Aug 082011
 
Battlefield 3

The BF3 hype machine is in full effect now.  A little over two months out, DICE is claiming that BF3 is the “deepest” shooter they’ve ever developed, and promise unlocks that could take years to achieve.    Now before you start to rant that you don’t want to have to invest insane amounts of time just to unlock competitive weapons, gadgets and attachments in the game, keep in mind that DICE isn’t simply referring to in-game hardware unlocks.  They’re also talking about elusive service medals and pins too.

Battlefield players are among the most loyal out there. Our games are literally played for years by our hardcore fans, and we want to actively support that. There should always be something left to achieve in Battlefield 3.

However, they also address hardware unlocks too.  That was one thing many felt was lacking in BC2 — you could unlock every weapon and gadget fairly quickly, diminishing any sense of game accomplishment thereafter.  They’ve got that covered too:

Compared to Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3 will have more than 10 times the hardware unlocks spread over weapons, weapons attachments, gadgets, and a huge unlock tree for vehicles alone.

So it sounds like you will have your fill of in-game items, awards and cheevos if that’s your thing.  If that isn’t your thing…well, you’re pretty much going to hate most games that come out now anyway.

You can read the full blog post over on the official Battlefield Blog.

Aug 082011
 

Tripwire announced today that Red Orchestra 2 will be pushed back until September 13th, 2 weeks later than their previous release date of August 30th.  While two weeks isn’t a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, I can’t help but thinking this only hurts RO2’s potential uptake by multiplayer shooter fans.

Moving RO2’s release date into September means that it will directly come into competition with BF3’s open beta, which will be immensely popular.  After that, you have BF3’s official release in October, and right behind that is the next installment of CoD.  You could argue that people who play RO will have no interest in BF or CoD, but it’s hard to deny there is a lot of crossover there, and people who may have been willing to try a new experience in RO2 during a time when no other titles were competing will instead stick with the name-brands they know during the pre-holiday video game rush.

On the bright side, a large reason why Tripwire is moving the release date back is due to the overwhelming number of pre-orders, which also gives access to a beta of the game, pre-release.  They weren’t quite ready for the volume of beta users, so they need to readjust their preparations for that.  I hope that it works out for RO2 and Tripwire, but it appears that launching in prime release time might not be their best strategy for gaining a critical mass of online players.  Maybe I’ll be wrong.

Read Tripwire’s explanation for the delay, here.