Well if you didnt know, Battlefield has gone the same way as the ‘other shooter’ and launched its own Elite type service named – Battlefield 3 Premium. I don’t like it.Well it would be unfair to say I don’t like Premium as such because it only has the one expansion right now ‘Close Quarters’ and that is the part that I don’t like right now and here is why.

So I booted up the PS3 and was hoping that Premium would make me enjoy Battlefield 3 a lot more than I already do over on the Xbox 360 but I was let down. I wanted to play the new maps that Close Quarters had allowed me to play but had to download them outside of the game as via the ingame menu caused my console to freeze, which is something effecting everyone.  Something I mentioned on Twitter to @Battlefield but they never responded. Once downloaded and installed I was ready to play…or was I?

I headed to Multiplayer then filtered the Server browser to only show me the new maps;

• Ziba Tower
• Donya Fortress
• Operation 925
• Scrapmetal

I chose any game mode so that I had a higher chance of getting into a server with a few playing and hadn’t at this stage really known what Close Quarters Domination and Gun Master were all about. I chose Operation 925 and ended up on a totally different map, usually the standard ones such as Caspian Border so I would quit and try again on another server, that was empty…it’s been like this for several days now and I still haven’t checked out that map. Bug? Also before anyone suggests that the server was full I deliberately chose servers that had around 10 players.

I have managed to play on 2 of the new maps out of the 4 that are meant to be available and they were Donya Fortress and Scrapmetal and from the impression of those 2 maps the game may aswell be called Battlefield Modern Warfare or perhaps Battle Duty: Modern Field 3 because it was no longer the same Battlefield 3 I enjoyed playing.

The Close Quarters Domination mode is similar to Conquest that we already have, 3 points on map to get but the time it takes to take each point is a lot faster which means you are constant running from one point to the next while dodging the USAS trolls.

The Gun Master mode reminded me of something I played on Counter Strike: Source many years ago which basically starts you off with a Pistol and the more kills you make the better weapons you will unlock etc, agsin something that should not be in Battlefield 3.

I also noticed that more and more players were running around with the USAS-12, I believe this is because those people wouldnt stand a chance with any other gun so have to use something that is so overpowered, even after DICE apparently fixed the issues with frag rounds etc.

I really do believe that EA/Dice have let people down with Close Quarters and if we wanted to play Call of Duty then we would put that disc in, what we want is to play Battlefield 3 and that is why so many people have bought the game in the first place. I also think they should’ve fixed glitches that are ruining the game before bringing more. Have you seen the boat glitch – well so have we and as far as we are aware DICE have no fix for it. I asked via my twitter account if they were working on a fix and had no response,just like with the PS3 issue above.

For now i’m going to give it a 5/10. Maybe if I could’ve got into the maps I wanted to and not the ones the game wanted me to the score would be different.  It’s just not Battlefield 3 anymore and it sucks