Battlefield 3 Field Notes: We Must Be Supersoldiers

Hello readers, welcome back to another installment of Field Notes! This time, we're headed back to the bright and ridiculously lens-flare prone Battlefield to examine what the player-character in multiplayer actually is. To help break up the monotony of text, there's a video in the middle somewhere, enjoy!

Have you ever considered that the troops in Battlefield 3, on both the US and Russian sides are basically supersoldiers? Let me give you a run down of why I think this might be the case. First, these guys absorb bullets like the various types of rounds are made out of rubber or some sort of material that hurts you but doesn't kill you. Second, when they do get shot, they have healing factors that can be accelerated by standing around an unopened box of medical supplies. Then there's the issue of explosives apparently doing very little damage to the player other than taking down their health if there's enough distance between the player and the explosion. If I remember correctly, explosions typically involve shrapnel which could hit a major artery and lead to heavy bleeding or at least ruin the use of limbs and a rather powerful shockwave that has the capacity to turn people deaf without proper ear protection (I suppose this is mitigated by the fact that most soldiers wear a form of hearing protection) and occasionally break some bones.


Then, there's the ridiculous weapon proficiency that each soldier seems to have. Arguably, a gun is a gun and there probably won't be too much of a problem wielding various firearms if you're trained in using one already but each gun tends to have different characteristics that would probably take some getting used to. For example, in the Assault class, you can use a conventional assault rifle like the Colt M16A3 or a bullpup like the FN F2000. While most weapons operate on roughly the same principles (i.e. point the gun, pull the trigger, lead spits out the barrel towards where you point), I suspect it would be difficult to operate one weapon from the other especially when you were trained for one design and not the other. Keeping with this example, reloading would be a confusing mess for a pretty long time since your muscle memory from using the M16 would influence you to load the magazine up front when the well is at the back on the F2000. Then, there's the issue of compensating for fire rate and recoil, which isn't too bad in terms of recoil for the M16 and F2000 but the fire rate would be a different story since the F2000 fires significantly faster that M16. Imagine the difference in recoil though between a 5.56x45mm rifle like the M16 and a 7.62x51mm battle rifle like the G3A3, I suspect it'd be a bit harder to handle the 7.62 when firing full-auto even though it has a significantly lower rate of fire.

Alright, maybe that last bit was a little too much of a gripe and realistically, you could use most guns if you know how to use one in general. However, the fact that you are apparently trained in using all sorts of vehicles is definitely ridiculous. Apparently, the player-character has received training in piloting helicopters (transport, attack and scout varieties regardless of the faction), piloting planes (fighters and ground-attack varieties, again regardless of faction), driving and manning the weapons system on tanks, driving and using the weapons systems on IFVs/APCs, driving land transport (fast reconnaissance vehicles and personnel carriers) and driving water transport (boats mostly). Man, the US Marine Corps and Russian Army are made up of some really talented, or ridiculously well-trained people, especially since their troops apparently have the capability to use all sorts of vehicles and weapons systems.

I realise that Battlefield 3 is nowhere near realistic but it's still pretty hilarious if you think about how insane all the mechanics in the game work if you apply some semblance of realism or logic to it.

The Last of Us Field Notes: Swift, Silent, Deadly

This game. This game is really something else. The single player is fantastic and deserves a proper review but I neither have the time nor talent to flesh out how brilliant this game is. Instead, let's have a little skulk around Factions, the rather interesting multiplayer component for The Last of Us. Before we start off, let me just say that there are a lot of issues surrounding Factions, the most annoying of which is the huge connection problem that every Naughty Dog has had since Uncharted 2. Factions is undeniably fun, when you can connect to it. I know not everyone gets the "Error downloading config file" or "Error syncing levels" problem but if you Google it, you'll see it's a fairly big problem and there's been not a peep from SCEA or ND about what's actually going wrong and how to fix it and that irks me to no end because I love Factions and I would play it more but I cannot because of some crappy connection issues that have plagued me since Uncharted 2.

Now that that's out of the way, let's talk Factions. This game mode is a fascinating and rather unique blend of stealth-based third person shooter gameplay combined with a challenge-based mission structure that affects off-screen survivors that you have to keep alive for "weeks" which is just through 7 games of Supply Raid or Survivor. The main objective of the game is to keep your little band of rag-tag Fireflies or Hunters alive for 12 weeks and, man oh man, is that a challenge. Keeping them healthy and well-fed isn't too hard. You just have to scavenge a lot during matches to get "supplies" or "parts"(converted into supplies at the end of the match). The supplies ensure that your clan is healthy and continues to grow while parts are used during a match as currency to upgrade your weapons or buy armour. As well as supplies and parts, you can also scavenge for crafting items just like in the single-player portion of the game.

Along the way, you are given "missions" which are basically just a front for getting you to complete certain challenges within 3 matches (or "days" using the game's terminology) with the penalty being losing members of your clan by a certain percentage, usually 60% or 100% and with each level of the challenge you complete, you mitigate the damage done to your clan. Now, I have a serious problem with this mode because there are very few challenges and most of them involve either killing or executing enemies which is damned hard in the first place. But worse, these missions require killing or executing enemies with particular weapons and it's not possible to keep using your same favourite weapon because the challenge criteria goes up with each time you pick it regardless of success or failure. Furthermore, these missions never bring you a positive result, just a mitigation of a negative result. I understand that this is keeping in the survivalist aspect and overall theme of the game but it is utterly ridiculous that 100% of my clan can get wiped out because I fail to complete a challenge considering that the missions usually involve getting attacked or attacking a rival faction. Realistically, not everyone's going to die because if you were really a smart survivor which you would have to be in this post-apocalyptic world, you'd be smart enough to mitigate your losses by bringing only those necessary to complete the job and packing off back-up and less able survivors to a safer location. But, no, even if I'm attacking a Firefly camp, I'm attacking them full-on with all my forces in one mass attack even though they're probably entrenched and have defences at the ready.

Other than the really annoying mission structure that makes no sense whatsoever and basically threatens to kill all my clan and force me to start all over for not completing some silly challenges, this mode is otherwise extremely fun. The two game modes available in Factions are, as previously mentioned, Supply Raid and Survivor. Both are basically team deathmatch with the twist being you only have 4 players on each team and fairly large maps to skulk around to find and eliminate each other. Survivor is exactly the same except you don't respawn during the rounds so if you're killed, bad luck, sit it out until the next round. The objective is the same, eliminate the enemy team and win as many rounds as possible in that way. Both game modes are extremely fun but it is a little disappointing that the multiplayer aspect of the game only offers team deathmatch style modes and no objective based ones like collecting as many parts as possible or some sort of domination style match. Furthermore, it seems a little strange that there are no Infected whatsoever. I think they should have tried including a game mode where one team is survivors and one team is Infected but I'm not a game developer so I don't know if that would be possible or keeping in line with what the development team wanted to do with the game. Maybe add in NPC Infected that hound you as you try eliminating the other team? Adds some challenge to the whole thing and maybe give an opportunity for both teams to cooperate before wiping each other out.

In terms of actual gameplay, this game requires a lot of patience and the ability to stay stealthy for extended periods of time. Like the title suggests, for you to win, you must be swift, silent and deadly all at the same time. If you're too slow, the enemy will be breathing down your neck with armour, upgraded weapons and crafted items like Molotovs (the bane of my existence in this game) or nail bombs. So, you have to move fast enough to gather supplies and crafting items to ensure that the enemy doesn't have a sharp advantage over you. You must be silent because noise reveals your location on the radar and moving too fast will lead you to an inevitable death if the enemy is smart enough to use listen mode to echo-locate your position. Lastly, you must be deadly because there is no time to mince about and take your time stalking your enemy because they are stalking you all the same. Both parties are equally hunter and hunted. Teamwork is another key component of this unique game because you need to work together and stick together if you want to survive. At the same time, you must be ruthless, leaving teammates to die when they are bleeding out because the enemy is probably using them as bait, drawing you in to heal him then popping out and popping you both. Lone wolfing isn't out of the option but being separated and ambushed by an enemy that knows how to work together is the worst possible position you can find yourself in. But sticking too close to each other is a bad idea as well because a well placed Molotov can kill an entire team.

In short, this is one of the best games I've ever played and I recommend you to get it and jump on Factions (if you can).

Battlefield 3 Field Notes: Re-Enlisted

Hello readers, if you exist outside my mind, at least, I like to think I actually have readers although that's probably wishful thinking. To celebrate the upcoming release of Battlefield 4 and because I felt like getting back to it, I'm playing Battlefield 3 again after nearly a year away from it and let me tell you, post-patches, Battlefield 3 is a vastly different game. This will be a semi-regular series written in both a meta-universe and in-universe style, varying depending on the content. For example, this introductory post will be about the game while the next one might be about a specific match/battle or vehicles and weapons. It's largely practice for my skills or lack thereof in creative writing.

The first match back and I've realised I've lost all semblance of motor control in a first-person shooter. I'm not the best video gamer, most of my friends will tell you that, but I like to think that I'm skilled enough to move an analog stick around but my reflexes have gone to hell after playing so many third-person shooters and fighting games for the past year. Some things I haven't lost, though, I still spam the select button to spot enemies for my teammates, a force of habit from my Bad Company days. Also, I'm still fairly proficient with vehicles. I can drive a tank and engage enemies with the best of them and I got skills when it comes to helicopter flying. Let's not talk about jet flying though. Before I took a break from the battlefield, I could barely fly a jet let alone dogfight properly. I tried flying one by spawning in a FA/18 Super Hornet and I basically crashed into the aircraft carrier when trying to takeoff.

Still, my performance wasn't too bad for a soldier off the battlefield for a year or so. Managed to get a decent score, fifth overall and third on my team. KDR doesn't mean jack on Battlefield but I managed to get better than 1.00 KDR, which is an achievement for me since I die most of the time trying to arm MCOMS or capping flags. PTFO, right? People are mostly the same though. They run down the middle and are pretty predictable. It was pretty much a massacre for the enemy team because they were headstrong and kept pushing down the middle. I never understood that mindset. As a rather poor combatant, I've always used varying tactics to outwit rather than outfight the enemy. An exposed flank is basically death to half an enemy team or more. I mean, if you slap a suppressor on your weapon and sneak in from their side and get the enemy from behind, they have little time to react and even if they take you down, you would have taken a fair chunk without them noticing or reacting quick enough.

Weapons-wise, I'm sticking to my 5 Service Star quest whereby I try out every weapon until I get 500 kills so as to unlock the dog tags for it. The current weapon I'm working on is the FAMAS and that thing has been nerfed to oblivion. No other way to put it. Usually, DICE does a great job in balancing weapons but man, they really made this thing terrible. When Back to Karkand first came out and the FAMAS got unlocked, it was a pretty popular weapon. A nimble, fast-firing and devastating close-quarters weapon. Now, it's got a ridiculously high rate of fire coupled with a small magazine, a long reload time and ridiculous recoil. The only way to use this thing is to walk right up to an enemy and pull the trigger. No need to aim, the recoil is way too difficult to control. Most guns I can develop an understanding of and a tactic to compensate for its weaknesses but this gun has too many to count. This is going to be a long 5 Service Stars.

I didn't play too many matches but I did have a lot of fun and now I remember why I love the Battlefield series so much. There'll be more Field Notes for Battlefield 3 and other games that fit the theme in the near future and until then, we've got a few awesome articles on the way. This is Renegade Sandwich, signing off.