Getting Personal with Battlefield 3: Close Quarters

EA released the second trailer for the upcoming expansion for Battlefield 3, Close Quarters. This trailer highlights an intense firefight on the Donya Fortress map with seemingly enhanced destruction. In contrast to the map packs for Call of Duty, expansions for the Battlefield series tend to centralize around a theme, Close Quarters focusing on tight maps for short-range combat. In addition to the new maps, the expansion will include new weapons and vehicles. Battlefield 3: Close Quarters will release sometime in June for the all three platforms (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC) with PlayStation 3 players accessing the content a week earlier than the others.

Taking my time with Diablo III

As many as 300,000 people played Diablo III simultaneously this weekend during the open beta event Blizzard held. For many of those players, it was the first opportunity they’ve had with the game. I’ve played it in small chunks at past BlizzCons, but sitting down and playing a genre that I had no familiarity with for a short amount of time hardly feels like a hands-on experience. Despite that, I too felt like I was sitting down to play it for the first time this past weekend.

First Crysis 3 Gameplay Trailer

Despite its reveal earlier this month, EA released the first trailer for Crysis 3 today, showing off some of the literal concrete jungle that is New York City. The trailer shows a quarantine dome placed over the city with remnants of the Ceph still inside and it’s up to Prophet to take back the city. A new addition to the Crysis series is a compound bow, which assumingly can execute stealth kills from afar.

Crytek told Joystiq that DirectX 11 support would be available at launch, in 2013, for PC users. “Yeah, I'm pretty sure we're going to have that,” said Rasmus Hojengaard, Director of Creative Development. “I don't know if we've announced that yet, but obviously we're going to have DirectX 11 support since we already did it for Crysis 2. We basically started from a Crysis 2 DX11 patch, as starting point, and then we developed our technology from there on. We'd be pretty stupid not to capitalize on the technology we did for that and utilizing that from the get-go.” Crysis 3 will be available for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC sometime in spring 2013.

Dear Esther fosters and hinders exploration in the same chord

Dear Esther is not a game. I don’t say that to sound elitist or demeaning, but it doesn’t share the same qualities that you might think of in a game. The narrative is scarce, there are no puzzles to solve, movement feels rigid, there is little interaction from the player, and no clear goal of what you must do. Instead, it presents a landscape that looks beautiful and illustrates the thoughts of a man as he reflects and accepts the troubles of his past.