Pausing trailers at the right moment can deliver gold: at the Battlefield 3 Premium presentation, Dice slipped in a mention of “Tank Superiority” as a new Battlefield 3 game mode. What on earth could it be?
There is already a superiority game mode in the Battlefield canon: Air Superiority made its single appearance in the console only Battlefield 1943, where players only conveyance was the juddery WW2 prop-planes. Instead of fighting over control the things, usual Battlefield way, every player would have a plane. You’d score if you had more planes in the air than the opposition.
Here’s how it looked from cockpits.
How to re-imagine that with all tanks, all the time? It’s a tricky one, because you can easily force people into the air by having them take off from aircraft carriers, so they couldn’t move away from the spawn. How can that work with tanks? They could just rope off the spawn points and have you die if you leave them without a vehicles. Battlefield 3already has that mechanic if you stray out of the map boundaries.
Air Superiority counted ticks according to how many players were in the air. That makes sense in a speedy sky craft, but the size of a map that would need to support a large number of tankswould surely mean that some games end up with two rival tanks miles apart from each other. Doing this on the ground would probably mean adding a control point or two for the players to capture that can only be taken while they’re in tanks. It also needs a lot of room: tanks aren’t exactly sprightly.
So: we think it’s going to land with Armoured Kill, but will be a Battlefield 3Premium only feature. And that tanks vs tanks is the game mode that has the most OMFG potential. Everyone in tanks? It’ll be epic.