By Andrew Reeves

Believe it or not, Battlefield 3 is just a few short weeks away from release. There has been a lot of material to feast your eyeballs on since E3, and even a public beta to whet the appetite. Both EA and DICE know you're exited, and they want you to now that they've been working hard to squeeze every last ounce of power out of each system before they send the final code off to be released. To help with this, they invited a group of various gaming news outlets to a dimly lit room in downtown San Francisco with a few TVs and provided a demo to show the finishing touches being applied as well as exposing a few more details of the various game modes you'll encounter.

They first gave a rundown of the new Battle Log system, which provides a rich online experience tying together all the many levels of statistics you can track across both you and your friends progress throughout the game. It comes with all the bells and whistles you would expect, like customizable profile pictures, real-time feeds of what you're friends are doing, chat, etc. While Battle Log is a great companion to any BF3 player, PC gamers will see the slight advantage of being able to select a friend from the website and jump directly into their game bypassing most of the menus.

Next we were shown a bit of campaign mode, where a few small things about the main character and story line were exposed (no spoilers here.. sorry). What I can safely say without ruining anything is that if you enjoy single player modes and their story lines, BF3 looks like it'll have plenty of what you want. I also noticed that there were a number of quicktime events throughout the opening level and since I have a number of friends who are bothered by this, I thought I should address it head on by saying that it is not meant to be a prophet for the later missions. To me it felt like they were in place to pull your attention towards the story more than anything else, and I don't think I saw another one all day.

We then moved on to co-op, where I was surprised to learn that the missions are not a mirror of the single player mode, but a smaller number of selections that loosely follow the same timeline. The game type plays out in a breach, clear, and move on formula for some of the missions, and an intense shoot everything that moves ask questions later for the rest. While playing through these missions it became obvious rather quickly to both my partner and I that even on the easiest of settings you can’t just enter a new area and expect to survive by running amok. There is a huge emphasis on teamwork here, and if you don’t have it you will not survive in this mode.

Finally we were treated to a couple of multiplayer levels where we played the Rush and Conquest game types. I’m happy to report that there are a number of little tweaks and gameplay improvements that make every demo we’ve seen to date (including the public beta) look like a relic. As beautiful as the graphics looked before, it was shocking to see how impressively cleaned up they were in this build. The audio assets sound like they have also gone through a good wash, making it easy to say that I’ve never heard a more accurate (and intense) set of sound bytes in a game. All of these improvements, combined with the fact that we were promised this was not final release code and there are even more finishing touches to be applied, make for a very promising release. If you had an lingering doubts about what to expect from the publishing giant and its veteran code house, you should probably check out this trailer:

We also came back from the event with some of the latest screens from the game, a sample of which is below:

This one is going to be fun, and because I’m admittedly terrible at multiplayer, I can’t wait to have you guys annihilate me in many numerous fashions on launch day.