Battlefield 1942 Secret Weapons Demo Released

Thanks to Blue's News for their post indicating that the playable PC demo of Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons of WWII has been released, "offering a sample of the upcoming Battlefield 1942 add-on that plays 'what if' with experimental weapons." You don't need the original title to play, and there are mirrors of the 165 MB download on 3D Gamers, Gamer's Hell, BF1942files.com, and a BitTorrent link via 3DGamers.

Comments

Great!

[magsymp]

I'm actually looking forward to trying this.

It's always nice when you have a free quality demo, specially as of late since I can't find anything that keeps my interest very long.

*rubs hands in greedy anticipation*
(ahhh... MUD).

Better then the first expansion?

[Mostly Monkey]

It'll have to be pretty nice before I spend another $30 on an expansion especially with the kick-butt Desert Combat and EOD mods that are available for free.

I felt ripped off after buying the first one once I realized that there were only 6 new maps and a couple of new vehicles and weapons.

Re:Better then the first expansion?

[Grand]

I also felt ripped off buying the road to rome. I bought the game and the expansion at the same time. So far I have played R2R about 10 times. As you said it was more vehicles and more maps. That is exactly what Secret Weapons will be. I think the 1942 mod community is big enough to actually hurt sales of the new expansions (SW and Vietnam). There are some very well made mods out there. Hell, one of the very early playable releases of the GI JOE mod was fun as hell even though it only had 4 different kinds of vehicles. The best mod out there IMO is EoD. It breaks up the norm of 1942 and puts the player into actual infantry combat. So instead of spawning and sitting in a line to get into a vehicle, you get to actually walk around with a gun in your hand. And as a soldier on the battlefield your actually useful NOT in a vehicle.

Re:Better then the first expansion?

[Baines]

Yeah, Road to Rome was a bit of a disappointment.

Also I now hear that there's a lot of cheating going on; Petition against cheats in BF1942.

Free promotion

[superultra]

Ok. This is a good time to point out that the companies, in this case EA, ought to be the ones hosting these files and providing them for download. Demos are promotional material, and yet I don't even see EA hosting the file. How sweet of a deal is that for EA? At some point in the near future the gaming enthusiast community ought to demand respect from gaming publishers. From testing unfinished games (aka patches) to promoting *their* material (demos), the fan community takes up a huge amount of responsibility that the company ought to be the one bearing.

Re:Free promotion

[SmellsLikeFish]

They are providing hosting - its the 1st link on their offical page. If they wanted to they could not allow it to be distributed by other sites but what advantage to me as a gamer would that be? I would just have to wait forever to be able to download it. Also sites such as shacknews, 3dgamers etc would not benefit from people visiting them, seeing what the site was about and maybe returning in the future.

Anyone tried it yet?

[WildBeast]

What are your opinions? I have yet to download it, I'm not really crazy about all those expansions. I mean how many expansions are they gonna make?

Re:Anyone tried it yet?

[neostorm]

"I mean how many expansions are they gonna make?"

As many as they can get you to buy...
(See: Sims)

Insulting expansions

[Mike Hawk]

I dont appreciate them listing new vehicles as new features. From my experience with BF1942, the vehicles are no more than one of the features of the map it is in. Correct me if I am wrong, but its not as if the admin can drop the jet pack in Wake Island now. This goes for the character models and available weapons too, all map dependent. They might as well list the new types of buildings as features. I have serious problems with the concept of expansions in relation to BF1942. It seems to me that it would be more appropriate to call them map packs since that is all they are. They make the game intentionally difficult to mod, then release extra maps and call them expansions. FU too EA.

supersecret

[TurtlesAllTheWayDown]

I haven't played Battlefield 1942, and suspect that the major focus of the game is NOT what I'm thinking about anyway, but I would *love* to see a WWII era strategy game with a focus not so much on battlefield tactics, but on research- toward development of The Bomb.

In conventional history, the Allies hurt the Axis nuclear efforts early on with sabotage of their heavy water processing plants; but if the raid hadn't worked, if Germany had applied more resources to nuke-building, or of others (Japan, USSR) the WWII endgame might have been much more interesting. Even the primitive "dirty-bomb" style devices the German team had been considering could have significant impact, under the right conditions.

A game where you have to balance resources expended on conventional forces vs those spent on research into exotic technology (Hell, you could even throw in a few Philadelpha Experiment style duds; the player ideally should NOT know which technologies would pay off in advance). Spies, and counterspies. An expansion pack could cover Cold War era nuclear research/espionage toward a Super, and Soviet dominance of Europe)

Is there anything like this out, today?

If not, would *you* buy it?

Re:supersecret

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the strat from the creators of Europa Universalis. The game is called Hearts of Iron and is almost exactly like what you described, you can pick it up sub-$25 also, so ENJOY!

Re:supersecret

[Anonymous Coward]

The purpose of Hearts of Iron is to simulate WWII on a global scale, not necessarily the research of Da Bomb. It does include an interesting research model (some like it, some hate it) that is for the most part pretty accurate.

Might be good, but you really shouldnt buy it

[quantax]

Battlefield 1942 was my favorite FPS game released last year and the recent additions of Desert Combat and other good mods make it even better. On the other hand however, EA has really demonstrated their money-grab desires with this game as the first expansion showed. The announcement for the expansion came before the second patch (the first patch was released before the ship date), which IMO somewhat uneloquently displayed EA's desire to make as much money as possible off BF942's success. The first expansion was barely worth the $30 retail price and added a couple new maps and vehicles; Desert Combat had more innovation in their first alpha release than this. Secret Weapons seems a little better in that they might actually have a decent amount of new content, but I refuse to buy it since that would only support EA's Release-Patch-Expansion system. I agree that EA should make money off this, obviously, but I find it a little disrepectful of your audience (the people who spent $50 on the original game) to release a game and inside a month announce an expansion when there are plenty of bugs to iron out still in future patches.

it's not that special

[phunhippy]

I've played it for a few hours last night and I don't think it was anything that is worth 30 dollars at all..

Don't forget.. Desert Combat .39 should be released extremely shortly.. I'm far more excited for that!

It's a bit late but..

[Anonymous Coward]

I played a bit yesterday and today. It was fun but it seems like the servers have really bad lag problems. Is the retail version like that too? Also, how the heck do people fly those planes. I just keep crashing. LOL