...according to DeVore - a boards.ie member who has had some experience playing the BF3 Demo - Dedicated LAN servers will NOT be supported.  You will have to rent a server a la BC2.

It looks awesome. if you could make a game out of Black Hawk Down, it would look like this.

So, specific answers.

Yes there is an extensive singleplayer campaign.

Its developed with the Frostbite2 engine and it was developed for the PC. The xbox version has been scrunched down. In fact one of the techs was telling me that when they first tried it on 360, it would barely render a single player object before optimisation.

Snipers are in it but i didnt get to see any play as them.

There is regenerating health like Halo.

Here's the shocker.... no dedicated LAN support. The lan has to have connection out to the interweb. He said would you be able to rent dedicated servers, "like before" ... which i hope makes sense to you.

I asked about commander mode and they all clammed up and wouldnt say anything. I doubt you will see it as one head guy did say "it was only 2 out of 128 people, its a lot of work for that"... but i expect some new tactical and strategic elements to MP because there was something they werent telling us.

They wouldnt say a lot about MP and certainly wouldnt answer questions about mods squads, mostly they wanted to show off the pretty pictures which were... in fairness... pretty.

There was one thing I loved, their destruction physics are amazing, you can tear down a 5 storey hotel to the ground, to rubble, or you can blow about a 1/6th of a breezeblock away from a wall to get a shot or to reveal an enemy in cover.

If we get another invite in the fall (as we sometimes do) I'll try to get a BF mod over to it, we've done it before for driving games mods. This was much more than BF though, i got to see and play Portal 2(awesome, gonna be huge!) and tons of other stuff.

Source: http://enterbf3.com/viewtopic.php?t=1598

Link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/10680/

Today I stumbled upon an article about a teacher using Minecraft in his lesson plan.
Full Article here: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/04/educational-building-blocks-how-minecraft-is-being-used-in-the-classroom.ars

I think it's great that kids are getting involved with not just computers but the social aspects of being connected in a virtual world. "Hold on!" you say; "That was quite the string of buzzwords!" I apologize. There certainly were a bunch of buzzwords but let me explain.

This teacher is using Minecraft to make the computer class more interesting and who could blame him? Games are fun! But Minecraft being very open-ended lead to things that I see that naturally occur even when we are playing. Territorial disputes. Building with limited resources. And most of all teamwork. This is were I believe my string of buzzwords comes into play. Being "LAN gamers," I would like to claim, that we are more social than just "gamers." We like the interaction with other people but there are times when it is difficult. Personality conflicts are just facts of life but we normally find ways of dealing with issues in a civil manner. One of the topics brought up in the article is about when these disputes arise they can stop and have discussion(s) about what is going on face to face. This is something I hope the kids can take away from these classes.

On a side note hopefully this will spur on another generation of LAN Gamers!


Blog: http://minecraftteacher.tumblr.com/