Slashdot Mirror
Battlefield 1942 - Secret Weapons Interview
John Callaham writes "HomeLAN chats with Digital Illusions producer Mikael Rudberg as he talks about Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons, the upcoming second expansion pack to their hit multiplayer shooter for publisher Electronic Arts." Seems like Battlefield 1942 has been one of the out-of-left-field smash hits of recent, and from the guys who honed their skills on Pinball Dreams for the Amiga, too.
and maybe included in this update will be some solidity in the man-on-man combat? in the current version firefights between foot soldiers is nothing more than a joke. sniping provides the exampe from which all understanding of the foot soldier fighting mechanics can be derived.... if any of you reading this have actually TRIED sniping in BF42, you know exactly what i'm talking about. accuracy is nonexistant, and thats an understatement. at first, i thought it was an attempt at realism, shoot in front of the enemy as to lead the bullet into them (the game attempting to recreate real life physics, i.e. predicting the trajectory of the bullet by aiming ahead of an enemy who is running perpendicular to you, much like in doom/quake when you shoot a rocket at a running player you do it a bit in front of them so that they run into it), but after using the games many sub machine guns i realized it was nothing more than quakes notoriously pathetic netcode. it is precisly because of this that the popularty of the many quake3 mods in existance today cowers in the shadows of thoes for the half-life engine. the only reaonse BF became as popular as it has is because of all the novelty added... tanks, planes, trucks, stationary machine gun/anti aircraft turrets. they're IMMENSLY fun and have propelled the game to the status it currently enjoys.
why can't it be like half life? i just played DOD 1.0 a few hours ago. i point the sniper crosshair at the chest of the enemy, i shoot, he dies.
i figure so long as the quake3 engine net code continues to hamper man-on-man combat and bullet physics, quake3 engine based games will rely on novelties like planes and tanks to sell themselves.
just my two cents, your milage may vary:
i own quake 1,2,3 and halflife, the latter i can't play on my mac and the former i haven't picked up except at the bi-monly lan-ing i do; i'm not a great FPS person by any means, probably somewhere in the 65th percentile. I'm in the 20th percentile when it comes to RTS games. I don't even own BF1942 and play(ed) it about once a week for 2 hours at a time on my friend's PC rig, and within 2 weeks was ranking #1 or #2 on any server I played on. There's no fun when you realize that this isn't a very competitive game, and very little teamwork is actually involved; far less than in counterstrike. Two decent players on one team can dominate the playing field. While this has alot of fun features, driving people over with a jeep, flying a Zero into a battleship to finish it off and ejecting at the last second, crawling under tanks unhurt, etc, it's just entirely way too unbalanced if two people on a 14 person team can turn the tables in a game in under 5 minutes.
moox. for a new generation.
The problem with this Slash/Games site is that it is clear that the people editing it and the people responding have no fucking clue about games really, except that they play Counter Strike.
Cya, I'm off to read GameSpy, it may be lame and corporate but it isn't full of shit and half-baked claims like this.
This is the second so-called "Expansion pack" to hit BF1942, and the game hasn't even been out for a year. Really, the new stuff in Road to Rome was *NOT* worth paying for - they could just as well have released it as a patch. I smell EA behind this (The Sims and its thousand expansions, anyone?) and I think it'll only get worse from here on, unless people see this for what it is... highway robbery.
I mean, they can't seriously expect me to cough up $30 every four months for a couple new maps+weapons, can they? BF1942 is an incredibly cool game as it is, so just keep supporting it with patches and fixes. Leave the new maps, weapons and features for the modders, or BF1943.
One of the primary reasons for a game to have an expansion pack is to get a better return on the initial investment into the game its self. The secondary, and ultimately less important reason is to release features that were cut from the game during development due to cost constraints.
An expansion does not require quite as much staff to develop, since your not starting from zero. If a game takes about 2 years to develop at a cost of say $3,000,000 dollars, you need to do better then that in sales to make a profit. If you develop an expansion pack for the above game, you can probably do so for 1/3rd the cost. If you sell to the majority of the initial customer base, instead of making 4 million on a 3 million dollar investment, you make 7 million on a 4 million dollar investment.
I would guess that the basic strategy is to only release fixed content in patches, and release new content in expansions. They will probalby also start to bundle the expansions with the base game by this time next year at the latest.
END COMMUNICATION
well considering i can't even get bf1942 to install and run properly, i dont think ill be picking this one up.
got the game to work and it ran ok. very buggy, but whatever it was still fun. had to reinstall win98 and everything went to hell.
just could never get the game to install and work again. i update everything under the sun, contact EA a dozen times but in the end it just wont work.