BattleField 3 (and Call of Duty 4 .. and Crysis 2)

Ha. Can you tell I just finished exams?
BattleField 3 was one I picked up during one of the Humble Bundles. I’m surprised my laptop can manage to play the game; even on Low-quality graphics settings (which is below what the game auto-analysed my computer for,  bah) it still looks fantastic..

Also, in terms of Single Player, (since BF3 multiplayer became irrelavent when BF4 came out? one would hope..), it’s also quite short. And a bit silly.
I’ve heard BF4 has a better campaign than BF3.

Call of Duty 4 I picked up a while ago. (Not at any great discount; but I’d heard CoD4 is “the good one”).
Also a short game.

– And from games I’ve played recently, it’d be worth comparing Crysis 2 to these ones. (..and not Far Cry 3; that’s rather a different game).
See, while the bulk of my more recent analysis dumps here on the blog have been about open-world designs, these three are shooters. Rather pure shooters, at that. (Although Crysis does dabble a slight bit in terms of RPG-elements; but only slightly).

And. Just because I am that damn pedantic.
Shooters are where you have a gun, and you kill bad guys.
The cool kids say that “modern” shooters aren’t quite as great as the shooters of the late 90’s..

But in terms of gameplay, with these modern-shooters..
If strategy games are fun because you build up a currency.. and open-world games are fun due to a conquest.. these pure-shooter games seem to have a much more ‘raw’ sense of fun in attacking-through hordes of enemies. ( And maybe also the cool-factor of machine-guns and explosions. :-) ).

Anyway. Timeline:
Call of Duty 4 came out in 2007.
Crysis 2 in March 2011, Battlefield 3 in October 2011.
(And the order I played them in? Crysis, CoD, BF3..).

Crysis 2 was the most modern shooter I’d played, when I played it.
It had that thing where you could stealth-stab enemies, with an animation and everything.
I thought that was very “modern shooter” as-in CoD-style; but, in retrospect, Crysis 2 is much more its own game.
It’s silly, and cliche, and the stealth-suit is apparently over-powered.. but it’s really not copy-cat from CoD4.

CoD4?
Hmm.
BattleField 3 copies so much of CoD4’s formula, one might as well consider them as the same game-mechanics. (Their stories differ, and in BF3 you get to [kindof] fly a jet, and drive a tank).
It’s … it’s all very linear.

Far Cry and Crysis 1 branded themselves as open-island type places. – The islands are certainly open enough that there’s variety of experience in choosing different routes for the mission.
Crysis 2, in contrast, is “open” only within each segment of a level. “Open” in that you have a variety of different ways to tackle the obstacles.
(Oh, and the RPG-elements? Crysis kindof-sortof has the upgrades for you to get when you kill the enemies; but I don’t recall it featured too prominently?).

The “linear” epithet CoD4/BF3, as far as I can tell, is just that the Campaign of these games only involves the player following a set path, then more/less directly shooting at the enemies before progressing further.
– What these games offer as an alternative is a strongly-narrated story. The narrator holds your hand, tells you who to kill (or not kill), and along with cutscenes, you end up with a pretty neat interactive work of fiction.

A comparison between linear and non-linear interactive narrations may be interesting.. but that’s rather a different topic, I suppose.