Battlefield 3 is a fucking disgrace and a monument to everything fucked up about gaming in 2011.

So let’s start this by talking about the user experience. You load up Origin, EA’s malvolent store slash game launcher client thing that is not Steam and it has some validation thing that takes way too long. Then you click on Battlefield 3 and it runs another validation thing to make sure you don’t live in the future; once it confirms that you don’t, you can load the game. Except that Battlefield then doesn’t load the game – instead it opts to fire up your web browser and takes you to a website EA calls the Battlelog, some people have called it Facebook For Murderers, others ‘one of the worst ideas in video game history’. Your web browser will be as unprepared as you for Battlelog, forcing you to install two plugins for your web browser to continue. Now so far in this review I’ve talked about what you do when you first play Battlefield 3; I’m going to talk about what I did for a moment: At this point in the process I turned to my one, solitary friend on Origin, who was playing Battlefield 3 at the time, and complained about the validation shit. I said, “all I want to do is shoot cunts!” He laughed and responded with “I hope you like dying.” Now at the time I thought this was just him shit-talking my gaming skills, but in reality it was an ominous warning of what was to come. Battlefield 3 is a game about dying. Continue reading “Battlefield 3” →