**OFFICIAL** AT Battlefield 3 FAQ and News Thread

[destrekor]

I still haven't played Gun Master mode, but that sounds pretty fun. I used to love gungames on CSS and I love that they included a C4 kill in the heavy mode lol.

Also finally found a hardcore no mini-map server with people on it <3

Ive found a couple of those

My buddies and I have basically been focusing only on Hardcore servers.
I'm not sure how many, and which ones, have no mini-map, and which ones do (if any of them do).

A few of them are almost constantly full, often with queues, while a few others fluctuate between nearly empty, half-full, and queued.

A few servers with multi-gamemode CQ only, with 32players, hardcore, offers some of the best arena-style FPS gaming I've experienced.
Hardcore across all maps can be a little frustrating, but is usually good fun.

Planetside 2 is stealing attention from BF3 as of late, but I like to think I'll be able to manage both games. Definitely excited for Aftermath to drop tomorrow. Crossbows!
I'm expecting to like the maps a lot more than AK. It's not that I need CQ maps; on the contrary, I actually prefer the standard full Battlefield experience, as I love rocking out with the MBTs. Especially knocking lazy helicopter pilots (or those without situational awareness) out of the sky. Too much fun.
It can be a fun challenge keeping a tank both alive and actually contributing to the fight on the urban warfare maps or in the urban-style environment in a more varied map.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Anyone played Aftermath yet? It unlocked for me last night.

 

[destrekor]

Anyone played Aftermath yet? It unlocked for me last night.

It "unlocked" for me like a 4 days ago (oddly enough, I was the first of my friends for it to show up on my home page as "unlocked"), but nothing downloaded as of yet.

I absolutely hate this patches though. They fix and patch up a few things, and I have to download over 3GB in content?! Seriously? holy shit lol


I doubt it, but it could be possible that includes all of the Aftermath content and now I just wait for the official "live" date and time. But I strongly suspect I will be downloading additional content at that point in time.
They are terrible with patches - they just cannot create streamlined patches, so much code has to change. I imagine it's due to a shitty packaging system. "Oh, we changed one thing in this package. Since something changed, you have to download the entire pack file again. So sorry, that pack file is also 1.5gb. We also touched three 500mb pack files as well. There is one new pack file included in the update which has 800mb in new content. That concludes the brief for your 3.5GB+ download."

I don't know the actual specifics, but I imagine it's something like that.


The release date (for PC Premium) is stated as "December 4th."

What time do you think it will actually go live. It won't be when the clock strikes December 4th. Oh, I would love that to be true, but EA is so badly managed I can nearly guarantee it won't go live until like 8am EST, if we're lucky. I don't expect an opportunity to even start downloading the content in the next hour and a half (it is almost 10:30/2230 EST).
I wish they would offer the ability to pre-load content. When the game goes live, I want to be able to actually play said game. Instead, that's the moment I get to begin download a few gigabytes of data, when who knows how many people are also just starting that same download and stressing their server uplinks.

 

[maevinj]

Actually, you probably did download Aftermath in the patch. I think that's the way they did it last time.

 

[darkewaffle]

Yea, my friend and I both got a 4GB download last night. It's definitely the aftermath content.

 

[DeadFred]

Yea, my friend and I both got a 4GB download last night. It's definitely the aftermath content.

Same but still unavailable to play as of 9:00 am EST.

 

[destrekor]

Yea, my friend and I both got a 4GB download last night. It's definitely the aftermath content.

I'm not so sure about that. Looking at the BF3 installation directory, I am seeing no hints at any part of the download containing xp4 (expansion pack 4) content (xp3, for reference, is Armored Kill).

 

[sigurros81]

How they have been doing it is that the patch you download the 2 or 3 days prior contains the map pack.

 

[hondaf17]

Anyone played Aftermath yet? Initial feedback?

On a side note, anyone else annoyed at how much they change the guns? It would be nice to have some consistency. Once you get used to how a gun handles they change it. I find that very annoying.

 

[darkewaffle]

I'm not so sure about that. Looking at the BF3 installation directory, I am seeing no hints at any part of the download containing xp4 (expansion pack 4) content (xp3, for reference, is Armored Kill).

The odds of a minor patch inexplicably being a 4GB instead of a 40MB download at the same time as the release of a new DLC (which they would likely pre-load content for) are not good.

I'm guessing pre-loaded content is protected/hidden somehow. Steam is the same way, when you pre-load a game the data is encrypted IIRC until release hour hits and then unlocked.

 

[destrekor]

The odds of a minor patch inexplicably being a 4GB instead of a 40MB download at the same time as the release of a new DLC (which they would likely pre-load content for) are not good.

I'm guessing pre-loaded content is protected/hidden somehow. Steam is the same way, when you pre-load a game the data is encrypted IIRC until release hour hits and then unlocked.

Yeah I do expect that to be the case; I never really checked out the install directory to see if those previous large downloads before expansion packs contained the data with filenames easily pointing toward DLC contained within or not.

 

[mizzou]

I'm diggin it

 

[Phanuel]

I has a sad I can't be a wookie throwing balls and shooting people with a crossbow in this game.

 

[DeadFred]

It seems the first 3.8GB download was just an update because now Im downloading another 3.9GBs of something.

BAH! Got work to do now so I wont get time to play until later tonight.

 

[destrekor]

It seems the first 3.8GB download was just an update because now Im downloading another 3.9GBs of something.

BAH! Got work to do now so I wont get time to play until later tonight.

Yep I just restarted Origin to see if I could finally force an update. Yep.

A hair under 3.9GB.

I figured this would happen: the previous download was for "Battlefield 3: Limited Edition" which tipped off that it was base game content updated (though it also updated some data in each xpack directory).
This download is titled "Battlefield 3: Aftermath."


I knew it would happen. Knew it.

Which speaks to the ridiculousness of their coding and update methods. That game "patch" was nearly 4GB. They probably changed about 500MB worth of code and files, and due to terrible file packaging methods, whole packages are downloaded instead of code getting slipstreamed into pre-existing packages.

 

[HendrixFan]

I'm liking the new maps. Someone in the servers was saying the hitboxes have changed. Dunno if that is true, but my soldier level K to D is much better than usual. Seems like I'm more accurate. Usually I have to tank it up to get a nice strong K to D.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Restarting Origin got aftermath to finally show up for me. Say what you want about Origin, the download speeds are amazing. 3.5mb/s is amazing when the fastest I've seen on steam was 2.0mb/s.

 

[orbster556]

Restarting Origin got aftermath to finally show up for me. Say what you want about Origin, the download speeds are amazing. 3.5mb/s is amazing when the fastest I've seen on steam was 2.0mb/s.

That's because no one actually uses Origin for anything outside of BF3 ;p

I have had similar experiences though and it is the one nice thing about Origin.

Regards,

 

[raasco]

Download speeds for me have also been very good. I played a little Markaz, seemed pretty fun. I also happened to receive my 7950 Twin Frozr today Woohoo! It's looking great!

 

[destrekor]

I have no favorite map as of yet.

F Rush though. But never enjoyed it is the first place.

These maps do seem to play out quite well in Conquest, I definitely have to say they are great Conquest maps.

Points are fairly close, would have been nice to see them spread out just a little bit more. But I actually enjoy these maps more than Armored Kill.

I need to play more AK though, I feel like I am just missing something about those maps. They should be fun, maybe I'm just doin' it wrong. :\

Regardless, these maps have now added more BF3 to the concept of BF3 - CQ is almost like a separate game that happens to give you experience and share nearly everything with the rest of the game. AK is almost like it's own game too, but again something might be off there.

So now you have BF3, Back to Karkand, and Aftermath.
Aftermath actually feels a lot like B2K.

 

[destrekor]

Download speeds for me have also been very good. I played a little Markaz, seemed pretty fun. I also happened to receive my 7950 Twin Frozr today Woohoo! It's looking great!

Yep. Origin has always maxed out my connection. Granted, that's just shy of 2MB/s (per ISP: 15mbps), but Origin almost always provides me somewhere between 1.7-2.0MB/s.

 

[sigurros81]

I'm liking the new maps. Someone in the servers was saying the hitboxes have changed. Dunno if that is true, but my soldier level K to D is much better than usual. Seems like I'm more accurate. Usually I have to tank it up to get a nice strong K to D.

I am feeling the same man. I don't think they've changed the hitbox, I think overall the way the game handles latency in the new map is much better, but yeah, I am getting much more accurate kills from what I've notice so far.

Overall, really fun maps. After playing a couple of cycles, the 4 new maps all sort of blend together, I really wish they would give the maps varying time of day at least so we can tell them apart better. But overall, really fun maps--they're all like a bunch of larger versions of Grand Bazaar but more interesting.

One more thing, performance wise, the maps run much better than B2K. My framerates are constantly 60+

 

[VulgarDisplay]

These maps are the best Rush maps in the game by far. Conquest is kind of a mixed bag, but on Rush they are the best in the game.

 

[Zargon]

Yep. Origin has always maxed out my connection. Granted, that's just shy of 2MB/s (per ISP: 15mbps), but Origin almost always provides me somewhere between 1.7-2.0MB/s.

I get around 1.2-1.4 from steam, and saw 3 from origin on this download

 

[darkewaffle]

Scavenger I'm still on the fence about, I kind of like it but at the same time I think it might have been cooler if weapons were more difficult to find (both in number and appearance [they're marked by icons]).

Played Conquest last night on... hell I don't know the map names lol. It's the one with the big palatial building that has a cap point on one of the upper levels labeled "Senate". Was an 1100 ticket round or something that took about an hour and a half but it was a blast. For feeling like a pretty big map I never felt like I was too far away from the next point/the action. Cover is a little lacking on some of the points but a lot of them seem to have multiple 'levels' to them as well which is an interesting change.

One thing I noticed was that while playing both scavenger and conquest on hardcore last night is that everyone started with only 60% health. Is that some sort of aftermath specific change or is that something universal representing the hardcore health "nerf" compared to normal?