PC Gamer ‘puts off' Battlefield 3 on Review?

I am going to kick this off with this preliminary statement. 8/10 is by no means a score to scoff at. Especially given the usual freak-out that fan boys have whenever a game that they subscribe their life to receive anything below 9 (sometimes even 10), I DO want to emphasize that point. 8/10 is NOT a bad score by any means. That said this is certainly not a winner for DICE/EA.

“I’m going to play it to bits – eventually. Right now, it’s broken, and I’m going to wait. Buy it when it has been patched.”

That’s the kind of statement you usually see in games that receive a 6 or a 7. Battlefield 3, being the next big (and gorgeous) Battlefield game however, does get away with an 8. PC Gamer is one of the few remaining high-profile gaming publications that don’t treat PC gaming coverage as an afterthought, and does a fair job of representing the barometer of what the PC audience expects. And their surprisingly condemning review, despite the decent final score of 8/10, is not something EA will be putting down as a Victory in their checklist for its self-proclaimed PR war against Activision’s COD franchise (see here for the ‘Above & beyond the CALL’ trailer that sums it up). Read on after the jump.

Now the first thing that comes to my mind having said that is the general score that the Call of Duty series have lately been privy to. COD’s average critical receptions have been no less condemning due to the series’ lack of innovation through its annual releases and its ever aging engine (now going on 6 years without a major update since COD2). However, despite the critical receptions that have been on a constant and annual decline, the CoD franchise has also been fortifying its place as the top seller and the benchmark of the FPS genre. Ever increasingly ridiculous single-player campaigns and the aging graphics are completely irrelevant to its growing army of fans. Because the game WORKS. And now, much like the Madden franchise, COD is a franchise that the majority of its fans pretty much take as granted purchase on a yearly basis.

On the other hand, Bad Company 2 / 1943 games aside, Battlefield 3 is relatively a new player to the much larger market with the consoles, virtually non-existant players during the days of Battlefield 2/2142, dictating the rules of the game. With the release of COD’s next Modern Warfare 3 just less than a month away and as the non 'day 1' reviews start trickling out, the flood of lash-backs citing stability from both its fans and now critics are starting to point to something that’s becoming a little more than a ‘shaky launch’.

I've only recently been able to start getting a proper taste of the Battlefield 3’s multiplayer myself, thanks to only recently having fixed all my issues that prohibited me from ever starting a proper multiplayer game (turning off uPnP and my Anti-Virus did the trick for me). When you CAN play it, Battlefield 3 is a fantastic game with very few flaws. It’s just so sad to see one of few games that still remembers and sticks to its roots in PC gaming stutter so hard in its launch with its main competitor (that remembers anything BUT its roots in PC gaming) lurking with anticipation just less than a month away.