Battlefield 3 End Game’s Dirt Bike Bonanza

Dirt bikes are coming! We've been exclaiming it for a while now, but it's tough to keep our excitement in check when we know that Battlefield 3's End Game downloadable content pack will let us fly off ramps while launching rocket-powered grenades.

An update on the Battlefield Blog from a DICE Quality Assurance Analyst, Malin von Matern, goes over how the jumps in the new End Game maps exist to let players have a lot of fun on the dirt bikes.

He talks about how much they had to tweak the initial jumps so that players could successfully get some "big air" or avoid features in the environment that would lead to certain doom, like rock walls or trees.

Shown below are some dev shots illustrating the changes made on a jump in order to make it more successful and fun.

"If you don’t give the player enough information about the jump on the approach, it’s easy to misalign the jump and end up crashing into a rock or a tree," said von Matern. " An example of this is the problem we had with the mega jump on Operation Riverside mentioned earlier. When players came up on the second jump while approaching from the Russian side of the river, many ended up crashing straight into the rock wall."

One of the biggest advantages of riding the dirt bike is that it's small and fast, allowing you to zip past enemies or outrun heavy vehicles. And the best part is that you don't have to ride solo, since having a passenger won't weigh down your bike. We personally want to see if we can use a buddy to launch an RPG as soon as we hit a jump, just to give us that extra little boost.

End Game will be available next month for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. Let us know if you're going to grab some air during your runs through the new maps! Check out the dev shots and video below, showing the bikes in flight. And of course, it wouldn't be Battlefield if we didn't see something exploding!