifles of enemies who only have a few tunnels and hallways to watch in order to hold down the whole kit and caboose. Just sitting with an assault rifle as a defender, firing in single-shot mode I was picking off waves of American attackers storming up the escalators while my buddies fired RPG's into the waves like a zombie apocalypse. One area in particular only gives players two options to reach the objectives, and both objectives are positioned in open areas with nothing but panes of glass between them and the entirety of the room. Which makes defending those bomb sites extremely difficult as the respawning waves of defenders come storming in a counter attack (bum rush) to defuse it.
Many players don't understand too what the siren and the flashing icon on the map really means. The number of people I saw rushing to try and defuse the planted bombs while I was playing defense was few and far between. I think some sort of incentive, or reminder of what those warnings mean needs to be placed in broad sight for all the people that evidently have never heard a siren before and thought "That must be bad!"
Battlefield 3 isn't stellar by any means, but I will reserve my true comments on the game until I get to play the full retail version this November, and get my hands on some 64 player conquest.