And there you have it ladies and gentlemen, after close to a year's worth of teasing, promising and fair bit of showboating Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and EA's Battlefield 3 are both in the wild. But which one delivers?
EA has made it known through its advertising campaign and numerous confrontational soundbites that it's aiming for Call of Duty's throne with DICE's latest shooter.
Meanwhile Activision has observed a quiet confidence in its genre-leading franchise, holding an assured silence that some would posit borders on arrogance.
Battlefield 3 reached European shores on October 28 and - on the same day - EA revealed DICE's shooter got off to
"a fantastic start on sales and quality". He wasn't kidding.
EA CEO John Riccitiello said during an earnings it had shipped 10 million units to retail and was already receiving reorders. Later that week Battlefield 3 was
declared to be 'the fastest-selling EA game ever'.
Critics gave the game a very
warm reception and the generally positive reviews pushed its Metacritic review average to a high of 93%.
Although Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has only been official available for a few days now (close to a week unofficially courtesy of a few
cheeky retailers) industry analysts have said Infinity Ward's shooter is expected to move between 5.5 and 6 million copies during its first 24 hours on sale.
Like it's opposition MW3 has gone down
a treat with critics, with the majority of reviews landing around the 9/10 mark.
Gamers however haven't been as kind and flocked to review aggregator Metacritic and submitted
hundreds of scathing reviews, dragging its user review average down to rock bottom. Some would say unfairly so.
If numbers are the metric of success the obvious answer is both games are huge success' in their own right, but what we're interested in is your opinion, how you feel about both games individually and relative to each other.
Do you think Battlefield is everything EA claimed it to be? Has Activision delivered another title worthy of the crown? Which out of the two do you expect to be playing months from now? Let us know in the comments below.
