Check img below from MOH site:

Could this mean the end of the PC franchise? I mean we all know how well “PC to console” ports go, right? WRONG !!!!!!!!!!! They most definitely cripple the end experience for PC gamers. We all know that the economy is tough and companies are looking to save money. But in all honesty this might just be the biggest mistake in PC gaming history. We all remember what a shocker it was to play Battlefield 1942, and how innovative and creative Battlefield 2 turned out to be. For gods sake when Battlefield 2 came out there were maybe 10 desktops in the world that could run that game on high settings with all the features and effects they introduced.

Should we lie to our-self thinking that they will keep the console version different from PC version? How many game developers are doing this in these tough times? Simple answer, none.

Possible differences between PC vs Console versions will undoubtedly be:

1. Number of players per map.
2. Thats pretty much it.

This makes you wonder now if Gordon Van Dyke really left the company to “be closer with his family”, or because he knew that his beloved franchise was going to become a port. I still hold a glimpse of hope that Battlefield 3 PC version will truly be a worthy predecessor to BF2. For some reason I still believe DICE’s SEO when he said “Battlefield 3 will blow everyone away”. As a hardcore Battlefield gamer I can see many gamers who loved the BF2 series opt for the console version. I mean why spend 800.oo dollars upgrading your gaming rig, when I can just pick up a xBox 360 version for 59.99 ?? Most definitely that will be the case for every media-core Battlefield fan. This scenario will only yield in less PC players, less servers, less fun. This is a true blow to the PC gaming industry, as in the recent years its getting no love from developers.

Please post your input on this situation. I would love to hear your opinion.

This Sunday August 1, be sure to check out a 100% all-new Medal of Honor gameplay trailer directed by Linkin Park’s Joe Hahn. The trailer will feature in-game footage set to the band’s recently-announced single ‘The Catalyst’ at www.medalofhonor.com/linkinpark. More details about the Battlefield 3 beta itself can also be found at www.medalofhonor.com/battlefield3.

Medal of Honor Limited Edition also features special content out-of-the-box including the MP-7, a weapon utilized by real-world Tier 1 Operators in the field.  With its light weight, high rate of fire as well as its ability to penetrate body armor, the MP-7 handles like a pistol yet allows targets to be engaged like a rifle.  The Limited Edition also includes two powerful shotguns with custom slugs. These devastating shotguns and ammunition are ideal for close-range fights.

* The PlayStation 3 version of the Limited Edition also includes the classic, Medal of Honor Frontline™ completely remastered in HD.  **Restrictions and conditions apply to Beta offer.  See http://www.ea.com/beta for details.

From the author:

Is this the official new live-action trailer for Battlefield 3??……well no. I created this film as a tribute to one of my favourite game franchises and it is meant with the greatest adoration and appreciation!

The compositing was done in After Effects, I created the 3D models in Maya and used Photoshop to create the textures and bump maps. 3D assets were rendered with mental ray.

Thanks again to Guy and Mark at Gamespot UK for recently mentioning the film on the Gamespot UK Podcast!

Please enjoy these wonderful photoshops, and join our discussion forum if you would like to submit your own.

The first one is the E3 show premiering on June 15 2010 that might bring an end to the BF3 news drought.

Read more here: (Battlefield 3 To Be Announced @ E3 Expo)

The second sign of hope is a recently discovered “whoops”. One of our regulars have sent us a screen shot of what seems to be the box art cover for Battlefield 3. This was supposedly taken while deep scanning Battlefield home directories hosted on EA.com

Click to see FULL Size:

http://bf3nation.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/battlefield-3-boxart.jpg

Battlefield 3 box art leaked

BF3 BoxArt

The image points to this URL:

http://blogs.battlefield.ea.com/themes/battlefield/images/bf3/boxart/battlefield3.jpg

(UPDATE: After releasing this story the link was pulled and the directory does not exist.)

WHY OH WHY MUST YOU TAUNT US EA/DICE?

So what can we tell from this screen shot? Not much. It seems that they are expecting the game to have an “M” (for Mature) rating. Could we see a BFBC2 type foul language? Gory images? Excessive blood? There is too much to speculate. Also embedded in the “3” is a single soldier who is sporting (from what it looks like) a M60 machine gun (correct me if I am wrong) The box also includes a “Game for Windows” logo which might suggest PC exclusivity (which was predicted, but fears of ports still haunt our souls)

(UPDATE #2: Just received news that the original source of this screen shot has many more of them. We will try our best to reach him and update our galleries so stay tuned)

(UPDATE #3: We are getting lots of fan mail thanks to this story and we would like to give something back to our readers. In the spirit of the “box art mayhem” BF3Nation is now holding a contest for the BEST BF3 cover creation. The grand prize is (hold your breath) 25 dollar Amazon gift card !!! So whip out your Corel / Photoshop or Windows Paint and GET TO WORK !!!

(More on contest: http://bf3nation.com/2010/03/battlefield-3-box-art-contest-win-25-dollars/)

- D. Kosiba

About E3 Expo 2010

E3 Expo is the world’s premiere trade show for computer and video games and related products. The show is owned by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the U.S. association dedicated to serving the business and public affairs needs of the companies, publishing interactive games for video game consoles, handheld devices, personal computers, and the Internet. For more information, please visit www.E3Expo.com or www.theESA.com.

EA has confirmed that they will be attending the E3. Stay tuned for up to the date news on Battlefield 3.

E3 Expo wiill run on June 15-17 2010

Link:
http://bf3nation.com/forum/battlefield-3-main-discussion-forum/battlefield-3-box-art-contest-win-25-bucks-!!-submission-thread/

All submissions will be accepted into the final voting. The winner will be decided by a public forum vote. As far as rules go, we only require a few things:

1.Box art must be for PC only
2.Must include front/side/back of the box
3.Battlefield 3 ONLY (no Bad Company please)
4.Must include a watermarked logo of BF3Nation.com

So are you ready yet? Join in on the fun and start now:)

81 billion points have been earned in online multiplayer sessions
43 million weapons and gadgets have been unlocked in online multiplayer
Over 6 million video views on YouTube
2.9 million hours have been spent playing online in the last 24 hours alone
230k peak-concurrent-users (PCUs)
Over 44k Twitter fans (most out of any EA title) http://twitter.com/OfficialBFBC2

Bad Company 2 has proven so popular that our servers experienced such overwhelming demand that EA and DICE have had to add even more hardware to handle the player numbers. We continue to monitor online play daily to make sure everyone can play as well as continue to work on the game for future updates and DLC which you can get at no extra cost with the VIP code (PC BFBC2 players will get the content in the form of downloads without the need for a VIP code).

My name is Johan Andersson (Twitter: repi) and I’m one of the architects working on our proprietary Frostbite engine here at DICE.

We’ve had numerous requests to go through in more detail about what kind of graphical features & options that exists in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for the PC. So this is an attempt at just that.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is based on Frostbite 1.5, but with multiple enhancements and a lot of specific effort spent on building it up and for the PC as this is the first time Frostbite is used on PC.

DX9/DX10/DX11

Frostbite 1.5 on PC is designed for DirectX 10 as a base, this enables us to easily support all the advanced graphics features that we use on the consoles, and much more! DX10 is a very modern graphics API and gives us a lot of flexibility as a developer.

DX10 has one unfortunate draw back though; it is only supported on Windows Vista and Windows 7, not the now 9 year old Windows XP. And as we have a big PC fan base, where not everyone may have transitioned over to Vista or Windows 7 yet, we have also added a rendering path that uses the old DirectX 9.

The DX9 path is quite efficient but lacks some of the features that we have on DX10 like anti-aliasing and HBAO.

For everyone with the new generation of graphics card, like the AMD Radeon 5xxx series or the upcoming Nvidia Geforce 4xx, we’ve also added support for DirectX 11. The primary uses of DX11 in Bad Company 2 is to soften all the dynamic shadows as well as to improve performance in general with a few smaller DX11 optimizations that we are using.

The detection and usage of DX9/DX10/DX11 is done automatically, the game selects the highest possible version available with your graphics card and OS. If you want to force a given path you can do that in the Settings.ini file by setting ‘DxVersion’ to any of these options: 9, 10, 11 or auto (default).

The Settings.ini file can be found in My Documents\BFBC2 directory.

AMD Eyefinity

Bad Company 2 supports AMD’s Eyefinity rendering mode where you can have 3 (or 6!) monitors connected to a single graphics card. The game will then detect that mode and the very wide aspect ratio and render using a wide horizontal field of view and keep the menus & HUDs on the middle display. This can create a very immersive experience if you have the hardware required.

Elmnator1 posted this Youtube video showing Eyefinity in the Bad Company 2 PC Beta on his nice setup:

Nvidia 3D Vision

We’ve been working together with engineers from Nvidia for adding proper support for 3D Vision stereo rendering in Bad Company 2 PC. This support is not enabled in the beta but it will be included in a patch shortly after the release of the retail game.

3D Vision works by rendering a picture for each eye every frame together with a slight offset. Then the 3D glasses together with the compatible displays and drivers correctly select which frame each eye sees to create actual depth perception in the game.

We are also looking forward to trying out the upcoming multi-monitor stereo rendering: 3D Vision Surround.

Expect to see & hear more about both 3D Vision and 3D Vision Surround in Bad Company 2 after the beta!

HBAO

HBAO stands for Horizon-based Ambient Occlusion and is a rendering technique developed by Nvidia originally and that we have integrated into Frostbite for use on all DX10 and DX11 graphics cards.

It is a technique that creates soft & realistic contact shadows between objects and can really enhance the visuals but in a quite subtle way. It can be a demanding effect for the graphics card and as such is primarily meant for more higher-end cards. It only is a cost on the GPU, not the CPU.

Since the PC Beta we’ve done a bunch of optimizations on the effect together with both Nvidia and AMD, so if you had performance problems with it before: please give it a shot again in the retail game if you have a modern & fast GPU!

For the full technical details about how HBAO works, see this presentation by Nvidia from SIGGRAPH 2008: Image-Space Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion.

Field of View

BC2 uses approximately the same vertical field-of-view on all platforms and modes. But as we support arbitrary monitor aspect ratios, you can get different horizontal FOV on different monitor setups – the wider monitor you have the wider horizontal FOV you get, i.e. you actually see more on the sides of the screen.

As widescreen monitors nowadays are even more common (and actually: the new standard) we felt it was very important to support them properly. Which we do in BC2 thanks to handling arbitrary aspect ratios. A positive side effect of this is that Eyefinity also works as it should, i.e. just like a single very wide monitor.

We’ve seen overwhelming positive feedback for the out-of-the-box support of Eyefinity, but a few select people have voiced some concern that the wide FOV when playing with Eyefinity would be considered cheating. But now when people have been playing the Beta we haven’t heard any feedback that Eyefinity have actually been a big practical competitive advantage, it is meant to give you only extra peripheral vision.

The PC as a platform is inherently not a 100% fair playing field as people have always had varying performance, network connection, hardware setups, input devices and new technology – which is also one of the strengths of the platform and something we, and many PC players, would like us to embrace & utilize.

If the community later collectively agrees that Eyefinity is an actual big advantage in multi-player we can look into potentially having it as a server option, but don’t think that will be needed.

Another much requested topic is to have a customizable FOV. This is not implemented in the PC Beta, but we are adding a customizable FOV for a future retail patch. The feedback from the Beta about servers, performance & stability have been of a higher priority and needed to be solved first.

Misc

The ‘High’ texture detail level is not included in the PC beta, but is in the retail game which increase texture resolution a bit.

Support for multiple GPUs (AMD Crossfire / Nvidia SLI) in the first PC Beta build was only partially working and could cause visual artifacts. This is improved on in the latest Beta client and since that version we have done additional performance scaling improvements that should be a good benefit.

We would like to thank both AMD and Nvidia for their technical support and assistance during the development of Bad Company 2. Both with the PC-only advanced features and with helping to make sure the game runs and performs well a wide range of graphics cards and configurations. Special thanks to Louis Bavoil (Nvidia) and Nicolas Thibieroz (AMD).

Future

If you are interested in more details about DirectX 11 as well as some sneak peaks and technical details about our upcoming Frostbite 2 engine, AMD recently did a big interview with me in their on the AMD Underground blog: “11 Days of DirectX 11: DICE”. The longer full interview is also available as an pdf here

Keep in mind that the interview is about the future, beyond Bad Company 2.

– repi