Battlefield 3 is a chaotic shooter where realism takes a backseat to explosions and people doing wild shit with vehicles. Thanks to an ambitious new mod, though, the game can now also be played slightly more seriously.
BF3: Reality Mod has been seven years in the making, with around 80 people contributing to its development. It takes Battlefield 3—first released in 2011!—and turns it into something that looks almost completely unrecognisable. The new, minimal UI is the first thing you notice visually, but the most important changes here have been made to the gameplay experience itself.
The development team say their “fundamental goal is to create immersive gameplay and a more realistic experience,” and so have completely redesigned the way you play the game. There’s a massive increase in the importance of communication and working successfully in small squads.
“We want to create an environment, where in order to succeed, one must rely on other team members and not only on personal skills,” they say on the project’s site. “We want to make players feel that by doing even a small task of a bigger plan, they are contributing to their team’s victory.”
It’s not striving to be a true simulation game—like the ArmA series—just a more involved version of Battlefield, so if you think of recent shooters like Squad or Hell Let Loose you’ll be closer to what Reality Mod is trying to achieve.
Here’s a trailer showing off the changes the team have made to the base game:
If you’re an experienced Battlefield player and you’re thinking, “Boy, this sounds a lot like Project Reality,” you’d be right! That mod was a huge inspiration for this project (as the developers of Reality Mod say repeatedly on their site), but that was for Battlefield 2, and this is for the nicer-looking and more modern (by comparison) Battlefield 3.
To play the mod, you’ll need a legit copy of Battlefield 3, and can then download everything you need here.