As a disclaimer, I played the BF3 beta and while admitedly the lack of a texture pack made the game look far inferior to the retail product, there was still a certain visual fidelity to the game that was recognizable. You could see that you were playing the same game as was shown in trailers.

The Warfighter beta just does not look that great. The textures and models are decent, but it's just really missing the sort of visual flair elements of Battlefield. For example, in Battlefield when you look at the sun you can see dirt on your goggles, I've been fairly impressed with their lighting and things such as shadows from trees cast onto your first-person weapon... Little details beyond the straight textures and models that make the game feel more immersive.

Beyond the lack of all that, while it helps to have your team mates outlined, it's so contrasting to have a game with so many busy HUD elements when the graphics seem so dull.

The sound seems equally dull to me as well. BF3 does a great job at making even a Glock sound powerful, while maintaining the distinct difference between it and an LMG or a sniper rifle. Warfighter seems to have the same BB-gun like sound effects that in Call of Duty would straight up make some weapons unenjoyable to use.

What I'm confused about is that the trailers look great. Obviously, BF3 did the same sort of misleading advertising wherein all footage was taken from the game playing maxed out at 60FPS on PC, but even the console versions, including the beta, looked like you were playing the same game seen in the trailers. I feel like what I've been playing is some completely different game lacking any form of visual fidelity. I'm wondering, does anyone else feel the same way? Like they're playing a completely different game? It doesn't even look like Frostbite 2 to me, I feel like I'm playing something like Operation Flashpoint or something on a different engine.

At least in the demo, I noticed slow zombies were flustered by you laying on the ground; if I were 3 feet from a zombie while standing it wasn't really good news, while on the ground they could be at my feet and sort of confused. I think it's partially just an atmospherical thing, and the fact that if you were to dodge or get knocked down, a lot of times it makes more sense to shoot immediately and get up when it's safe than to shuffle to your feet then attack. You have the option to just ignore staying on the ground and get up, but if you did it all the time it'd probably seem lame that your character non-chalantly gets up just to be slapped up right away.

For me, it's a GameFly. I've been playing for a while, and while it's semi-open, in practice it's linear, and I don't enjoy the combat enough to play through it again. I really would only buy a single-player only game if it was truly open and really long (i.e. Skyrim and Bethesda's other games) or warranted multiple playthroughs (Mass Effect 3, for Renegade/Paragon, for Extended Cut, well and ME3 isn't even just single-player, co-op rocks with the free updates). I don't count the racing as multiplayer. The driving in Rage's single-player is a fun but shallow side-addition IMO.

That being said, I'm only on Disc 1 so it seems like it will be a fairly long game. I don't think it would be a total waste of money to buy it, I just thing money is more well-spent elsewhere. If you don't have GameFly or another rental service I would try and borrow it from someone else.

EDIT: I don't know if the guy above is raging from a launch experience, but at this point in time I can speak for the Xbox 360 version at least not having any bugs during the 4 hours or so I've played. The hit detection seems a little weird and I don't know WTF is up with the random pellet spread of the shotgun but neither is truly annoying.

I think it's the same as BF3, when you install to the hard drive it uses higher-resolution textures because it doesn't have to stream them from the disk. I can't say though because I install every game I play to my hard drive for wear-and-tear reasons so I installed before I even started.

EDIT: Though Battlefield 3 actually had a hard drive install, and then a seperate 1-2GB option to install the HD texture pack. I think Rage just includes the textures in the install.

Disclaimer: I have Premium

I think the server que priority thing is kinda messed up, in that it's really messed up in person, but in practice it pretty much doesn't matter. I never really want to play on one server so bad that I'm going to wait in line. Basically, I bought Premium to save money. I could care less about the other benefits, though getting map packs early is nice just because I'm honestly not that good at BF3.

That was pretty awesome!

Did it say "Killed by Server"? Because yesterday I was on one server and I'm pretty sure I was getting killed by the admin. I died, inside a tank with no damage, from "bad luck" trying to drive up some stairs on Caspian Border. Also, I died inside a jet, flying way up in the sky, from "bad luck".

It barely ever happens to me so I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure if you die in the fashion of say, admin balancing teams, then I think it says you were killed by the admin or something.

Played through the majority of the demo, this game reminds me of the old Spec Ops games and not in a good way. The game isn't bad by any means, but in almost every category it screams mediocrity. The premise is cool, but other than that I don't see any sort of innovation anywhere and I've seen everything done better elsewhere. The graphics are pretty good, but aside from the scale it isn't trying anything too difficult. There seems to be little destruction in the environment, I'm not seeing any insane particle effects or anything, and while the scale is nice, you're being funneled down pretty linear level design. While I like the aesthetic of the area, it's a very limiting set up in that with the city being all under sand, even compared to games like Crysis 2 taking part entirely in New York, at least not everything was orange. I just see the same look getting old after a while in terms of multiplayer and them being limited to Dubai. Despite how far fetched the story is, at least Call of Duty and Battlefield have multiple locals to build multiplayer maps that fit with the story.

Other than that, I found the gunplay, cover system, enemy AI and team controls to all be pretty uninspired. I don't see anything new being done here outside of the core setup of being in Dubai during a sandstorm. While Battlefield spoils on this account, the sound of guns and explosions fell sort of flat on my ears. Overall I can't leave with an impression other than the fact that this is a cover shooter, which means it's going up against Max Payne 3, Gears of War 3 and Uncharted 3. MP3 isn't out yet but Max Payne has not disappointed in the past, and even just Gears 3 and UC3 are some of the best games out right now, and even with a little bit more age they are both graphical showcases to this day for console visual achievement. The story doesn't seem that interesting to me either, and the demo didn't give me the impression it was going to be conveyed in a way I would care about it at all. Also, considering you are "Spec Ops", they should incorporate some more bleeding edge technology into your arsenal (one of the only pages I'd take from MW3) and let you use some in-developement or newly adopted weapons instead of the same M249 and M4A1 that you use in every modern shooter since at least Counter-Strike.