Patches, DLC & Zombies, Oh my!

This is the midagedgamer report for the week ending 6-1-2012.

So there's big news in Battlefield land with the announcement of yet another huge patch coming. Scheduled to be released over two days from 6-4 to 6-5. 

The official schedule is:

PC and Xbox 360 worldwide: June 4th
PlayStation 3 in Japan/Asia: June 5th
PlayStation 3 in all other regions: June 4th.

 
Specific size of the patch is unknown but it's likely to be at least as large as the 1Gb March patch.  It's also likely that some changes were made to allow for the "close quarters expansion pack"
The BF3 development team released an announcement prefaced with the following...

 
"We are very happy to present the contents of our next Battlefield 3 game update! This is a big one, rolling out June 4-5. .... including a solution to the M26 dart issue, reduced suppression, and the introduction of colorblind support on console."

There are a number of tweaks to weapons, gameplay and equipment in this patch reportedly taken from player suggestions.
Now if they'd just start announcing their maintenance cycles instead of dumping you out of the middle of a game.  No less than 3 times in the past two weeks BF3 has gone offline leaving you with nothing on your battlelog screen except a message saying " Update in Progress... Check back soon, Soldier!"

I understand that updates need to happen but EA has a bad habit of doing them unannounced.  These impromptu maintenance periods were unannounced and left many players dumbfounded when the game dumped out unexpectedly. 

I've seen this behavior before with EA properties.  Specifically I've seen EA's German development house Phenomic develop the habit of doing this with the Play4Free title Lord of Ultima.  You "might" get an indication on their facebook wall but usually only after the servers were down for hours.

I can understand limited notification in a free title but with a paid title with paid DLC content EA needs to be a bit more on the ball.
Perhaps we can take consolation in the fact that BF3 is still on sale for 39.99 on Origin.  Check the links at the end of the page for more patch info.

 
http://bf3blog.com/2012/05/new-battlefield-3-patch-revealed-coming-june-4/
http://blogs.battlefield.com/2012/05/bf3-june-update-announce/



In other EA news, Crysis 2 "mazimum edition" is on sale on origin for 39.99.  This looks to be the much hyped but ultimately disappointing sequel to Crysis with DLC and perks.  At least it's cheaper than it was at launch...

Official Specs are:
* Bonus XP - Access to preset classes plus a custom class
• Scar weapon Skin - Scar assault rifle digital camouflage
• Weapon Attachment - Day 1 access to scar hologram decoy
• Unique Platinum Dog Tag - Display your multiplayer rank and stats
Includes Retaliation and Decimation packs:
• 9 additional Multiplayer maps supporting all game modes
• 2 new weapons - FY71 Assault Rifle and M18 Smoke Grenade



Let's take a look at Steam for a bit...



Skyrim is still overpriced at 59.99, Seems the biggest hype surrounds the "Dawnguard" add-on which is basically a vampire themed expansion.  How creative, vampires, I suppose the next expansion will be called "Moondoggie" and focus on werewolves.
PCMAG's report on the Dawnguard add-on.http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2405158,00.asp


In other Steam news, The new Modern Warfare 3 DLC collection 1 is available for 14.99 on steam which contains all the DLC content from January till march.  Collection 2 is available as well but not on steam. 

This is part of a regular DLC content release cycle for MW3. Most collections focus on new multiplayer maps with some spec ops missions.  The spec ops are interesting but as Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer is about a decade out of date it's a waste of time and money so I likely won't be bothering with it.  I've been burned by COD DLC before.

On the Steam fringes an interesting update occurred the other day to Killing Floor.  The Zombie/horror favorite has received a lot of attention with a 1/2 gig update this week. 

That's large for a game that demands less than 4GB from your hard drive.  It's likely something to do with an upcoming event as Killing floor doesn't need many fixes and the game is simple and mature enough to not need updates to the core game files.
On the hardware side GTX 670 availability is improving as is the GTX 680 although that's a relative statement.  According to This week in computer hardware on the TWIT network and the PCPER podcast there's still problems with the 28nm process which is affecting the supply of Nividia's new enthusiast GPU. 

AMD has a better channel presence due to its earlier entry into the 28nm process but it appears the higher end 7900 series cards are experiencing issues with the 28nm process as well.  With the performance crown currently belonging to NVIDIA, AMD is sweetening the deal on their 7900 series of cards by offering games like Dirt Showdown among others with the cards. 

If you can stand a little more power draw, a little more heat and a little less performance than team green's offering this may make your mind up if you were undecided.
That's it for this week,

I'm out..