Battlefield 3: The Multiplayer Masterpiece That Carried a Generation

Battlefield 3 arrived in October 2011 as the twelfth game in the Battlefield series and a direct sequel to Battlefield 2, six years after that game shipped. EA Digital Illusions CE developed it. Electronic Arts published it. It came to PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. That gap mattered, and the studio filled it with a game that understood what the series had been missing.

Trailer, via Electronic Arts Archive.

Fighter Jets, Prone, and 64-Player Battles

Battlefield 3 brings back the pieces the Bad Company games had stripped out: fighter jets, the prone position, and 64-player battles on PC. That last figure is the one that counts. The PC version is the full combined-arms game, and the console versions are not. On Xbox 360 and PS3, the player count drops and the ground area shrinks to match, though the fly space stays the same size. It is a real cut, not a cosmetic one, and it shapes how the maps play.

The maps themselves cover a wide spread: Paris, Tehran and other locations in Iran, Sulaymaniyah in Iraq, New York City, Wake Island, Oman, Kuwait City and other parts of the Persian Gulf. They run from urban streets and metropolitan downtowns to open ground built for vehicles. This is the series at its most varied, and the vehicle combat is the reason.

Battlelog, and the Mode That Never Found Its Footing

Battlefield 3 also introduces Battlelog, a free cross-platform social service with built-in text messaging, voice communications and game statistics. It lets players join games their friends are already in, with one catch: both players have to be on the same platform. It is a clean idea with a hard edge.

The game spans single player, co-operative and multiplayer. The multiplayer is the strongest of the three. The co-operative mode is the weakest. The campaign sits somewhere between, and it is where the game’s ambitions get in its own way.

Blackburn, Mayakovsky, and a Campaign That Splits Its Attention

The campaign follows two characters: Henry Blackburn, a U.S. Marine, and Dimitri Mayakovsky, a Spetsnaz GRU operative. It opens in March 2014, with Blackburn, a sergeant in the 1st Recon Marines, deployed to Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan alongside his squad under the callsign Misfit 1-3.

The squad includes Private First Class Jack Chaffin, Lance Corporals David Montes and Christian Matkovic, Staff Sergeant Steve Campo and Captain Quinton Cole. They are sent to defuse an IED. Chaffin is wounded in an ambush by the People’s Liberation and Resistance, an Iranian paramilitary group, moments before an earthquake levels the city. The squad escapes.

The next day, the PLR stages a coup in Iran. The United States invades. In October, after a U.S. Navy airstrike on Mehrabad Airport, Misfit is sent into Tehran to assess battle damage and capture the PLR’s leader, Faruk Al-Bashir. In an underground bank vault, the squad learns the PLR has Russian suitcase nukes, and that two of the three devices are missing.

Overrun, Misfit calls for backup from an M1 Abrams column, callsign Anvil 3 of the 1st Tank Battalion, including Sergeant Jonathan Miller. Miller gets Misfit’s helicopter out. His tank is disabled and overrun while the crew waits for a Quick Reaction Force. Miller is knocked out, taken prisoner, and executed by Al-Bashir and a man named Solomon, with the killing filmed and posted online.

In November, Misfit captures Al-Bashir, who is fatally wounded when his escape vehicle crashes. He dies mid-revelation.

The cast is stacked: Gideon Emery as Blackburn, Tony Denman as Chaffin, Ronan Summers as Montes, William Meredith as Matkovic, Eric Loren as Campo, David Harewood as Cole, Ray Haratian as Al-Bashir, Mark Ivanir as Solomon. The performances are not the problem. The problem is that the campaign keeps handing the player off between set pieces and never lets a single one breathe.

What Battlefield 3 Gets Right

Here is the ranking that matters, from strongest to weakest:

1. Multiplayer, especially the 64-player PC battles with jets and vehicles in play.
2. The map spread, which moves from Paris streets to Persian Gulf open ground without repeating itself.
3. Battlelog, a genuinely useful service held back by the same-platform restriction.
4. The campaign, which has the cast and the globe-trotting structure but not the pacing.
5. Co-operative mode, the least developed of the three.

The graphics hold up. EA Digital Illusions CE built the game on an upgraded version of the Frostbite engine, and the destruction that engine enables is still the series’ signature. Walls come apart. Cover stops being cover. The battlefield feels alive in a way few shooters of that era managed.

Development began in 2009, after Battlefield 1943. An open beta ran forty-eight hours before it opened to players who had pre-ordered the Medal of Honor Limited Edition. The anticipation was heavy, and the game mostly carried it.

Where the Attention Actually Went

Battlefield 3 sold 5 million copies in its first week, one of the biggest launches of 2011. That number was earned by the multiplayer, not the campaign. The single-player is a tour of locations the multiplayer already does better, and the co-op mode never justified its place. Battlefield 4 followed in 2013.

Eight and a half out of ten is the right score. The multiplayer is the reason to play Battlefield 3 in 2011 and the reason it still gets talked about. The campaign is the part you finish once and forget. That split is not a flaw in the package so much as a statement about where the studio’s attention actually went, and the game is better for it.

2011 Video Games · Battlefield 3 · DICE · Electronic Arts · first-person shooter · Frostbite Engine