Modern Warfare 3 vs. Battlefield 3...I really don’t care

Two of the biggest shooters are going head-to-head this week, but to tell you the truth, I couldn’t care less. I will happily not be siding with Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 or Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 3. It’s understandable, though, if you’ve felt compelled to pick or at least recognize a “winner” based off of all the media hubbub.

A simple Google search for the phrase “Modern Warfare 3 vs. Battlefield 3” yields over 2,500 recent news stories. I recognize the irony that my critique of this situation just adds to the noise, but at least I’m making an effort to not play into all of the traditional hype.

Can you blame news outlets for wanting to milk this “conflict”? If each publisher expects to sell millions of copies of its game, chances are a significant portion of those customers (plus potential customers) will want to read something online that will reinforce their biases. That can add up to plenty of page views and ad money for anyone who covers this match-up.

I’ve seen some sites list and compare the numerical scores that the major video-game press outlets gave to each title. They even throw in quotes from the respective reviews to back up those numbers with cold, hard opinions. Now add the approving and dissenting comments from readers. Does this kind of meticulous comparing and contrasting give us an undisputed winner? Maybe it does -- but to me it just looks like a big circle jerk.

The diehard fans appear to love engaging in that us-versus-them mentality. Like most humans, they derive a nice sense of smugness from thinking that their tastes are better than people of a similar demographic who enjoy a similar pastime.

Have you looked at the titles’ respective Metacritic pages lately? Ignoring the absurdity of using a work’s aggregated review score to assess its worth, it appears that BF3 fans are the most self-righteous. At least, I assume it was them who banned together to give over 1,000 negative user scores to MW3 (as of the time of this writing) compared to BF3’s 68, both for the Xbox 360 version. But I'm getting intertwined in this silliness -- let me get back on track.

In the end, the public is going to buy millions of copies of these damn games and make two of the richest publishers even richer. Industry analyst Michael Pachter predicts that Activision is going to move 16 million units while EA pushes 8 million.

With this in mind, I would expect the publishers to want fans to continue arguing and for the media to keep covering the rivalry in order to drive more sales. So who wins in the MW3 vs. BF3 face-off? Players who enjoy the games along with the developers and publishers who are raking in the cash. Now that that’s been settled, can we all move on? I’ve already given way more shits to this subject than I ever cared to.

Tags: Battlefield 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

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Jonathan Oyama

November 12, 2011

I bought Battlefield 3 because I thought it would be a fun multiplayer game. That was all. I didn't give a crap about this stupid war to end all wars. It's as if the marketers wanted to start some meaningless rivalry to pit fans against fans.

Battlefield 3's Facebook page only makes matters worse. Aside from some cool fan video posts, it always posts relentlessly about how it's the Modern Warfare killer. It's ridiculously stupid. I just bought the damned thing because the multiplayer looked fun.

Honestly, I'll feel better once all this hype is over in a few months.

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Alejandro Quan-Madrid

haha. Whoa, I had no idea that the FB page for BF3 positioning the game to be a MW3 "killer." lol.

Randy Snow

November 13, 2011

I bought both. If I had to say from a gaming standpoint MW3 did the story/moments better. BF3 did great MP "but in my eyes not as great as BF2."

From my feelings on the marketing. I feel MW3 took the high ground. I don't seem to recall the CoD series ever calling out other games, at least from a marketing standpoint. But it seems like Dice is always calling/poking fun at CoD.

But enough of that, I consider this whole 'feud' pretty stupid. Perhaps it can be best compared the Sonic vs Mario thing but set in the modern era. Where telling your friend at school Mario sucks is replaced by spamming forums, and review sites.

Maybe this is the start of a new cycle for a term? Going back to the idea that all FPSers were 'Doom Clones' until Goldeneye and Half Life came out. Then came the 'Halo Killer', now it seems to be about beating CoD sales numbers. Now if only we could come up with a term for this current 'era'.

Yeah, but at least Goldeneye and Half-Life had a different setting to distinguish one from the other. With MW3 and BF3, it's something as abstract as two different playing styles.

If they really want us to consider it as a rivalry similar to the mascot wars, they're going to need some better to determine one from the other. I say they should call BF3 the fun, open-world multiplayer game with a lame, linear single-player mode. In contrast, MW3 is the awesome single-player game with a arcade-style multiplayer mode.

Heck, even describing the two is hard for me to do. The setting is so similar that I don't even care what they do next.