Didn't worry me as I wasn't aware of that until I asked my local Game retailer yesterday morning how the mid night launch went. He said that fizzled due to the game being sold earlier elsewhere.
Anyway, the game graphically is brilliant although very over the top with the bloom/HDR which I will tweak the settings to later. My GF card allows me to run everything at High settings, I'd love to get a better card to run it at Ultra settings. The improvements to the destructible environments over Bad Company 2 is mind blowing good, although some of the tree movements look very rubbery and comical.
My biggest gripe is that this is more of a sequel to Bad Company 2 with minimal connection to BF2. My biggest annoyance with Bad Company 2 was having to unlock secondary weapons for vehicles and then not being able to use more than 1 at a time. You can't have a secondary machine gun and smoke screen at the same time, which is stupid and not logical in war. BF3 continues this dumb idea and then applies it to the aircraft... great, so lets send a pilot to war with just a machine gun, no missiles or flares... yeah that's smart. This sort of crap was absent from BF2, other than weapon unlocks. Weapon unlocks and upgrades I don't mind at all, but limiting the armory of heavy armour and aircraft is just pathetic in my books. At rank 1 I am seriously outranked by a rank 10 player in aircraft, despite being able to fly half decent. Not being able to get a missile lock or fire flares when he got a missile lock on me was pissing me off something chronic.
In aircraft I want to be beaten by someone that has a better flying skill, not because I'm limited by my choice of weaponry both offensive and defensive.
BF2 for me was a hybrid between Operation Flashpoint realism and Call of Duty arcade game play. It wasn't over the top realistic (I only play Battlefield games in "Hardcore"), but not over the top arcade. The balance was good enough for me to spend nearly 650 hours playing over 5 years and compete in several ranked Scrims. BF3 so far just isn't what I was expecting (it's more Bad Company 2 than its heritage) but I will give it more time and no doubt probably put a good 100+ hours into it over the next year or so.
I haven't played all the maps yet and only very small way into the Campaign (not really interested, it's very COD styled). But the maps I've seen so far were interesting and had good surprises. It's good they included the Rush mode from Bad Company 2 and not just Conquest, as I like to play both.
Edit: In summary and bit of a cliché, the game is clearly targeted at the console market and not PC gamer. Perhaps I should purchase Red Orchastra 2?
(I mean its got more bugs than I would expect for a late in development Beta) but I guess anyone fimilar with the battlefield series would know that any battlefield game doesn't actually get finished till 1 year after release!
