Battlefield 3

First, what was. Dice made an incredible game with BF2, it was everything you could ever want in an online FPS.

They gave us this, and it was wonderful:

And we turned it into this, which was also wonderful :D

And my favourite, the beautiful and beguiling AH-1Z to some P.O.D.

I used to play with this guy, Champuss, who is the gunner in this video. I was a hell of a lot better than that pilot though, he spends way too long close to the ground almost stationary, and would have been raped by the dudes I used to play against on the EA UK and Pornostars servers.

He was fucking god tier, it was any pilot's dream to have him as your gunner. I did manage to kill him a few times, but mainly in jets as it was pretty much impossible to beat him in a chopper battle.

Here's my stats, I got to Colonel rank, and figured that would be a good place to leave it, seeing as everyone I knew and most of the good servers had quit by that point. I did reinstall it once, a year or two later, but it was like a million gig install at that point, and every successive patch had made it run and play worse, so I didn't stick around.

http://bf2s.com/player/48949941/

And now, the future. I am so excited for Battlefield 3, I hope it lives up to all the potential that is being shown in the trailers, the graphics and engine look incredible, and the gameplay looks really fun with a lot of variation, and tiptoeing that fine line between realism and fun perfectly, that the best PC Battlefields have always done.

Next, I would desperately like to see some multiplayer footage, also what they are doing with the aerial vehicles. Tanks are cool and all, and rolling down a map in an armour column is certainly a fun time. The thing is though, the flyboys will come along and fuck up your day just like that, given the chance. And the jets and helis are where you get the 50+ kill streaks that make you feel like a fucking demigod for 10 minutes :D

I hope the handling of the aerial vehicles is complex, and tricky to master, with none of the appalling hand-holding and training wheels of the hover things from Battlefield 2142. I hope there is a good balance between the aircraft, rather than the situation in BF2, where there was the god tier of the J-10, the mid tier of the F/A-18 and the Mig-29, and the waste of database space that was the F-35. Literally, the best use for that thing was on Wake Island, where you could load early, grab an F-35 and full reheat towards the Chinese airbase- if you were lucky you could bail out and HALO onto a jet or heli. If you were even more lucky, there would not be an anti-tank enemy within range to kill you! That was some fun shit.

I want to see the Blackhawk restored to its former glory before the 1.2 patch, I want to see those gatling guns act like they do in real life, that is, rip everything they touch to shreds. I want to see the epic healing/repairing/resupplying/mine-laying Blackhawks with a full squad inside turning the tide of battle. I want to see TV-guided missiles from the attack helos that do not magically run out of fuel and explode after 450 metres.

I want to see foot combat that is fast-paced and fluid, yet still retains all the classic Battlefield traits such as crouch, prone, and the increased accuracy these stances provide, and for that additional accuracy to be vital to suceed. I don't want to see dudes with AK-47s being able to pull the dive and spray trick, and I don't want to see LMGs with instant pinpoint accuracy. I want to see medics with a defined role, and not the cover/regenerating health paradigm that is the favourite of the Xbox shooters..

I want to see a squad and team system that is intuitive, and easily adaptable to changing conditions on the battlefield. I want to see some way to re-create the hot-swapping squad leaders thing, maybe to not the extent it was, but certainly not to the other extreme of being able to kill the squad leader and the squad is effectively fucked.

I want to see patches developed exclusively by the main development studio and team for the game, not palmed off to some substandard contractors that have no idea how to program or balance the game as in BF2.

I want to see a full and comprehensive stats system, and the API fully and freely available to third parties so they can make stuff like BF2S and so on.

I want to see all this and more. Dice could have an amazing game on their hands, proving the doubters wrong who say that PC gaming is dead and that all anyone will buy is Call of Duty sequels and clones on the Xbox 360.

I'm going to predict, here and now, that Battlefield 3, will upon release, shatter every record Modern Warfare 2 ever made. And it will be ten times the game to boot.

Welcome to duty.