The PS3 beta was like PC alpha but with no AA, other than that, the graphics quality was pretty much identical to the PC version. The main difference I noticed between the two was weird ammo icons that appeared above friendly players heads that were in close proximity. If they are very close, the ammo icon will extend into the full player name. I didn't like that at all. One bug from alpha remained that I noticed, which was players running around with nothing but a floating clip and the gun model not showing. The game pads were set to maximum sensitivity for aiming, and that was difficult for me to use.
As for the NDA that lee was talking about, but in our brief we got told specifically to talk about Battlefield 3, and did not have to agree to any NDA. My girlfriend was with me, and he PS3 failed to load the game, so a tech gur rebooted it, and when she loaded the game up it clearly said BATTLEFIELD_3_OPEN_BETA as the game title, and as far as I'm aware, there are no NDA's for open beta.
Also, we got a look at the main menu which we didn't get to see in PC alpha due to origin just bumping us into the game. There were the general options you'd expect, campaign, multiplay, options and I think credits was there, nothing to phone home about. The background was the standard battlefield 3 guy.
The game played well, they had a few changes to the standard PS3 controls, holding down left analouge stick was run, pressing right analouge went to crouch and holding it fown was prone, left trigger was grenade, right trigger was melee, right button was shoot and left button was scope view. The rest was as you'd expect.
I got a few kills including a knife kill so I was happy, seeing as I don't play shooters on consoles much. I checked to see if they have implimented destruction fully yet and they hadnt' Shooting walls and statues did nothing.
And it was metro we played, same as alpha. Played MW3 while I was at gamefest as well, and battlefield blew it out of the water. I have a couple of CoD fanboys as mates, and we all went in together, and one of them said 'DICE have really uped their game! As soon as spawned I realised it was so, SO good! The sound was amazing, I'm definatlly buying it! I'm not even sure if I'm going to bother with modern warfare 3 now.'
We played Spec ops game mode for MW3, and it was identical to MW2 with a few extra guns. The player models had been redone, but as far as game engine and gameplay went, it was just MW2 re-released. We watched one of the activision team play a single player mission on a big screen while we were in the queue, and the AI were more interested in shotting his unkillable AI team mates and only about 3 AI soldiers shot at the player. Captain prices voice over had just been lifted from MW2 and not even re-recorded with different dialouge, it was the same lines of text in a different order. Bad times for activision this year, BF3 is going to wipe the floor.
As for those of yo usaying 'Prove it' we were told not to take any photos or videos in the booth, but I do have a picture of a BF3 poster we were given.
Also one last heads up, Single player and co-op is confirmed as available in open beta. 8 people in the group next to us were playing that, but I couldn't tell what map it was or what was going on. The rep guy also said you can counter knife attacks now too, you get a split second to hit melee when being stabbed, and you can counter it and stab them instead. Genius!