One of the largest patches I've ever seen has been in the pipeline for Battlefield 3 for over a month now. Now, after 9500 comments and lots of anticipation, DICE is ready to give the game the love it deserves.
Battlefield 3's next update will be releasing on March 27th, and the best part is that DICE plans to make it available to PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 gamers all on the same day. The patch notes are quite extensive, so I recommend heading over to the official Battlelog post for the full details, but below are the general fixes that you can expect on Tuesday:
GENERAL GAMEPLAY FIXES
- Players should no longer take fall damage from short falls.
- Players now get up from Prone slightly faster, allowing better odds of getting away from a grenade or threat when prone.
- Fixed some situations that would unintentionally make a player unrevivable.
- Reduced the black screen fade in time on spawn. The fade is still necessary for properly streaming in loading content at spawn, but it has been substantially reduced.
- Increased the spawn protection time from 1sec to 2sec. The protection will still be immediately canceled as soon as the player moves or shoots.
- Spawn protection will no longer be canceled by the player looking around.
- Increased the speed at which a player regains accuracy when aiming after moving for a more responsive experience. Firing before fully zoomed will still result inaccurate fire.
- Increased the inaccuracy and recoil added when a player is fully suppressed.
- Shotgun Buck and Flechette rounds now have a less suppressive effect at medium to long range.
- Tweaked the damage levels of Buck and Flechette rounds to balance them with other weapons.
- Improved the suppression of the .44 magnum, .357 magnum, and the 5.8x42mm DAP88 rounds from the Type88 sniper.
- Attempting to Crouch (like Prone) will now properly interrupt Sprint.
- Increased the effectiveness of Suppression Resist Specialization.
- Parachutes now respond to turn and throttle inputs more quickly.
- Switching from primary weapons to sidearms and back now takes less time.
- Increased the effectiveness of explosive resistance.
- Tweaked bipod deploy settings so players can no longer deploy a bipod in places higher than chin level.
- The bipod should now be more reliable when deploying on top of sloped objects like cars and rocks.
- Fixed several issues with vaulting objects, especially for thin railings.
- The Knife now only takes two swipes to kill when attacking from a position where a takedown is not possible.
- CRAM weapons on Carriers now count towards stationary weapon awards.
Chances are that this patch will be a huge download, so don't be surprised when you have to download a 200+ MB patch on Tuesday. As far as what's on the horizon, there will be three big DLC packages coming later in the year, but these changes will have to tie us over until the first one releases at the beginning of Summer.
