User blog comment:Smuff/Battlefield 3's campaign to be "six hours of awesome"?/@comment-1655527-20110831212930

I actually ended up playing multiplayer just to justify spending this much money on first person shooters anymore. Thanks to the influence of Certain Games on the industry, all modern-setting FPS games have a single player campaign that be cleared in less time than it takes to install the damn thing on a PC.

Also, BC2 lacked most of Bad Company's sense of humor already, so I wasn't too worried about seeing it go. Having the ridiculous (and extremely entertaining) plot of "four losers (whom the Army refuses to kick out for some reason) invade a country to steal gold from mercenaries" replaced with "super intense save-the-world OMG-SUPER-WEAPON!!! shenanigans" was a pretty big let down already. The fanboys will cry and scream (and by the way, Battlefield is in fact a superior series, I'm not debating that at all) when it's said, but face it: BC2's plot was nearly indistinguishable from a Call of Duty game. Developers care about the single player experience - to a point. But I know way too many people who never even touch the solo campaign in any modern-setting FPS to think that it's really that big of a priority. Look at BC2's single player again: how much padding was there really? How about the completely pointless driving-a-boat-down-a-river sequences? Most of the driving in Sangre Del Toro through empty, unoccupied desert? At least in the humvee convoy sequence you were fighting off ambushes every couple of minutes. In at least one river scene you're just holding down the trigger to send a fishing boat putt-putting up a river while the NPCs talk about the plot and you silently avoid rocks without Marlowe saying a word. Am I stoked about BF3? Oh yes, completely, without a doubt. Am I buying it for the single player game? Absolutely not.