As you can see not too long ago I was a very bitter vet - https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=117249 - the game had finally gotten on my last nerve and I was mere moments away from deleting it for good. Instead of rage deleting the game, I decided to simply quit playing for awhile. Well BF4 came out and I picked up my copy at midnight to rush home and play. After a few days of playing BF4 then returning to DUST I noticed that my "bitterness" for DUST had melted away.

For those of you that have not played BF4, it's bad - plain and simple. The game was designed with the PS4 and XB1 in mind so textures look horrendous. Constant freezing and crashing and the worst netcode in an FPS I've ever seen also plagues BF4.

When I returned to DUST after playing BF4 and reading the BF4 forums, it finally hit me that I'm expecting FAR too much from DUST atm which was leading to my bitterness. Face it, the PS3 is ancient technology, the textures aren't going to look amazing, the game isn't going to be liquid smooth. When this idea finally sank in, I realized that DUST really isn't all that bad. I'm still currently trying to recover from the nausea and headache that playing DUST has caused me because in comparison to BF4, it's FAST and I mean FAST FAST. Just one match after not playing the game for about a week and a half literally had me about to vomit because of how quickly the characters move.

The forums are also vastly different as well. On the BF4 forums, all it is are people literally ripping their hair out over how awful BF4 appears on the PS3 and X360. There is nothing but pure hatred for DICE/EA and people swearing they will return the game as soon as they can. The most notorious complaint on their forums is that DICE made the game play far too much like COD (which I agree, BF4 is now CODField 4) and I can just imagine the tears of anger and disgust falling onto their keyboards as they type fervently about how "their" beloved battlefield is now dead.

The only time you see a "DEV" on the BF4 forums is when they are locking a thread because it has gotten too out of hand. CCP actually cares about us and the game and often listens to our feedback. CCP is also slowly becoming more open and is communicating with us more transparently. DICE/EA never engaged with their playerbase except through the news section once apologizing for launch day bugs.

DUST may not be perfect atm, but it is far from being horrendous and as bad as some of we "bitter vets" make it seem. With the upcoming 1.7 major content drop, I feel like that 1.7 may just be the patch that turns DUST around...a new chapter for DUST so to speak.

Sorry if this sounds ramble-y, I had thought this out in my car driving to work and now pretty much lost the entire train of thought but.....

TL;DR - Realized PS3 is ancient after playing BF4 and I can't expect DUST to be Halo, BF4, Crysis, and EVE all smashed into one game running on the Carbon Engine, because currently DUST is actually quite alright.