DICE's online stat tracking and matchmaking website, Battlelog will replace the in-game main menu for Battlefield 3 on PC. Eurogamer report that to change servers in the middle of a session, we'll have to Alt-tab out of the game, and then start another match from the Battlelog website. As if that wasn't strange enough, console versions of Battlefield 3 WILL be getting an in-game server browser. Whaaat.
Senior designer on Battlefield 3, Alan Kertz was talking about the system on Twitter .
"Battlelog is the PC main menu," he writes. "You go straight from Battlelog to playing. No splash screens, no menus. Just straight to the playing.
"You Alt-Tab or close the game and go to Battlelog. Infact, you can get to the Main Menu of the game from anywhere you have the net"
Kertz defended the system, equating it to the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 server browser. "In Bad Company 2, if you wanted to change servers, you had to quit the round and then load another map. This is no different at all," he tweets.
Responding to a flurry of questions on Twitter, Kertz said "that's the way the game is designed, we can skip loading a menu this way and reduce the time."
So if you want to start a new game in Battlefield, you'll have to leave the game in order to do it. As mad as that sounds, having a website as a main menu raises further questions. Will Battlefield 3 need to be online to launch the single player campaign? If we drop the Battlefield 3 .exe shortcut into Steam, will we be able to use the Steam overlay web browser to join new servers through Battlelog? Why are the things I mentioned in that ridiculously convoluted sentence I just wrote even necessary? Post your thoughts in the comments below.
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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.
