When it works, it's a great game, but in truth, my experience of the game is that it's the worst maintained online multiplayer I've ever, ever played. It's shockingly bad.
First off, playing as I usually do with my mates at the weekend, this time round I've found these problems;
- We STILL can't get 3-4 of us in the same game and on the same teams
- It's now an issue just sending squad invites to each other, half the time we send them then we don't all get them
- In playing the game last night over a two hour period the game froze my xbox mid-match, forcing me to turn it off and on again, FOUR times
- Not only are there green flashes but now I'm seeing red flashes too
- Twice we all had to quit the game because the loading screen before joining a game went dark and just stayed hanging
- the MAV trick of using it to get to high places hasn't been fixed yet, and it's ruining the game. On Tehran Highway last night six out of nine of the enemy team were sitting on the freeway overpass sniping. It made the game ultra boring
- Lag. It's still horrific. On certain games it's fine, on others me and my mates were getting shot anywhere up to two to three seconds after hiding behind a wall. One occasion, I knew a guy was about to run through a doorway, so I aimed right at it with an ACOG x4, then I hear a bang of a shotgun and I'm dead, with the killcame showing the guy standing in the doorway I was looking at. He must have wandered in and shot me before the game even registered at my end that he was there. Brilliant. Several times I've been shot by the invisible man.
- The USAS12. Is it being patched? 99% of people seem to use this or the FAMAS, but the USAS is a joke. It knocks out walls. It has explosive splashback that can kill you just by being near it, it fires at huge rates and from massive distances. Several times I got killed by it when standing in a room and the wall gets blown out, I hide, the splash damage kills me. It sounded and looked like a tank shell, it was the USAS12 shotgun. Fucking sort that gun out DICE, it's the most overpowered gun I've ever seen in a game.
- I just loved getting t-bagged repeatedly by some guy from Japan playing in a European server with him somehow being able to take two entire assault rifle clips to the body from medium range, before turning round while I'm having to reload and, yes, nailing me with the USAS-12. Why should the lag benefit him, he's not in his own region's servers??
- Party chat. On the xbox dashboard the chat works perfectly, on other games it works perfectly, on BF3 there's always at least one out of three or four of us who's mic mysteriously keeps cutting out or not working at all. This only happens on BF3.
As you can tell it's really pissing me off. Lag, can't play with my friends, when I can play with them and it's a decent match it keeps freezing my xbox, That's of course when I can talk to them over the sounds of a joke tank cannon for a shotgun, or when the game chooses to not cut someone's mic off completely.