With all the hype surrounding Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3, it’s quite amazing that we haven’t had any petitions, boycotts or outcries. Mostly there’s just been a ton of fanboy trolling and rivalries. Modern Warfare 3 has dedicated servers, no restrictive DRM has been announced, hell, no one is even complaining about lean.<\/p>\n
EA has delivered on the long overdue reason to prematurely complain, by announcing a new system of server browsing. In the PC version of the game, DICE’s online stat tracking and matchmaking website, Battlelog, will replace the in-game menu entirely. Now bear with me, ‘cause this gets pretty confusing.<\/p>\n
Most of the information comes from senior designer Alan Kertz, talking on Twitter. He writes, “Battlelog is the PC main menu.” “You go straight from Battlelog to playing. No splash screens, no menus. Just straight to the playing.<\/p>\n
“You Alt-Tab or close the game and go to Battlelog. Infact, you can get to the Main Menu of the game from anywhere you have the net.”<\/p>\n
After the inevitable uproar, Kertz insisted it’s actually quite similar to the server browser in Bad Company 2. “In Bad Company 2, if you wanted to change servers, you had to quit the round and then load another map. This is no different at all,” he tweeted.<\/p>\n
What this means is that you’ll have to leave your current game before you can try starting a new one. It has to be said, the idea of having a website as your menu does seem a little odd, although Kertz insists that this cuts out splash screens, load screens and everything else – you go straight from Battlelog to the game. The advantage of this is supposed to be drastically reduced load times.<\/p>\n
Fast load speeds are great and all, but it does sound a little clunky. Some Alpha testers (or so they claim to be) in various comments sections have said the system actually works quite nicely, so don’t cancel your preorder just yet.<\/p>\n
One question of concern this does raise for South African gamers in particular however, is if this means we’ll need to access the internet in order to launch the game.<\/p>\n
If this all wasn’t weird enough, the console versions will have a typical server browser. Go figure.<\/p>\n