This is what I consider the peak era of gaming in my life. Battlefield dominated most of it. This post is try and post all my thoughts, almost 15 years after.

2011: The Alpha

Battlefield 3 open alpha was announced in mid 2011, and there was a lot of chatter about this on Twitter and other gaming forums back then. Competitive gaming was not something I Was into at this point. The whole idea confused me. I had a lot of single player games to play, so I exclusively played them.

Side note - 2011 Twitter was nothing like X in 2026. It was mostly a lot of mundane stuff. There were no culture wars happening, and it was very edgy. You couldn’t get a bluecheck unless you were deemed worthy, and tweets were only 140 characters. I think X as a platform is better, but I wish there was more fun gaming content. Donald Trump was a real estate tycoon, reality TV star, him becoming the President of the United States is the farthest thing from anyone’s mind. I say this because the golden age of Battlefield ended for me because President Trump influenced in some manner the downfall of Battlefield, at least in my opinion.

Gaming in general was very different. This was a hobby for passionate gamers, and most of the discussion centered around things like graphics, hardware, mods etc., and game journlists are not the laughing stock they are today. Injecting politics into gaming was seen as a dumb thing to do because gaming was an escape. Why would I ever want politics in my video games? I am playing video games partly to escape from all the real world nonsense.

I bought a GeForce GTX 570 in April 2011, and I wanted to play an FPS game with great graphics. Somehow Battlefield entered my conscious thoughts, and I decided to give it a try. At this point, Crysis is still the best single player FPS out there. I believe Crysis 2 was released, but I didn’t own it yet, and also, I read that it wasn’t a PC focused game like the first one was.

I realized I need to use EA Origin to download the game, and it wasn’t available on Steam. I hated the idea but because the game was free, I decided to try it. Its not like I was ever going to buy a Battlefield game anyway, right? Who has time for multiplayer games anyway, with so many great single player games to play.

So I went ahead and downloaded Origin, went through the account creation process, and then downloaded the game. I remember this very vividly to this day. I started the game, and a browser window opened. I had no idea what the heck was happening. This was BattleLog. Something I dearly miss today, but I hated it at the time. I thought it was the dumbest thing in the world. Why would anyone want to open a browser to launch a game? I couldn’t figure out what to do, but I started clicking around and I eventually figured out that I needed to click on server and join it, and so I did.

It put in a Rush match on Operation Metro. I was completely blown away by the graphics. They were amazing. I had to turn some settings down to get decent frame rate, but it was still looking absolutely amazing. It was hands down the best looking game I ever played. There was one problem though - I had no idea what to do. I didn’t know what Rush meant (at that point, I never played Bad Company games). I was lost. I did not know how weapons worked, and it was a miserable experience.

Here is a video showing how bad I was at the same when I first played it.

I decided it wasn’t for me. I gave up on it.

Battlefield 3 Part 1

After the disaster that was the Alpha, I decided Battlefield and multiplayer gaming wasn’t for me. I played singleplayer games, and went on with life.

In december 2011, Battlefield 3 entered my gaming conscious again. I don’t remember what led to this, but I wanted to give it another go. Something about the game just caught my attention. Was it the gun play (which i was horrible at)? Was it the gritty military aesthetic? Was it the stellar graphics? Can’t say, but I ended up buying it. On Thursday, December 1, 2011, I purchased Battlefield 3 on Amazon for $49.51.

After I downloaded the full game, and I installed it, I opened Battlelog again. This was still something I thought was silly and I hated the idea of launching the game via the browser. I started browsing Battlelog, and I remembered that back when I played Battlefield 2 demo with bots, I played the conquest mode (even though I didn’t really understand what conquest meant. I used to play conquest like TDM). So I decided to look for conquest games in the server browser. Having found one, I joined it, and I remember it put me to Grand Bazar. I remember thinking the map looked amazing. I was still very bad at the game. I finished near the bottom. Maybe got one or two kills. Quite sure I played as Engineer, and tried to use the RPG on infantry, expecting it to work like Quake 3, and of course it didn’t. I got killed almost immediately.

I hated being bad at the game. I then played a round of Operation Firestorm. I got killed in every manner imaginable. I was terrible at the game.

Depressing. I am never played this game again. I should just stick to single player games.

Noshar Canals TDM

June 2012. I got wisdom tooth surgery, I took a few days off from work. My wife suggested that we try Battlefield 3 together as a squad. I did not have anything better to do in life, and she was going to go back to school in a different country in a couple of weeks, so I thought it will be fun to play with her. I had absolutely no intention of playing Battlefield 3 once she left, because I didn’t enjoy being terrible at the game.

She was playing on a laptop and I was playing on my desktop. Her laptop at the time was not powerful enough to run Battlefield 3 even on medium settings, So she turned the settings way down and we decided to try a smaller game mode. We happened to find a TDM server running Noshar Canals. We joined the server, and we started playing it. I understood the game mode, and because there were no vehicles, I played support and my wife played Assault.

I slowly started to understand the mechanics of the game, how the unlocked worked, how to help teammates etc. I started to play more assault and discovered the god tier M16A3, which became my go to assault rifle. There were still aspects of the game I was just not familiar with - playing as an engineering, using vehicles, sniping, game modes like conquest etc. I didn’t care. I was just happy playing TDM. My wife and I spent many hours over the next few weeks playing Noshar Canals TDM.

This continued when she left to go back to school. We played Noshar Canals TDM when we were on different continents. This map holds special memories because of the time I spent learning to play Battlefield

YouTube

In addition to the Battlefield discussions on Twitter, and Reddit, I noticed that there was user created Battlefield content on Youtube. The most notable video was the rendezook from stun_gravy. It was unbelivable. How can someone jump out of a jet, RPG another jet and get back into the jet? How did they even know this is possible? This wasn’t staged. This was in a multiplayer round. I was speechless.

The golden era of Battlefield also gave us some of the best Battlefield content on Youtube. Always looked forward to videos from these channels. Every day there was a video from one of these channels, and I would come back from work and look forward to watching their videos. None of these are dedicated Battlefield channels anymore. They have branched into other things, and that is understandable.

Conquering Conquest

I still was mainly playing TDM at this time. I never got the hang of Conquest, and it was too chaotic. Around this time, the excellent Close Quarters DLC was released. This DLC was focused on smaller maps, Domination game mode, and micro destruction. I played the heck of out of this DLC. Loved 3 of the 4 maps. Did not enjoy Scrapmetal a lot. I don’t mind it, but its nowhere near as good as the others. Operation 925 was my favorite map in this DLC.

Playing domination made me understand conquest. I knew Armored Kill DLC is around the corner. When I watched the launch trailer of Armored Kill DLC, I knew I wasn’t getting the full Battlefield experience playing just Domination and TDM. The trailer for this DLC was epic. I watched some youtube tutorials on how to play Conquest and be effective. I knew I had to jump into this game mode and figure things out myself and I should not let some bad rounds deter me from playing this mode. I just have to enjoy the ride.

One of the first Conquest rounds I played after my new found resolve was Caspian Border. I still played support on conquest because I felt like this class was best suited for new players. LMGs have unlimited ammo, and you can resupply teammates, and you are always contributing to the team. I pretty much just followed people around, gave ammo, and managed to hold my own for a bit. This set the Battlefield journey in motion.

From then on I played conquest large, and I played other modes just to unlock weapons. I would diligently watch weapon reviews and try to incorporate them into my game. I would also try to imitate the gameplay of the youtubers, and that was a lot of fun. This got me hooked on learning the map layouts, figuring out gameplay and weapon combinations. I found myself immersed in this world of Battlefield. I was watching Battlefield history videos, watching gameplay recordings of older games. I was fascinated by this game. I finished 9 single players games in 2012, 4 games in 2013 and none in 2014. Battlefield went from being a game I never thought I would play to being my main game.

Capturing Battlefield Moments

I wanted to record gameplay and upload videos to youtube. I used FRAPS before. The first video I recorded using FRAPS. It was a round of Quake 3 deathmatch on nightmare difficulty. I recorded a few clips here and there, and uploaded them to my old youtube channel, but it was under the controlled environment of a single player game. So I remember a video from JackFrags about recording gameplay using Dxtory, which was much better than FRAPS. So I started recording game play videos. This became a side hobby that I pursue to this day. It was still a cumbersome process though, and you have be recording all the time to capture those Battlefield moments. I learned the basics of video editing and if memory serves me right, I used Sony Vegas Pro for editing the clips.

This post was started on 3/29/2026 on Amtrak en route from Austin to Fort Worth, TX.