Battlefield 3 Close Quarters Expansion

As most of you already know, DICE has announced a number of expansions that will release at different points throughout this year. The first of which is called Close Quarters and will be out in June. I've seen different websites give their opinion on this and I thought it was about time for me to express mine considering DICE released a new gameplay trailer today.

First off I want to say that I've been a huge Battlefield fan since the first time I was able to get into a tank way back in the early days of Battlefield 2. I played that game for a number of years and then moved on to the Bad Company series and now I spend huge amounts of time on Battlefield 3.

This expansion at first was a little confusing to me. The battlefield style has always been big vehicle heavy, objective oriented maps. They seemed to be going in the opposite direction with this expansion I couldn't figure out why. I've come up with a couple conclusions to that but we'll get to them in a minute.


 I'll start this by saying I was very skeptical about this expansion but after hearing reviews from PAX East and seeing the new trailer today, I think they've managed to take something that a lot of people have been looking for and give it a great Battlefield twist. When Battlefield 3 first released, DICE was hoping to really get some of the CoD fans to want to play Battlefield. They succeeded for a short time until Modern Warfare 3 came out and they all went running back. I happened to be a bit wrong about that. There is still a large population within Battlefield who enjoy the fast run and gun game style that CoD offered but liked the visuals and weapon handling of BF3. Those people are typically fans of TDM and were always looking for something more. This expansion gives them exactly what they're looking for. I think it's also a way for DICE to try and win back some of the CoD fans who left early in the games life. I was bothered for awhile that a company would spend the time developing something for a group of people that didn't even enjoy the game enough to stick around in the first place. Then I realized that it's not only for them but for a wide number of people who are still playing the game.


The maps that DICE has shown so far have a lot of open space as well as narrow corridors. My fear coming into this is that it would encourage people to grab a bipod and LMG and just sit in a corner at the end of a hallway mowing people down. I think with the level of destruction and the dynamic nature of these maps, that will be avoided. There will always be the jerk who thinks it's funny but for the most part I think it will be difficult to do and people will be forced to play it the right way. These maps seem really well designed with things like that in mind.

DICE will also be introducing new weapons and assignments into the game for people to unlock. This alone gives people like me something to look forward to with this expansion even though I love my wide open conquest maps. Other than a couple new weapons that were shown in the trailer, I'm not sure what all the new stuff will be.

So after all this ranting and back and forth, what is my final opinion? I think this expansion is a good thing. I'm not necessarily excited to jump into the action or even be one of the first people to pick up this new game. What I am excited for is the fact that we'll get new weapons and things to work toward and I'm excited for what this could mean for DICE and the other expansions later in the year. If Close Quarters does well, it could give DICE the extra revenue they need to put into the next couple expansions to really make them amazing for old school Battlefield fans like me.

You can find more information on Battlefield 3 Close Quarters on here. Let me know what you think about this in the comments.