DICE has posted another Battleblog entry, this time it concerns unlocks, awards and persistence in Battlefield 3. As many know, Battlefield 2 was the first game to really offer a deep persistence mode, with awards, unlocks and stats that would keep players busy for hundreds of hours.
For Battlefield 3, DICE reveals that the game will feature “more than 10 times the hardware unlocks spread over weapons, weapons attachments, gadgets, and a huge unlock tree for vehicles alone”. Unlocks will be given based on the class you play as and the weapon you use, so if you use a weapon a lot, you’ll get more unlocks for it, same goes for classes.
Regarding awards, the pins have been substituted for ribbons, which will be given out each round (e.g. 7 kills with assault rifles to get the Assault Rifle Ribbon), while it will also feature BF2 style medals, for example, the US service medal is awarded after playing 100 hours as the US Marines. Ranks will be as plentiful as in Bad Company 2, which had 50 ranks in total.
It has also been confirmed that Engineers will get an anti-air rocket launcher, and that Jets will get the choice between air to air missiles, or air to ground missiles/bombs.
tl;dr Engineer gets an anti-air rocket launcher, BF2-like medals are coming backs, and there will be 10x as much unlocks as Bad Company 2.
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