Is Battlefield 3 ready for e-sports?
While both Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 are about to make serious strides into a scene that’s currently the playground of StarCraft 2 and DotA clones, it’s Electronic Arts that’s behind more than its competitor Activision.
About three months ago, I wrote a blog post that briefly considered the current state of first-person shooter (FPS) in e-sports considering strategy games replacing the shooter as the leading type of competitive game. This post is an update of sorts.
Thanks to the boost in interest from spectators and marketing that is becoming prevalent in the broadcasting of games, publishers are looking to show off their game in a high-payout tournament meant to stimulate the game’s early life. These tournaments are held in hopes of sparking the common person into thinking they have a chance to compete in some sort of semi-professional level. In practice, this doesn‘t seem to be the case, but we haven’t really had this experience with a FPS game…yet.
With games such as Battlefield 3, though, the compulsory façade the developer wants players to go through doesn't fit into the competitive landscape. Requiring a player to play through the entire multiplayer progression to unlock all possible weapons, equipment and customizations creates a conflict for those gamers who try to play competitively.
In Battlefield 2142, the competitive multiplayer scheme primarily used the base weaponry and map utilities to complete objectives. This was a snap decision most leagues chose in order to allow as many people as possible to compete.
With Dota 2 and other DotA clones, the multiplayer is the entire experience. Everything has to be available or the game doesn't work. Meanwhile, the recent Battlefield and Call of Duty franchise games have become a competition of who can drink the most kool-aid of unlockable items, customizations, weapons, and "perks" first successfully introduced by Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
Battlefield 3 in-game
Like DotA and DotA clones, StarCraft 2 doesn't have this issue either. All the units are available in the multiplayer depending on which race you choose to play. There are no weapons that are unavailable depending on how far you've gotten in the multiplayer progression because there is no multiplayer progression.
With Battlefield 3, there's uncertainty about how customizations will affect the competitive multiplayer modes in tournaments. Players might not be able to rely on what they unlocked in their casual play of the multiplayer mode. Ultimately, EA will get to make the first decision about how to deal with unlocks in tournament play, whether everything will be unlocked or the players will be limited to the basic equipment for each class.
In other FPS games, where there are player classes such as sniper, shotgun, etc., the different classes keep the game fair by limiting what is accessible. That is to say, an entire team can't play as machine gunners defending the flag on dod_anzio, or that an entire team can’t all be playing the Heavy class with Natashas equipped on any given Team Fortress 2 map. The problem with multiplayer classes is that there needs to be a limit on how many of a given class can be chosen in order to ensure a certain ability can't be exploited.
In the latest iteration of Call of Duty, there's been a similar issue with how effective certain weapons are compared to others. For example, the FAMAS has a dramatically less violent recoil pattern compared to other weapons in the game, which makes it a preferred firearm for players to use. Players handicap themselves by using anything other than this specific rifle, but it doesn’t seem like they have had this issue with being limited by weapons they have or haven’t unlocked.
Through the Battlefield 3 global tournament, EA will come to realize there is a fundamental problem with how modern FPS games' multiplayer is designed for the competitive scene.
Can MW3 be the first semi-successful CoD e-sports title since the original MW?
Personally, I am more interested to see how MW3’s approach to multiplayer will allow it to thrive as an e-sport title. With the focus on smaller maps and faster confrontations and chain building, I hope the game will inspire players, similar to Quake 3. Obviously, there wasn't the chain building and the variety of weapons and add-ons that you can find in MW3, but Quake 3 had this air of timing regarding item pickups and armor upgrades which were laying on the map for anyone to take. This gave the game a deeper strategy than what was obvious for spectators.
How EA will run the BF3 tournament remains to be seen, but I'm hopeful they will find some sort of middle ground for players entering the tournament who may be new to e-sports. Integrating the playing experience gamers get at home to be similar to the competitive experience will be key for EA.
I'm not exactly holding my breath for this to happen, but knowing EA, they will do something right eventually.
Right?
Brad "bcarr" Carr
