I finished the single player campaign over the weekend. It is indead pretty a pretty weak COD copy. Even the plot seems similar to Black Ops. The tank mission kinda feels a little more wide open but that’s only because youre out in an open field, where you go next or who you fight is never in question. And in my opinion some of the scripted events were pretty pitifully executed. There is one part in a mall where you are supposed to hold off a few waves of enemies. Your squadmate, as far as I could tell, just crouches in the middle of the room and doesn’t fire or take cover the whole time. But of course nobody shoots him because he isn’t the bullet magnet the player is, and if he were hit it wouldn’t matter because he’s scripted to survive.
The single player should of been:
Here’s a large map, here’s your objective, here’s some intel on enemy patrols and enemy weapons/armor, have fun!
They could of then mixed it up by having different objectives (hostages, destroy this or that, secure intel) and different requirements and capabilities on your side (you get a few tanks that follow you, you need to stay in stealth as long as possible, etc).
The thing with open scenarios like that is that they rely on really good AI to make things fun/interesting. And good AI is hard to do. Corridor, linear shooters with AI that pops up from hiding every once ina while - much easier to do.
Haven’t touched a chopper or plane yet.
I heard some bad things about issues people were having, and they always seem to be so rare and people want them.
I have a joystick. It’s a decent one, though it’s made to look like an old-school stick.
So, I should be able to plug it in, and play?
No tricky set up or anything?
I wish I could get into one of those servers that people were setting up just to play around.
If I play with it in single player, will the settings and controls be the same in multi-player?
I guess I just don’t want to take it from a capable pilot and get heckled.
Use our secondary server (search for SDMB and it’s labeled MORE BEER!!) to play with the planes/choppers. It’s setup just for that.
You’ll have to go and pretty much change every setting to use your joystick’s buttons/axes for both choppers and planes.
But also make sure you clear out (by clicking and then holding down escape) any joystick settings for tanks and infantry.
I made the mistake of leaving those on and that had me moving backwards, unable to fire, etc one night.
Oh and the server will kick you off in a few minutes of inactivity. so make sure you save your settings and move around a bit, before going back to them every couple of minutes or you’ll get booted (and the settings will be lost).
So, the stick setting are different for choppers and planes?
That seems like a pain, you have to reset them each time?
Jets and helicopters have different bindings, yes. You just have to set it up once and you’re good. It’s pretty simple - you just click what you want to set - like roll axis, and then move your stick along the roll axis (left/right). Or select use countermeasures, then push which button on the joystick you want to launch flares, etc. Once it’s set you’re good indefinitely.
Ahh, so the game recognizes that you are in a different vehicle.
I took it as you had to go reset each time you entered one.
I’ll take a look at it tonight. Thanks for the help.
Beef, and chopper tips for a newbie?
That was scary and funny at the same time. Watch those towers. And trees. And buildings. And the ground.
I always knew if you jumped out of a falling elevator at the last second you’d be ok. 
You’ll want to be someone’s gunner at first. You have to unlock most of the stuff you need in a chopper - the first unlock are countermeasure flares against heatseeking missiles, and you’ll die fast as a pilot without them. Easier to rack up some points and see what it’s like to fly around when you’re someone’s gunner.
Otherwise helicopter controls are pretty straightforward. The game won’t hold your hand and do stuff like autohover for you, but it has none of the subtle difficulties of real helicopter flying - it’s pretty clean and neutral.
You’re best off using a joystick. You can use a gamepad, but then you’ll have to bind roll and yaw to different sticks, and that’s a little awkward. That’s actually what I’m doing right now, so it’s workable.
If you fly high, everyone with a missile will be targetting you. If you fly too low, stuff like tanks and RPGs will take shots at you. When you start getting better, you can start darting between buildings and trees to try to break up people locking onto you with missiles.
The rockets that the attack helicopters launch aren’t very potent and you have to hit with a lot of them to score a kill.
When you’re in an attack helicopter and you have a gunner, there’s a rectangle at the bottom with a square in it. This represents where you’re gunner is looking within the area he can see - so if you hear your gunner shooting something, note where the box is, and see if you can also see the target, or at least give him a clear shot.
If you’re flying a transport chopper but you have gunners, try to provide a stable gunning platform for them but not staying too stationary or a tank/rpg will pick you off. Keep in mind that gunners can’t face their MGs straight forward, so you always want to keep targets at least slightly off to your side.
Otherwise, just practice - the game doesn’t have a built in single player practice mode which is stupid, but you can use the alternate SDMB server. Talk to me on steam sometime (or origin, but their chat interface is annoying) and I can take you around in the alt server.
In many games I just start a listen server with a password so I can practice/explore by myself, is that easy to do in Battlefield3?
I don’t think so - they’re using the same “partner” game hosting site system they used in BC2 to keep the server executables under their control. I don’t know of any method to create a listen server.
Thanks for the tips, I will have to check it out when I have time to mess with it.
That is some funny stuff.
Just a heads up, this is the cable that you need to make a wireless xbox controller into a wired one (it just snaps into the front).
No, that just allows it to be charged, the controller still communicates wirelessly with the console, so you’ll still need the wireless receiver for PC.
I was trying to see how well BF3 was selling on PC but I couldn’t find any data. Only the usual console news sites that reported the retail sales numbers and then went LOL PC LEAD PLATFORM YET IT ONLY SOLD A FEW HUNDRED THOUSAND COPIES totally still not understanding that no one buys PC games retail anymore.
Anyone know how it’s doing?
We either have to wait for EA to release numbers or…
Actually that’s all we can do.
The only numbers being floated around are the totally made up ones from VG Charts, where sales numbers go to die.
They don’t track any actual numbers, instead they poll some people coming out of gamestops and extrapolate. You can guess how well that captures PC numbers.
Recently Gabe Newell said Portal 2 sold better on PC than consoles, yet VG Charts has it selling 1/10th of the xbox 360 numbers alone .
And When Cd Project said they sold over 1 million copies of Witcher 2, VG Chatrz had the PC at 80,000 units.
The only bit of news we have is a statement from EA saying how “suprised” they were about the strength of the PC numbers, saying they were hitting goal posts much quicker than expected.
But who knows what that means in terms of numbers.
Going purely by the number of people that seem to connect online, the PC sold better than the PS3, but less than the xbox 360.
Looking at the graphics on Beefs videos plus the larger number of availible players on each map makes this a no brainer PC game for those with the option. I had a large number of friends getting this for xbox and didnt want to shell out the money to make my system run it so i went with the xbox version. Kinda regretting it now as most of my friends list bought the latest COD 60 dollar expansion pack leaving me hanging.
Youtube videos can’t do the graphics justice. The bitrate is just too low - everything looks mushy. The frame rate is also capped at 60. It’s so much more crisp, clear, beautiful, and smooth in action. Really, it’s a huge difference - later tonight I might upload a small clip with much less compression if you want to see how it really looks.
That’s too bad that you can’t play with us though on PC - we’ve been playing every night together and having a blast.