Eurogamer Readers vs. Battlefield 3

Colin is also a fan of the sound. "It's clear that DICE has spent an incredible amount of time and focus on the sound of Battlefield 3," he says. "As with its previous games the sound is impeccable, explosions have a deafening boom and the gunfire sounds scarily powerful." Apparently DICE goes out with the Swedish armed forces on manoeuvres to capture some of the noises, which is pretty incredible. (I mean, who knew Sweden had an army?)

For Joe O'Connor, however, it's the way the non-player characters behave in Operation Guillotine that sticks in the mind. "In the charge down a hill into Tehran, surrounded by squad-mates, one of the chaps next to us was caught in a mortar blast and blown a good few feet into our path," he remembers.

"What with how he landed, and how the NPC was struggling to get up, I really wanted him to be okay. The animation was incredibly human, and that's a really hard thing to get right. It really helped sell the feeling of being there, of being surrounded by real people in a real war, and was a nice compliment to the rest of the physicality they built up, such as being helped over a fence by a fellow soldier, or helped to fire a flare into the sky."

Joe wasn't completely sold though. "What I didn't like was one of the scripted moments they'd put in, where an attempt to break open a door was rudely interrupted by an enemy kicking it open from the other side, and the player going briefly into slow-motion as he pumped the shotgun into the enemy.

"Never have I been so rudely pulled out of a game I'd been utterly absorbed in. It was almost as if DICE didn't have enough faith in the dynamic engine they'd created, and felt a need to put something dramatic in at just that moment."

From this narrator's perspective, it was one of the most Modern Warfare-esque moments of the whole level, although, to be fair, the other example was a man stumbling out of a doorway on fire, which was a static script set off by a dynamic event - us throwing a grenade through a window - and really did hit the mark.

After checking out the co-op and campaign, the competition winners got to sit down with executive producer Patrick Bach for well over half an hour to talk about the game, and after a slow start we got into an interesting discussion about everything from the state of the beta to Bach's take on storytelling in games, specifically the way that Battlefield 3 doesn't let you shoot civilians - something which upset a few people at the time.

Joe thinks he made his point well though. "As a producer he doesn't want the image the random person on the street has of Battlefield 3 to be some idiot on YouTube gunning down a whole mess of civilians. He seems to want it to be of huge battles between jets and tanks and infantry. It's a fine distinction - people are still dying - but it's one I think he has a right to make.

"I've actually been quite annoyed with people I've read in comment threads saying, 'Why doesn't he let me play how I want to play?' They should just grow the hell up. It's that sort of attitude which is going to stop gaming from reaching its potential. At this stage in its development it still needs room to breathe, and it's not going to get it if very mainstream games try to branch out when it's unnecessary. Let the indies test the waters in the way that smaller films did back in the thirties and forties. The big games with 'issues' will come in time.

"We need a whole generation of gamers, for the sort of people who read the Daily Mail to not be terrified of this new-fangled medium, before we'll really get our Apocalypse Now, our game which truly explores the horrors of war."