PS3 to receive Battlefield 3 DLC first

By Ryan Fleming Published September 22, 2011

In what is becoming more and more a common tool in the war between the Xbox 360 and the PS3, EA and Sony have signed an exclusivity deal for the upcoming Battlefield 3 DLC. The deal will bring all additional content to the PlayStation Network one week before it appears anywhere else.

Currently, Microsoft and Activision have a similar deal in place for the Call of Duty games, which grants Xbox 360 owners a full month of taunting their PS3 and PC counterparts. It likely hasn’t caused many people to buy an Xbox or sell a PS3 just for the one month head start, but those that own both systems and are deciding which version of the game to buy have likely flocked to the system with the faster line to new content.

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The map packs have proven to be big business for most online games, especially Call of Duty, which has sold tens of millions of add-ons at $15 apiece. The current Call of Duty game, Black Ops, has released three competitive-based map packs and one zombies co-op map pack–the most downloadable content of any of the Call of Duty games. All have been a success, so you can expect Modern Warfare 3 to follow a similar tact. Activision has already claimed that there will be at least 20 pieces of game add-ons, but it isn’t entirely clear yet what those add-ons will be. Regardless, the add-on business isn’t going anywhere, and both EA and Sony know it.

On the PlayStation Blog, DICE’s Junior Product Manager, Tommy Rydling, confirmed the agreement between Sony and EA. The first map pack–due later this year–will be titled “Back to Karkland” and feature four maps from Battlefield 2, revamped and upgraded. The map pack will appear on the PSN one week before PC or Xbox 360. Although no exact release date has been given for the expansion, this particular map pack is also available as a bonus for those that pre-order the Limited Edition version of Battlefield 3.

The multiplayer beta which features one level of the Rush game mode set in Paris, is also set to begin later this month on September 29. Battlefield 3 will be released for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on October 25.

Former Gaming/Movies Editor

Ryan Fleming is the Gaming and Cinema Editor for Digital Trends. He joined the DT staff in 2009 after spending time covering…

Gaming

Battlefield 2042’s new season adds a map set in the developer’s homeland

Soldiers fighting on Battlefield 2042 Season 3 map Spearhead.

EA unveiled everything players can expect from Battlefield 2042 Season 3: Escalation ahead of its November 22 start date. The most notable addition is a brand new map called Spearhead, which is set in Sweden, the homeland of the Battlefield series' main developer, DICE.
Surprisingly, Spearhead is the first Battlefield map set in DICE's home country. The map is centered around two Nordvik manufacturing facilities in the Swedish wilderness, surrounded by very rocky and uneven landscapes. It looks like a map full of interesting terrain that will benefit some vehicles, like the brand-new EMKV90-TOR tank, more than others. Later in Season 3: Escalation, the Manifest map will be reworked to be less cluttered and more tightly designed, while a Breakaway rework will move the Oil Rig to a location much closer to where most action on the map takes place.

Of course, Season 3: Escalation is more than just a new map, battle pass, and some map reworks. A new assault Special named Rasheed Zain is an Egyptian soldier whose legs were amputated after a military accident and replaced with prosthetics. He wields an Airburst launcher and recharges his health very fast after getting a kill, making him great on the front lines of a fight.
The Rorsch MK-4 railgun, the NVK-S22 shotgun, NVK-P125 long-range pistol, the throwing knife, and vault weapons XM8 and A-91 spice things up on the weapons front. EA and DICE also teased that they'll finally start to rework Battlefield 2042's Specialist and Class systems toward the end of the season.
Battlefield 2042 Season 3: Escalation begins on November 22 across all platforms. The game will also be added to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate via EA Play on that date. Later, the PS5 version of Battlefield 2042 will be free to try between December 16 and December 23.

Gaming

Battlefield 2042 Season 1 is an improvement, but a late one

A specialist holds Battlefield 2042's new crossbow weapon.

Battlefield 2042's launch didn't go quite as planned for EA. While it was poised to be the publisher's next live service hit, it floundered at launch due to an overwhelming number of bugs, a controversial ability-driven specialist system, maps that felt way too big, and more. While Digital Trends' reviewer loved the base game, many players didn't, so EA spent months fixing it. As a result, Season 1: Zero Hour was pushed back all the way to June 9, over six months after the game's launch. Ahead of its release, I got the opportunity to try out some of Season 1's new content a see if Battlefield 2042 has really changed for the better.
This primarily consisted of going hands-on with the new Specialist Ewelina Lis on the new map Exposure. Is Battlefield 2042 in a better state now than it was at launch? Yes. Will it make enough compelling additions and changes to bring you back if you're not a hardcore Battlefield fan? Not really.
Battlefield 2042 | Season 1: Zero Hour Gameplay Trailer Premiere
What's new?
The main additions coming to Battlefield 2042 at the start of Season 1 are a new rocket launcher-wielding specialist named Ewelina Lis, a new map set in the Canadian Rockies called Exposure, new weapons including a crossbow and marksman rifle, and a battle pass containing lots of free and paid unlockables. It's definitely the meatiest batch of content Battlefield 2042 has received since launch, but it doesn't revamp or fix every core problem with the game.

Starting with the battle pass, don't expect any wild crossover or crazy outfits, just a lot of new realistic looks for your specialists, vehicles, and weapons. It is challenge-based, which Halo has shown the downsides of, but thankfully 30 tiers of it are free and the only things unlocked by paying up are cosmetic. That means everyone will be able to try the new specialist Ewelina Lis. She is a helpful Engineer Specialist as she always has a rocket launcher at her disposal to help destroy vehicles.
While I found the new Ghostmaker R10 Crossbow and BSV-M Marksman Rifle to be too slow and not powerful enough to be very useful in a game with such a quick time to kill, Lis may be a useful specialist that will stick around on most squads. She's particularly useful on the brand-new map Exposure.
When previewing the new season, I got to try out both Conquest and Breakthrough on Exposure, a map that supports both 128-player and 64-player matches. As it takes place in and around a base built into the side of a mountain, it has one of the most distinctive and vertical layouts of any new Battlefield 2042 map. The tensest firefights took place in a spot nestled on the side of the mountain, as players could flank from within the mountain on foot or from the skies in new stealth helicopters. While I enjoyed those moments and attacking the base in the helicopter, it still felt a bit too big to traverse on foot outside of that base, a common problem with all of Battlefield 2042's maps.

Gaming

Why playing PS3 games on a PS5 is way harder than it sounds

A stack of PS3 games.

PlayStation Plus Premium will give players access to a library of classic PlayStation, PS2, and PS3 titles starting this June, which is exciting as the PS5 only is backward compatible with the PS4 currently. Unfortunately, it comes with a caveat: All PS3 games must be streamed from the cloud and can't be played natively on the console.
We're over 15 years removed from the PS3's launch, and there's still no good way to play many classic PS3 titles like Infamous or Metal Gear Solid 4 on modern platforms. Sony is content to continue PlayStation Now's approach to PS3 gaming with PlayStation Plus Premium. This stands out when Xbox and Nintendo are doing a relatively good job at natively emulating or remastering games from older systems for modern platforms.
To learn why PS3 games are so hard to bring to modern consoles, I spoke to Whatcookie, a contributor for the popular PS3 emulator RPCS3. Whatcookie, who chose not to share his name, is also known for creating a 60 frames per second patch for the PS3 version of Demon's Souls. He broke down what makes PS3 emulation particularly frustrating and sheds some light on why Sony is content with streaming PS3 games from the cloud instead.
CELL it
The system architectures of the PS4 and PS5 are so similar that isn't much of a problem to run PS4 titles on Sony's latest system, with a couple of exceptions. Compared to that, the PS3 has a different CPU that has more in common with the PS2 than Sony's modern systems.
In short, PS3's CELL microprocessor had some very unique capabilities, which meant that developers over-relied on the CPU at the time. This approach ultimately makes PS3 games harder to emulate. Whatcookie broke this all down for Digital Trends in greater detail.

"The Emotion Engine from the PS2 as well as the CELL in the PS3 are both built to do floating point math as fast as possible, to the detriment of other aspects of performance," Whatcookie explains. "The CELL even surpasses the PS4's CPU in terms of floating-point performance but loses out on every other measurable aspect of performance."
The uniquely powerful CPU of the PS3 already makes it an odd system, but the PS3 could also move 128 bytes atomically and had a weaker GPU than the Xbox 360. This combination led to a weird post-processing workaround for developers that Whatcookie called "unfriendly to emulation," where developers would offload post-processing to the CPU.
"This means moving a rendered image from the GPU over to main memory, emulating the post-processing code, and finally moving the image back to the GPU's memory from main memory, where the GPU will draw the UI over the processed image and finally present that image to the screen," Whatcookie says. "This type of round trip is very unfriendly to modern GPUs, where post-processing a 720p image would likely be faster than moving the image to main memory, never mind all the other steps."
These extra steps on a function that developers would usually contain to the GPU make emulation difficult. Still, a large dedicated team at RPCS3 has put in a lot of work to create a functional emulator for modern PCs. According to Whatcookie, it's totally possible to get PS3 emulation working on a PS5.
"The PS5's CPU is a decent deal faster, and combined with the kind of shortcuts that developers of commercial emulators make -- the official PS2 emulator on PS4 has many game-specific patches and hacks -- it should be possible to achieve full speed on whatever games they choose to release."
So why doesn't Sony put in the effort to address these issues and get proper PS3 emulation up and running on PS5?
Just because you can…