With Battlefield 3 having sold more copies at launch than all of the other games in the series combined, there are obviously going to be a lot of new players getting involved in the legendary BF multiplayer for the the first time right about now. This is a good thing. New blood and new people with whom to share the rich tapestry of incendiary wonders that is Battlefield. Positive stuff.
But Battlefield can be confusing at first. Over-awing, in fact. There are many things you need to learn to do, and many thing to need to learn to absolutely not do ever. It isn't like other multiplayer shooters, but its rewards are much greater. So I've compiled here a crash course of tactics, tricks, etiquette and basic good Battlefield manners to make sure that you're both useful and well-liked in the fight. It'll make you better at Battlefield, and it'll make you a better human being overall.
Seriously, don’t do it. I know it’s tempting to sprint from your base deployment directly to that big shiny whirly-bird ahead of you the very first time you play Battlefield 3 online. You want to be the cool one. You want to be the soaring, unseen killer. You want to be the guy raining flame and death from above in your nigh-impervious, vengeful sky-chariot. You want to be the guy who gets the chirpy salutes and earnest, meaningful, slow nods from your team, as you fly away into the sunset knowing that once again it was your safe transportation that got your men where they needed to go, and got them there safe.
But seriously, those things are a f*cker to control at first, and if you don’t get some solo practice in before you set yourself up as the bus driver of the heavens you’ll just plough your entire squad down into a barbeque of twisted metal and disappointment within seconds of lifting off. And that’s going to give the group respawn a really bloody awkward atmosphere.
There’s a reason it has multiple seats. If you hear gunfire coming from behind you as you speed from your base the second after your battle-eager arse hits the driver’s seat, it’s not because the enemy have suddenly appeared. It’s because you’ve accelerated an empty car away from a few prospective wing-men who don't have head-sets, just as they got close enough to see the ‘Enter vehicle’ button prompt. And they’re now really, really pissed off with you. And they’re right to be. You’re a twat.
Oh yeah, treat a jeep as a special personal transportation meant just for you if you want to. But good luck when an unexpected hail of gunfire leads to a flaming radiator and you realise that you left your vehicle-fixing Engineer jogging along in your dust three quarters of a mile back.
Don’t. Just don’t. If you’re not carrying anything in the way of C4 or rockets, treat the incoming rumble of caterpillar tracks as you would the sound of a volcano beginning to erupt underneath your feet. A tank cannot be bargained with. It cannot be reasoned with. It absolutely will not stop, ever, until it has mulched you into fertiliser and posted you back to your mum with a note saying “HA HA!” in really big lettering so that she has a cry. And it won’t even care.
Seriously, pick your battles. There’s enough going on at any point in a Battlefield game that you can always fall back, regroup, and find a new purpose elsewhere. Or else team up with an Engineer, come back properly equipped (having spotted the tank to track him), and blast that f*cker to Pluto before mopping up his stinking, cowardly crew as they bail out. They were going to make your mum cry. They deserve it.
Don't assume that you have to be right on top of a flag in a game of Conquest in order to capture it. The viable area can actually be pretty big. Once you see the countdown ticker start, move around a bit to get a feel for where the boundaries lie. You'll find that you have more space, and therefore more cover options and more ability to set up a defensive perimeter than you might expect.
Seriously. Your Assault guy can help you. Pay attention to him. If you knew the number of times I’ve chased down a troubled friendly squad in order to help them out, risking life and limb by sprinting through an unholy horizontal rain of lead in order to reach the building in which they’re hunkered down, only to have them ignore my medkits and immediately sprint out into yet another hail of gunfire and become immediately 100% less living… Well, you’d know a big number and it would make you feel sorry for me.
Pay attention to which classes are around you and act accordingly. They might be trying to help you. In fact if they’re even a half-decent Battlefield player, they definitely are.
If you’re in a tank, you should know that it’s not just the blunt force implement it at first appears. Yes, it’s tempting to just wade up to an objective and start pummelling away until everyone, including yourself, is dead, but there’s not a great deal of point in that, especially if you’re on the attacking team in a Rush game. Remain stationary in a contested spot, and the opposing team will just roll in a tank of their own and initiate a pointless, attritional Mexican stand-off, in which both tanks have a 50% chance of losing, and in which neither battle-beast really does any overall good due to being forcibly tied up with fighting its opposite number.
No, as a tank driver, you want to be a rolling threat, there to intimidate clusters of the enemy away in order to pave the way for your ground troops. You want to scatter the opposition to allow your troops to more easily cement their presence at an objective, before you move on to herd around the wider fight as you see fit. See yourself as a big violent sheep dog. With massive guns. Do it that way, keep an Engineer on your crew for repairs, and you can have a long-term, persistent effect on the battle while seriously saving on the respawns. If you park up and just start firing, you’re simply turning yourself into a big flaming roadblock with a very limited lifespan.
There’s a reason that all of those guard towers and top-floor port-a-cabins last approximately six seconds in a game of Battlefield. Rather than being a frowned-upon, niche tactic as it is in other shooters, camping is a legitimate move here, as it is in the real world. People are used to snipers. People are used to the obvious sniper hidey-spots. And with the presence of the spotting system – whereby any player can flag up a distant enemy for the attention of their team – locating and destroying those hidey-spots is incredibly easy.
As soon as the alert to a sniper in the area goes out, any decent player will immediately turn their attention – and explosives – to the high windows. Don’t forget that cover can and will be blow apart around you, so if you telegraph your location by using a stand-out spot, you’re screwed. Try using the natural undulations of the terrain to gain an elevated advantage instead. It’s far more subtle, and far harder to identify with a kill-cam.
Battlefield’s weaponry is not a one-size-fits-all situation. Some shooters might let you mix and match for the sheer sake of variety, but in Battlefield, know this: Shotguns are for close-range, rifles are for medium-to-long, sniper rifles are for killing people a really long way away. And rocket launchers are for killing tanks, not men. And if you don’t have lock-on, don’t use them from too far away. Otherwise you’ll be disappointed and look a bit silly.
One place where you can – and should – mix it up though, is in your use of classes. Yes, you might get really attached to Charlie Medpack or little Bobby Rocketlauncher, but like I said, different equipment for different jobs. A Battlefield game is a long, drawn-out, ever-changing ecosystem of tactical murderising, and to pin yourself down to one class is a very silly action indeed.
You might be desperate to level-grind your Assault guy up and get that diamond-plated, triple-barreled sniping dagger you have your heart set on, but if a chopper suddenly appears over the horizon and starts shredding your front line, no amout of your sticking plasters and Calpol are going to help. Swap out, come back with something that can kill a chopper, then swap back if you want to. Every class has a part to play, and if you want to maximise your usefulness to your team – as well as your enjoyment of every kind of fun Battlefield holds – you’ll want to learn to use all of them.
It’s that simple. If you can see that your squad is getting torn apart, pick a different spawn point. Know when you can help them, know when you’re just wasting a spawn. Pick somewhere safe, and they can spawn on you.
Hmmm, I’ve said ‘spawn’ too many times and the word has now lost all meaning. It sounds weird. I'm going to move on to the last and most important point before it starts bending my brain.
Forget your position on the scoreboard. Forget your K/D ratio. Forget measuring the success of your game based upon how few seconds you go between kills. None of that shit matters in Battlefield. Enjoying Battlefield, I mean really enjoying Battlefield will require you to throw ego aside and see the experience for the bigger picture it really is. Like I said in my review, Battlefield isn’t really about who wins or loses. The class-specific assist skills mean that you’ll level up regardless, as long as you really get involved. No, it’s really about a bunch of people coming together to dynamically choreograph the biggest, most ostentatiously epic war movie imaginable.
Treat it as such and play your part. The most seemingly innocuous actions can be the tide turners that change the whole shape of the battle. You might think you’re not making a difference, camped out half a mile from the action, spotting enemy positions and sniping the occasional guy out, but snipe the right guy at the right time, hell, just draw the right guy to your distant buddy’s attention, and you can change everything. Play selfishly, play wrecklessly, play simply to see how high you can get your name on the scoreboard, and you’re helping absolutely no-one. Least of all yourself, because you’ll be missing out on 90% of the fun of Battlefield.
Remember guys, the new Back to Karkand multiplayer DLC is coming soon next month. Play to get the best out of Battlefield 3, and you too could be be having this awesome a time by Christmas:
Brink: Failure or Death
Angry Birds, Tiny Wings, and the Wide World of Mobile Development
Complete steps on How to remove Dead Rising 3 HUD to get Sharp & Clear Screenshots for PC
Driver: San Francisco Walkthrough
How Much Is Your Free Time Worth? This Quiz Tells You