Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

[Dec 13, 2011, 11:21 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

The Battlefield Blog announces the Back to Karkand expansion for Battlefield 3 is now live for Windows PC and Xbox 360. They celebrate the new content for the military shooter sequel with a new trailer showing gameplay on the Sharqi Peninsula map. This page has more details and a FAQ on the add-on, and here's a bit on how this all works:

If you haven’t followed us before, Back to Karkand is our first expansion pack for Battlefield 3. It features four legendary Battlefield 2 maps reimagined in the Frostbite 2 engine, with enhanced levels of destruction.

More than just a map pack, Back to Karkand also features 10 new weapons to extend your arsenal (you can bring these new weapons back to the base game maps), three classic vehicles from Battlefield 2, including the STOVL fighter jet (excellent for hovering and capturing bases), Desert Buggy, and and APC, five new dog tags, and an added layer of persistence with the all-new Assignments you need to complete to unlock new weapons.

Now go back to Karkand and let us know what you think in the Battlelog forums! To find your new maps, just use Quick Match or the server browser as you normally would. The four new maps will appear together with the nine ones from the base game. For a full guide on how to use the server browser on console, check out this guide we prepared earlier. Just make sure you apply the latest multiplayer update for Battlefield 3, or you will not be avle to access Back to Karkand.

If you are a Limited Edition owner, you are entitled to this entire expansion pack at no extra charge. Otherwise, you can buy it for PC from Origin at $14,99 or for Xbox 360 from Xbox Live Marketplace or the in-game store for 1200 Microsoft Points.

View

43 Replies. 3 pages. Viewing page 1.
< Newer [ 1 2 3 ] Older >

43.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 15, 2011, 00:50

Zardoz5

DedEye wrote on Dec 13, 2011, 19:56: PunkiBastardo wrote on Dec 13, 2011, 17:23: Well might as well ask here... Does anyone know any possible workaround for massive continuous lag? That is, besides opening router ports? Only one of my buddies bought BF3 and he basically can't play cause he suffers what would amount to like 2000 ms ping at all times even tho BF displays only around 50 ping for him... If he is using an AMD crossfire setup, try disabling crossfire. I've tried many driver revisions and with crossfire enabled I get terrible pauses for seconds at a time in multiplayer. Works great on a single card thankfully. Another thing to note to is if you are trying to run the game with Ultra Textures but have less than 1.5GB of video ram you will probably experience some thrashing. Repi, DICE's rendering architect mentioned this on the twitters.

42.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 14, 2011, 19:42

DedEye

Thanks for the tip! I was quite hopeful this would do the trick (something similar worked for SH5) but no joy.

41.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 14, 2011, 09:29

Ant

Matshock wrote on Dec 13, 2011, 12:42:
Gah! Authentication servers are down. Just like the fist days of Steam...

But once it's updated- DIRKA DIRKA!

Fist days? Ouch!




Ant @ The Ant Farm: http://antfarm.ma.cx and Ant's Quality Foraged Links: http://aqfl.net ...

40.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 14, 2011, 02:37

zip xavier

DedEye wrote on Dec 13, 2011, 19:56: PunkiBastardo wrote on Dec 13, 2011, 17:23: If he is using an AMD crossfire setup, try disabling crossfire. I've tried many driver revisions and with crossfire enabled I get terrible pauses for seconds at a time in multiplayer. Works great on a single card thankfully. I had terrible stuttering and all that shit with my crossfire setup. They implemented a console command to cap the max fps, which fixed this for me. Once you join a game, hit the console ~ key. Type g, hit tab, then type in the max fps you want. 65 works great for me, it instantly turned the game smooth.

39.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 14, 2011, 01:19

ColoradoHoudini

Enjoying the maps a LOT! Only gripe i have so far is if you don't have a vehicle, Wake is terrible to try to navigate. Everything else is awesome.

38.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 23:33

LittleMe

Sacrifex wrote on Dec 13, 2011, 18:39:
I'm glad that the pack is not free to all PC players for one reason. Everyone who wanted to be a drama queen and ragequit their pre-order, but bought the game, has to pay a fee. It's rare that such exacting justice gets dealt out to the entitled masses. I'd have preferred if anyone who ragequit and came crawling back had to pay more than $15 honostly, but I can settle for savoring their infinite tears and butthurt over less than the cost of a crappy lunch on the town.

ROFL! This is self-entitled central, too. Quite a few narcissistic self-entitled drama queens here. Yup, $48 pre-order well spent.

Only played one map, Oman, and it seems much better than the BF2 version surprisingly. But it performs not so great compared to the original BF3 maps. I'll turn some settings down.




Political freedom can only be preceded by economic freedom which is preceded by monetary freedom.

37.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 23:12

Matshock

No Arabic-speaking faction. What a cop-out. Has DICE been so neutered in just 6 years? Other than that, this is the best USD $48 gaming dollars I've spent all year.

36.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 19:56

DedEye

PunkiBastardo wrote on Dec 13, 2011, 17:23: Well might as well ask here... Does anyone know any possible workaround for massive continuous lag? That is, besides opening router ports? Only one of my buddies bought BF3 and he basically can't play cause he suffers what would amount to like 2000 ms ping at all times even tho BF displays only around 50 ping for him... If he is using an AMD crossfire setup, try disabling crossfire. I've tried many driver revisions and with crossfire enabled I get terrible pauses for seconds at a time in multiplayer. Works great on a single card thankfully. Wake Island is one of my favourite maps. If you're surrounded by tanks grab an engineering kit or get C4 for your support class and blow the mofos to hell It does help if you have peeps on your team that can fly and know to defend flags that spawn armour. If your opponent controls the air and the armour, it's a tough fight.

35.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 19:31

xXBatmanXx

Sacrifex wrote on Dec 13, 2011, 18:39:
I'm glad that the pack is not free to all PC players for one reason. Everyone who wanted to be a drama queen and ragequit their pre-order, but bought the game, has to pay a fee. It's rare that such exacting justice gets dealt out to the entitled masses. I'd have preferred if anyone who ragequit and came crawling back had to pay more than $15 honostly, but I can settle for savoring their infinite tears and butthurt over less than the cost of a crappy lunch on the town.

Well...it will fragment the community huge. It happened to BlOps after the 2nd pack. It is a way for them to kill the community naturally to push their new product.




In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. / Few men have virtue enough to withstand the highest bidder. Playing: RL

34.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 18:39

Sacrifex

I'm glad that the pack is not free to all PC players for one reason. Everyone who wanted to be a drama queen and ragequit their pre-order, but bought the game, has to pay a fee. It's rare that such exacting justice gets dealt out to the entitled masses. I'd have preferred if anyone who ragequit and came crawling back had to pay more than $15 honostly, but I can settle for savoring their infinite tears and butthurt over less than the cost of a crappy lunch on the town.

33.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 18:28

Teddy

Yakubs wrote on Dec 13, 2011, 17:23: These maps should really have been included at release or should have been free for everyone. There's no way I'm going to drop another $15 just to get the complete game. It also seems like a dumb strategy to give it away for free as part of the LE. The people who pre-order are the same people who would willingly pay the extra $15 while the people like me who picked the game up on a whim are almost never going to pony up. So.... punish the dedicated fans and give things away for free to everyone else? That is one of the most idiotic ideas I've ever seen posted here.

32.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 18:08

Endo

And once again they release a pay-for expansion before bothering to fix all the glaring bugs and issues the game already has. Why am I not surprised.

31.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 17:23

PunkiBastardo

Well might as well ask here... Does anyone know any possible workaround for massive continuous lag? That is, besides opening router ports? Only one of my buddies bought BF3 and he basically can't play cause he suffers what would amount to like 2000 ms ping at all times even tho BF displays only around 50 ping for him...

30.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 17:23

Yakubs

These maps should really have been included at release or should have been free for everyone. There's no way I'm going to drop another $15 just to get the complete game. It also seems like a dumb strategy to give it away for free as part of the LE. The people who pre-order are the same people who would willingly pay the extra $15 while the people like me who picked the game up on a whim are almost never going to pony up.

29.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 16:06

Elessar

Hellbinder wrote on Dec 13, 2011, 12:14:
Is this the release that lets me actually play the game for more than 30-45 seconds before it app crashes?

man im glad i spent all that money on a game i cant play, many others cant play, and no one at the dev or pub seems to care.

If you're running a 32bit OS, give this a try. Fixed it for me: http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/forum/threadview/2832654489420350764/




"You don't get what you deserve, you get what you get."

28.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 15:01

born2expire

Yup, of course Origin HAS to go down on my ONE day off this week, GG's EA! Tumbler wrote on Dec 13, 2011, 13:46: Any impressions on the maps? I'm probably going to spend my evening on SWTOR so I'm curious if the maps are worth coming back to this game over? I only liked playing on Firestorm, Caspian and Kharg, I didn't think the other maps were "true" battlefield maps. Do the new maps all give you the full suite of vehicles to play? From the little bit i got to play today, Wake Island blows. It's got like 5 tanks per side and the island is about 100ft wide, so you run away from one tank to the other side of the island and there is 2 others over there Strike at Karkand is awesome, it seems to be exact (from what I remember from BF2) and there is even more buildings that you can enter.

27.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 15:00

Verno

Tumbler wrote on Dec 13, 2011, 13:46:
Any impressions on the maps? I'm probably going to spend my evening on SWTOR so I'm curious if the maps are worth coming back to this game over? I only liked playing on Firestorm, Caspian and Kharg, I didn't think the other maps were "true" battlefield maps. Do the new maps all give you the full suite of vehicles to play?

They are huge, old school BF maps with some nice destruction stuff and plenty of vehicles. Frankly it was exactly what BF3 was lacking and has brought it up to what release probably should have been.




Playing: Animal Crossing, Sleeping Dogs, Tales of Graces F Watching: Survivorman, Justified, Silent Running

26.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 14:39

Dmitri_M

Nice. Oriface's servers are down. Most excellent. Well done EA.

25.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 14:14

venomhed

My BF3 will ALWAYS crash the first time executed within 15 minutes. After that I can get a couple hours in. So lame! Such a buggy game for my friends and I. Skyrim on the other hand won't crash even after 6-8 hours!

24.

Re: Battlefield 3 Goes Back to Karkand

Dec 13, 2011, 13:46

Tumbler

Any impressions on the maps? I'm probably going to spend my evening on SWTOR so I'm curious if the maps are worth coming back to this game over? I only liked playing on Firestorm, Caspian and Kharg, I didn't think the other maps were "true" battlefield maps. Do the new maps all give you the full suite of vehicles to play?




VGfive.com - Game Trading site (Steam codes too!) Kickstarter "Game Developer"!

43 Replies. 3 pages. Viewing page 1.
< Newer [ 1 2 3 ] Older >