Impressions: Battlefield 3 footage at GDC

The Game Developers Conferenece (GDC) was held last week at the Mascone Center in San Francisco, CA. During the span of the week, Electronic Arts released a gameplay trailer for Battlefield 3, a continuation of the popular Battlefield series being developed by DICE, a Swedish game development company. The release of this trailer had been teased several weeks before, showing several brief glimpses of gameplay, but the trailer released last Wednesday was the first (mostly) uninterrupted display of how the game looked and played that was seen by the general public; there was also a closed-doors demonstration of the game that was filmed and leaked to the Internet, naturally. This same demonstration was detailed in the March 2011 edition of the magazine Game Informer, with attention given both to the demo and to the technology driving it, such as the updated Frostbite engine (which allows for better visuals and audio, higher destructability of the in-game environment, and the quicker development of character animations, allowing for a much more varied approach to how both the player's character and computer characters behave during gameplay and cutscenes) and the company's use of ANT technology, the same animation technology that powers many of Electronic Arts' sports games, FIFA being one example.

The Good:
-Animations: They looked incredible in both the trailer and the leaked video. Characters stacking up against doorways to clear houses, soldiers sprinting down alleyways, and the player dragging a wounded comrade out of harm's way... it all looks great.
-Graphics: It's still early, and the release is not until this fall, but the graphics are really raising the bar, both for the Battlefield series and for games in general. The dynamic lighting is incredible (if you don't believe me, check out that alleyway and the unlit house), and everything is crisp.
-Gameplay: It looks FUN, which seems to be an afterthought these days when it comes to how your game looks (I'm looking at you, Force Unleashed 2). Clearing houses, gunfights in the streets... oh yes, I'm excited. Granted, I have not played this game at all, nor will I be likely to before its release date, but if it plays anything like Bad Company 2, it's going to be another fun entry in the Battlefield series.
-Audio: You. Hear. Everything. If they had a guy sneezing from down the block, I guarantee you would be able to hear it. The sound, while often underutilized in games, makes or breaks a lot of games, and it's looking sounding excellent.

The Bad/The "Why?"
-Nothing: Sure, all we've seen of this game has been in those three trailers, and they're all roughly the same material, but I loved every second of that trailer. The work DICE put into building a new Frostbite engine definitely shows in the game, and it looks like this could be raising the bar for what we can expect to see in shooter games moving forward. As Robert Bowling, creative strategist at Infinity Ward, has gone on record saying that they will not be updating the engine they have been using for Call of Duty for the last several years, DICE and EA definitely seem to be looking to give Activision, owners of Infinity Ward, a run for their money.