In all the nostalgia of the recent clips showing the maps for Back to Karkand, it’s been quietly ommited an exact date for Back to Karkand.

Well, that’s now been fixed! With a posting on the Playstation website listing the date, we can figure out that the PC version will be one week latter. Source for the Playstation release

Release date for Back to Karkand

PS3: 7th December

PC: 14th December

So that’s a Wednesday.

Looking forward to it!

In the collection of Teasers as we get closer to the Back to Karkand release – a set of four maps from Battlefield 2 being remade in the destructive glory of the Frostbite 2 engine.

This newest trailer focuses on the vehicle heavy map Gulf of Oman, and gives us our first look at the VTOL (able to hover) F35 jets.

Can you feel the Nostalgia?

From the maker of Operation Douchebag, comes another clip heavy on the lols, called Operation Crymore

Of great note are the revisiting of putting claymores on the jeep are now working fun, to hilarious effect. Bonus points for the Michael Jackson music!

A minor update has just been pushed out for the Battlefield 3 servers. This is a small update and covers a crash problem when reviving (!), and some minor variable additions for ranked play.

This is a small update. It contains two changes:

* vars.idleTimeout and vars.idleBanRounds commands are now controllable on ranked servers
* Crashfix when a player is reviving another player

Since it’s Thanksgiving over in the US we are not mandating that all RSPs update within a specific timeframe. Most of them will likely offer this as an optional upgrade for the time being.

This won’t likely be rolled out as quickly as the previous R9 Patch, where the client patch would only see R9 and higher servers. This meant if a server operator was lazy in updating they would have noticed no players able to join the server anymore. There is no such requirement for this one, and likely will see it slowly roll  out over the weekend.

The note about crashing when reviving is interesting, as we were only aware of the TV Guided missile bug, where it is possible for a squad mate to spawn in an invalid position in the Attack chopper to make the server crash. Still, any crash fixes are great!

Source from Battlelog

So, a bit earlier than expected, we now have the first patch available!

It has been covered already in Battlelog, as well as in gamespy, and of course battlefieldo, But the important things which you may be interested in are:

• GameTime.MaxVariableFps can be used to cap your framerate for vsync and higher refresh monitors
• UI.DrawEnable   can be used to disable all hud elements for video recording (update: doesn’t appear to work)
• Joystick options now have a deadzone setting
• Squad join functionality minor changes

*update* There is more information now posted on the Battlelog regarding the patch and server page here

The full change list can be seen by jumping past the fold…

While you are twiddling with the invert controls option in Battlefield and setup your joystick, here is some motivation for you to hurry up and get it done.

This beautiful collection of jet footage was posted by SuperRoach in the movies section of the forums.

I’m not sure if you would call the following a teaser or a full blown trailer, however the excitement I got from watching this the first time made me giddy.

Of note in this trailer is they are completely pc footage, as seen by the massive amount of flags able to be captured in the video.

Also, destruction is again at the forefront here, with the new (old?) maps from Battlefield 2  are back and exploding to pieces everywhere.

First off we have new graphics drivers just released for amd, which are detailed here. You can look forward to improved crossfire profile performance, as well as my pet peeve – occasionally your second screen will turn black, leaving only Battlefield 3 the visible thing (I usually have battlelog or my voice coms on the other screen. The version number of these are 11.11 .

AMD Page for Latest Drivers

NVIDIA also have drivers recently release, with their driver page being tricky to link directly too, but here it is . Their version is number 285.62, and has fairly strong recommendations to use it if you don’t already due to the Battlefield 3 optimizations in it.

However, NVIDIA also have beta drivers, if you feel like taking it to the …. danger zone. The version of this beta is 285.79, and these were only released on the 10th of November. Have a look at the notes and download here

Patch notes coming soon

Lastly, community manager zh1nt0 in the forums has mentioned that the sought after patch notes will be coming soon for Battlefield 3, as seen by his forum post here.

It has been speculated heavily that the tactical light will be toned down, as it was seen by a post from one of the developers with a less powerful light:

Tactical LightReference http://t.co/39fXY6MtBefore http://t.co/oxEPpGCcAfter http://t.co/bOSx4rio

November 8, 2011 10:58 pm via DigsbyReplyRetweetFavorite

@Demize99

Alan Kertz

No word has been given on things which will be critical for the ESports community, which will include spectator and Battlerecorder.

What happens when you get someone that sounds like Jason Statham and a collection of great kill streaks?

This clip is the answer. Well presented (although highlighting our urgent need for Battle recorder to get clips from the comunity easier), You see a collection of multi kill frags and fluke shots such as a rocket shot taking out a building and everyone in it as it misses its intended target of a tank.

The highlights for me too show off the excellent reloading animations on the guns, which I think you will agree on if you watch this clip, well done to Hazard Cinema.

If you’d like to leave any comments, check out this post in our forums

The the early morning hours here in Australia, a new Back to Karkand trailer was released:

Noken (of Snoken Productions) excels again with a fantastic presentation showing lots of Sharqi Peninsula action from Battlefield .

As well as this, a new mode was named:

Classic Conquest Assault mode  More flags, and you can capture every flag just like the original bf2!

This could be interesting to see if this would be back ported (forward ported?) into the newer Battlefield 3 maps, to give more of an sense of urgency to maps, as when all the flags are gone, the map will be over.

Thanks to the battlelog blog, there has been more information about Back to karkand coming out in December. In the more immediate timeframe though, Improvements to squad joining have been promised, and stability changes have already been rolled out to the servers (you can now play Caspian border and Tehran highway without the rubber banding ball of death effect!)

In the trailer and blog, there is talk of “Extended Persistence”. At first I thought this would be some more dogtags to earn or something similar, but the term in the blog is being coined as “Assignments”. I wonder if this will similar to Blackops, where you could purchase contracts for time limited objectives such as X amount of Headshots, or something totally unique.