Love is a Battlefield (3) Discussion

If I had taken the time to copy and paste all the advice I got after writing about my poor showing on the fields of battle that are Battlefield 3, I could have hit my word count, taken my fee, boarded my Nintendo branded Pegasus and flown it to the Xbox mansion where all us game writers hang out. (It really is a magical place.)

Problem with that plan? 1. None of that stuff really exists, and 2. Guilt.

See, it wasn't just people giving advice that struck me. Some of it was damn good advice. And plenty of folks seemed to genuinely want to help. It turned out that sucking at Battlefield 3, and sucking at games generally, was a lot more common than people might think – certainly more common than you'd expect in a core gaming community like the one fostered here.

Click here to read Sam's original piece: Love is a Battlefield (3).

I admit that there was a discontent that immediately followed that article going online: now the admission was out there, I was supposed to feel better, right? I didn't. And could I expect a return from the community? The last place you might expect salvation to appear was in an internet comments thread.

But, lo. Those that identified, sympathised, empathised. And those that came with ideas, freely given.

So, in honour of those generous readers, and in honour of my, in some cases more than doubled scores, here is my experience with a select  few of those tidbits that have reignited my enthusiasm for Supply Efficiency. Get some.

1) Just Have Fun

Overwhelmingly this piece of advice won the day. Some delivered it in what I took to be soothing tones, while others seemed to think my preoccupation with my own lack of skill was a bit weird and made them shuffle about awkwardly. Regardless of how delivered, “have fun” was both blisteringly obvious and not at all obvious.

The intent of that original piece was to describe how one could still enjoy a title while being so ludicrously bad at it, so I obviously missed the mark a bit. But the frequency with which gamers suggested that it was ok to just take it easy and, you know, play, made it apparent that many of you are a lot more sensitive than you might let on. Yeah, that means you.

Hey. No one's judging.

Don't look at your feet. Own it.

Happiness is a huge explosion.

2) Your Sidearm Is Your Friend When On the Run

Right you are, chum. When on the run in the Support class using your sidearm is key, because the SAW doesn't shoot straight.

I never expected this to actually work. The dude who suggested this buried it among several other very good suggestions, and of all of them, this seemed the least likely to have a positive effect. My experience with the handgun hasn't even been patchy, I thought. Patchy would actually be a big step up.

The Support class continues to feel like a natural home for me, and I haven't moved off it despite several suggestions that I pick up the Assault class (see below). The SAW, with its ability to fix and hold steady, allows me my second most useful attribute on the battlefield: wall o' bullets. But firing from the hip with it has exactly the same accuracy as, and is in no way different to, an octopus hurling marbles at rising helium balloons from a bouncing dune buggy while doing Zumba. This is known.

Moving from cover, stowing that badboy, and keeping a pistol up has proved to be an excellent way to either pick up a sudden, unexpected kill, or at least send more experienced players backing the hell away once I open up. Even ahoof, it's a lot easier to hit what you're aiming at.

The inability to cluster rounds without having the SAW steadied is so well known, that anyone with half a brain merely stands still and calmly puts one round in your melon while you're jerking about like a marionette. It's so undignified. The sidearm changes things.

3) Play Conquest

The idea of playing Deathmatch was broadly reviled, and that was something I had already discovered myself. What's important here, though, is that I had considered the solution to be Rush. It allowed an ammo supplier/suppressing firer plenty of opportunities to burrow in like one of 500 known species of sucking lice (or Anoplura) and defend.

There's a stack of reasons that Conquest is better, all of them non-frag-points-scoring-related. And as a result of making this tiny change not in how I play, but in what I play, my scores have sky rocketed.

Here's probably a good place to point out that the advice seemed to be aligned to one of two core intents: make me (and anyone reading) a better BF3 player, or provide options for higher scoring to thus improve the stats, rewards and collectibles of the character. The former, undoubtedly, harder than the latter.

The move to Conquest hasn't done much for my skills, but after only a few rounds I went through two promotions: the opportunities for re-supply and for suppression/assisted kill bonuses have been huge. If you're battling with inching up your rank, try making this move.

Become a Conquestador... these guys are doing it wrong.

4) Slow Paced Players Are Always the Ones Who Win

This was coupled with “stay cool...” which has to be pretty good advice not just in Battlefield 3, but in life. If more people stayed cool we probably wouldn't be in the financial mire we're in. Actually, chances are we wouldn't even have games like Battlefield 3, because there would have been no wars to base them on. We could wear jeans to work and jandals on first dates. Hooray for staying cool.

I wanted to address this because the part about pace doesn't actually match the experience I have had out there. Slow pace, in the world of the novice equals certain death. “Don't run around like an idiot,” also formed up part of this suggestion, and I can agree with that; the idiot bit, at least.

But do run. Goodness, do. Run as a matter of self preservation. It's the cowards' advance. You can't out run a bullet, but it might get you to where a bullet, you know, isn't, a bit quicker than walking.

5) You Should Try the Assault Class

This is still up for debate, but there was enough Assault advocacy that it couldn't be ignored. Because I continually feel as if I am trying to balance an ice cube on a knifeblade while aiming in Battlefield 3, I feel that this may not ever be the right fit. In my order of preference, the character classes go: Support, Engineer, Assault, Recon. And Assault only beats Recon because of the number of times I have been humiliatingly unzipped by someone's knife.

I would be very interested to hear if anyone out there has actually moved to the Assault class and cemented it as their go-to as a matter of preference, assuming they started with an “easier” class, like Support.

To me, friends, Assault is too much like showing up at a party before anyone's arrived. Conspicuous.

In war, that's the last thing you want to be.

Turning up several months early for a house warming party can be quite the social faux pas.

Any and all further advice and discussions welcome below!

Sam Prescott is a freelance gaming journalist based in New Zealand. He writes for IGN as a form of catharsis. Why not follow him on IGN and Twitter?

Source : ign[dot]com

What On Earth Is Nintendo Up To?

It would be very difficult to argue that Nintendo had a good E3. It wasn’t exactly disastrous, sure – the Wii U put in a strong showing, and the 3DS seemed in good health despite the lack of games on show – but there was a general feeling that the company had completely misjudged its audience. Hours of time was spent Nintendo Land and the very familiar Super Mario Bros U whilst games like the fascinating P-100 and Game & Wario weren’t even mentioned. After the conference began with a lovely, fan-pleasing Pikmin 3 demo, Miyamoto disappeared backstage – and all the excitement seemed to retreat back there with him.

In the course of four separate press conferences, there was almost nothing from Nintendo itself that was worth getting excited about from a gamer’s point of view. There was no new Zelda, no Metroid, no Smash Bros. It’d be easy to infer from this that Nintendo just didn’t have anything to show. But then, weeks later, the company comes out with three announcements that would have gone down a storm a couple of weeks ago: the 3DS XL, details on the new Smash Bros, and an 8-Bit Summer promotion that will see beloved NES classics highlighted on the 3DS eShop. So why didn’t we see all of that at E3? What’s going on?

Nintendo made a wishy-washy statement on the matter that didn’t really explain anything (“we’re always looking for the most appropriate ways to both inform and surprise consumers”? What does that mean?). Dig into it, though, and you can find reasons for Nintendo’s behaviour that reveal how the games industry has changed, and why shows like E3 are increasingly becoming strange, anticlimactic events for those of us who grew up with gaming.

“ E3 isn’t just for us. It never was. It’s for the shareholders, the financial analysts, the executives that are more interested in where next year’s dollar might be coming from than what people are going to be playing in a few months.

There’s a bizarre disconnect between the focus of the excitement and attention surrounding E3 from the games press, and the focus of the platform holders’ conferences. We’re all getting excited about new games, eager to see what Halo 4 has to offer and guessing what surprises might be in store from favourite developers. Meanwhile, Microsoft comes out with usage statistics for TV watching on the Xbox and spends half an hour on Smartglass, Sony usually brings out the graphs (although not this year, interestingly), and Nintendo shows us trailers for Wii Fit instead of footage for a new Smash Bros. With the exception of Sony, which spent time debuting Beyond and showing off The Last Of Us, actual new games are either not mentioned at all or relegated to thirty-second trailers.

In order to explain this, you have to take into account that E3 isn’t just for us. It never was. It’s for the shareholders, the financial analysts, the executives that are more interested in where next year’s dollar might be coming from than what people are going to be playing in a few months. Nowadays, it’s also for the mainstream press that will be communicating the news to TV and newspaper audiences who don’t know what Pikmin is. To these people, Namco Bandai working on Smash Bros means nothing, whereas a 20-minute demonstration of Nintendo Land is pretty informative and Netflix is an important new revenue stream.

You don’t get this issue with the third-party publishers, incidentally. Ubisoft and EA stick firmly to games, for the most part, because that’s what their business is – they’re not engaged in the battle for the living room that Microsoft and Sony are fighting, and they don’t have to worry about how their stock price might react to a new product launch like Nintendo does. But both still found time to plug their services as well as their games – especially EA, which has willingly embraced social and mobile as part of its core business.

What Nintendo has clearly decided to do is aim big events like its E3 press conferences at the more general observer, be they Financial Times correspondent or someone who wants to know what the Wii U actually is. We saw Super Mario Bros U, a reassuringly recognisable presence, alongside a sequel to the similarly mega-successful Wii Fit and a party game that illustrates how the Wii U controller works and what you can do with it. If you’re a shareholder or financial analyst, you’re reassured by Nintendo’s clear references to previous mega-successes alongside a new product. Meanwhile, the people who are actually in the room for the press conference or watching live – us, basically – are left wondering what on earth is going on.

“ Nintendo hasn’t left behind its fans, but it has decided to open new channels of communication.

What last week’s announcements show is that Nintendo prefers to communicate with us directly, not through someone else’s event, with the Nintendo Direct broadcasts. For the past year, these have been fan service of the highest order, showing trailers, oodles of gameplay footage and really interesting developer roundtables as well as actually making new announcements. The Iwata Asks interviews are another way of talking directly to the most hardcore Nintendo players, delving deep into the games that make us tick.

Nintendo hasn’t left behind its fans, but it has decided to open new channels of communication that enable the company to make announcements on its own strictly controlled terms. This is a case of the company marching defiantly to its own tune, and refusing to have its news agenda dictated by large-scale American events. It’s difficult not to see the announcement of the 3DS XL, the 8-Bit Summer and the Smash Bros details literally weeks after E3 as a bit of a middle finger to anyone expecting big announcements at the show– and, more importantly, to E3 itself.

It’s not the first time Nintendo has done this. Back in the 90s and early 00s, Nintendo had its own Japanese trade show that ran alongside the Tokyo Games Show, Nintendo Space World. The publisher has repeatedly snubbed huge-scale events like Gamescom and TGS, refusing to take those opportunities to make announcements. It has already withdrawn from both of those events. E3 is quite possibly next.

There are obvious advantages to this approach. Nintendo gets to dominate the news rather than fight with all the other platform holders at E3 for attention, building buzz around its own video broadcasts. It can also spend more time talking about the interesting games, because there’s no strict press conference time limit to adhere to. Having Iwata talking directly to gamers lends a sense of intimacy that you can’t deliver at a press conference. And the press is essentially taken out of the picture: Nintendo is talking to journalists at the same time as it’s talking to anybody else who chooses to tune in.

“ We're not whom Nintendo is trying to impress any more.

But the disadvantage is plain to see. If you spent all your airtime at E3 basically ignoring gamers, you’re going to make them pretty angry about it. You might even end up with one of the editors of the biggest gaming site in the world saying that you messed up E3. But that's the thing: I'm not sure that we're the people Nintendo is trying to impress at E3 any more.

If you ever think Nintendo genuinely has nothing up its sleeve, you don’t know Nintendo – but we’re going to have to get used to getting our announcements in a different way. It’s already clear that Nintendo’s E3 presence wasn’t geared towards us. If you’re holding your breath for the next Zelda, Metroid or Fire Emblem rather than the next Just Dance, there’s a strong possibility that E3 is no longer the place to look.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games team in the UK, and only just got over that post-E3 hangover. You can follow her on Twitter and IGN.



Source : ign[dot]com