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Review: Battlefield 2
- Title: Battlefield 2
- Developer: Digital Illusions
- Publisher: Electronic Arts
- System: PC (only)
- Reviewer: Zonk
- Score: 8
So how do you improve on an already great title? The sequel to Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield Vietnam stays very close to the source material. So close, in fact, that it's hard to point to any fundamental change in the gameplay mechanics. The changes, instead, are quality of life improvements. The game's engine allows for lagless infantry combat and accurate vehicular strikes. A fantastic audio environment places you directly in the action, raising the heart rate as bullets whiz by your head. Graphical improvements allow for a beautiful setting to slay your enemies, and tight level design makes for surprisingly tense house-to-house fighting. Stripping away options in favor of enjoyment, BF2 only ships with the Conquest game type, which pits armies of varying size against each other in a bid to control a set of nodes scattered across a map. Though there aren't that many maps each of them scales from 16 to 64 players. This allows for each map to evoke a different feel, from squad on squad to army vs. army, depending on the battle's size.
The additions they've made to the Battlefield series instead changes the framework of the tried and true gameplay they're offering up. Players have several different kits they can outfit themselves with, as in the original titles, but new kits such as the special forces soldier add in some variety. Support characters, like medics and engineers, can also increase their effectiveness by entering vehicles. These vehicles become mobile support bases, with medics inside vehicles healing fellow players that stand near the unit. Players can form themselves into small squads, each of which has a dedicated voice chat channel. Squad leaders can issue orders via a push-button system or voice, and have their group act in unison. The squads on a particular side are in turn directed by a commander. The commander of a side has a very different perspective on the game, a top down map interface giving him a birds-eye view of the proceedings. The commander has several tools at his disposal, including a kind of enemy detecting radar and the ability to call down artillery strikes. When the entire system is working in unison, players acting in concert within their squads and in league with other units directed by a commander, the experience is something akin to poetry in motion.
Unfortunately, that frission of so many different players working together rarely happens. While gamers have adopted voice chat for everything from Massive games to UT Tourneys, they generally do so with people they already know. In playing online, very few individuals seemed willing to make their voices heard to strangers. The in-game text commands are easy to access and informative, but they're still no match up for a quickly uttered statement. While cohesion within squads does seem to be generally good, as there are only a few people to coordinate, the level of effectiveness is entirely dictated by the squad leader. One suicidal or absent-minded guy at the reins can meant that you and your comrades are in for one messy death after another. In the overall picture, the commander's role ends up less utilized than it could be. Armchair generals abound in the FPS world, but in practice few are anything approaching a virtual Colin Powell. The experiences I've had lead me to believe that overwhelming force will almost always win the day. Beyond the game itself, the frustration involved in getting into combat is often off-putting. It may seem like picking nits, but the glacial slowness and murky obscurity of the server browser is extremely frustrating to have to deal with when compared to the user interfaces offered by other games.
Battlefield 2, then, is an extremely competent first person shooter with a strong pedigree and a vision to improve the way in which the genre is played. It is hampered by the vagaries of online play with strangers, poor user interface decisions. On top of these issues, bugs have been a problem since the game was released. Numerous patches, some even more devastating than the bugs they were meant to fix, have not endeared the game to players. Despite all these problems, when a group of players clicks in a Battlefield 2 game it is unlike any other team-based FPS on the market. Fans of the previous games will be happy to get back into the game they love, no questions asked. Veteran FPS players should definitely consider picking up a copy, as it's highly likely that you're going to run across this title at your next LAN party ... but you'll probably want to save it for LAN parties. Players new to the PC FPS experience will find things to enjoy here, but may be intimidated by the amount of knowledge the game assumes on the part of the player. Overall, while not a disappointment, Battlefield 2 falls short of a dramatic reprisal of the Battlefield series.
It amazes me that people keep suggesting that BF2 is this great example of what makes PC gaming better than console gaming.
I am a PC gamer and while I own most of the consoles, I never turn them on because I prefer the PC experience and my high-resolution cutting-edge graphics to playing on a "tee vee".
But Battlefield 2 was clearly designed from day one TO BE A CONSOLE GAME! Just look at the user interface. It's designed to be operated by a console-style game controller without any need for a keyboard, mouse, or any of the rest of the PC user interface.
The primary communication interface consists of a button-triggered popup menu of canned messages, and keyboard-based chat looks like an afterthought.
The user experience for this game will be identical in its console ports, and not because the consoles will be made to behave like PCs, but because the designers of this game went to a fair amount of trouble to make the PC behave just like a console.
The game may look better on today's PCs when compared to today's consoles, but this is simply due to the more modern (and several times more expensive) hardware in a current gaming PC. There may be other reasons why PC gaming is better than console gaming, but BF2 presents no examples (that I can see) of why this might be the case.
BF2 *is* a great game though, and is the first game of its type that actually convinced me to buy it.
G.
It's much more satifying to play as a sniper now that the game doesn't give away your hiding spot everytime you successfully take someone down.
Also the spawn times of the vehicles should scale based on how many players are on the map. On maps with fewer players there are far too many vehicles to go around.
But VGCats said it best.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Pitched, high tension battles fought street to street and house-to-house are experiences that consoles just can't offer up yet.
1. Take HALO engine.
2. Apply city-scape graphics.
3. There's no step three.
There are three things I can think of which set PC gaming apart, and none of them are "pitched, high tension battles fought street to street and house to house," which sounds to me like something that consoles would be great at.
What sets PC gaming apart is:
1. Mouse-driven FPS.
2. Keyboard-driven text chat.
3. Mods.
Pretty much everything else a PC game can do could also be done on a console.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
If Battlefield 1942 was fought in IIWW realia, shouldn't Battlefield 2 be located, say, in Roman Empire, the unrests caused by king Herod, barbarians' attacks from the north, this kind of stuff, when Jesus was a 2-year-old child?
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I've been playing since the game came out, and have the following hardware:
P4 3Ghz with HT
1 Gigabyte of RAM
ATI X800 SE PCIE
160gig Western Digital 8meg SATA Drive
Soundblaster Audigy 2 (in 4 channel mode)
The game runs like a dog in anything higher than 1024x786 resolution on that hardware. You have to leave all the settings at "medium", otherwise stuttering will occur (I've heard this is because higher settings require 256+ megs of video RAM, which I don't have.)
The game easily consumes my gig of RAM, and starts forcing Windows to swap to disk. It gets so bad, that after exiting the game, I have to wait approximately a minute before I can use the PC again (from it swapping all the memory out of the disk.) This PC just has Windows XP installed on it, nothing else running in memory.
The game will also randomly "crash" while loading a level. I'll complete a map online, and it will appear to start loading the next map, a black screen will appear, and then my desktop. Yay!
There are also issues with the "aiming"-- I think it's a case of the server/client prediction being different. I can unload an entire clip of an MP5 at short range (5-10 feet), with crosshairs on someone, and somehow 90% of my bullets miss, and the guy goes into "prone" mode and stabs me up close. Huh? There's also this funky "jump and go prone" manuever, as well as the "jump from a building and fire accurately while falling" manuever. Things that shouldn't be happening, essentially.
It's still an enjoyable game, it just has flaws and needs patching..
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
...I don't think DICE/EA QA'd this at all. At least with the 1.02 patch out it's a bit more playable.
This post could go on forever and I don't want that - so here's a list of the embarassing problems this game has. Not all of these are directly DICE/EA's fault, but they're all things DICE/EA could fix:
The Server Browser in the game has no "Favorites" functionality
Copy-Paste doesn't work, so if you want to play on a friend's server get your notepad out
Broken Tabstops all over the User Interface
Teamkill tracking issues too abundant to list
Ranked Servers not uploading their numbers to EAs master servers
Ranked Server Providers cramming so many hosts on single systems that VOIP functionality for in-game voice is non-functional
No anti-Bunnyhopping in the game
Jump-To-Prone is an exploit and should be removed from the game
Armchair generals abound in the FPS world, but in practice few are anything approaching a virtual Colin Powell. The experiences I've had lead me to believe that overwhelming force will almost always win the day.
;)
Uh...the "Powell Doctrine" is one of overwhelming force. Maybe there's a few more eColins out there than you think
Well, not really even 2 patches as within days of the first patch EA "recalled" it and suggested people just reinstall the game and NOT patch it.
But that's neither here or there. I'm done with this game. It's just too tiring to play anymore.
1. The voting system sucks...I've NEVER seen one vote ever go through. Ever. I'm sure there's someone out there that's seen a vote pass...but not me.
2. The punish system just plain sucks. You kill someone by accident..like in a tank and you can't see behind you and you're not totally paying attention to the mini-map to see anyone near you and WHAM you run over your team mate cause they decided to just jump out in front of you. Do they forgive? Not a chance. Always get punished. Very rare do you not get punished. This just needs to totally go away.
3. People never act like a team anymore. In the first few days of the retail release there were people that seemed to really want to win the game...but now it's just point whores that only care about how many points they can rack up...doesn't matter if their side wins or loses. The retard level is very high at the moment.
4. Now we get into the people that rage the game. Like the myg0t morons and their ilk. The ones that go out of their way to run out in front of a jeep or tank so they CAN punish people on purpose. They'll jump on top of a chopper so they die when they take off, they'll run to a place that's about to be shelled so they can punish the commander. This is happening more and more.
5. Random disconnects for no reason.
I'm done. Guess it was a 50 dollar lesson in waiting a few months after release of a new game. EA should be ashamed of themselves releasing this bug-ridden crap. I may just go back and play the demo as that wasn't as bad.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Frankly, my favorite of this genre is still RTCW. It seems like when they started trying to add vehicles to these games, they seriously screwed up the game balance.
The game control is much improved from the old battlefield game. Unfortunately they seem to have a problem with balance. Namely with aircraft. Tanks and ground vehicles, no problem... if anything they're too easy to take out by infantry.
Planes... nearly impossible to kill, unless you're in an AA gun vehicle. The stationary AA missiles don't seem to have the speed or range to nail them, and there's no way to hit them with small arms.
But if you want to win, and you want to get a high score, with all the fame and fortune that goes with it... You have to play the Helicopter right.
The Helicopter has a pilot, two gunners and four passengers.
The pilot and two gunners should be medics. If anybody does get some small arm fire off onto your passengers, they'll get healed. The four passengers... Well there you want engineers. Why? Cause if you get hit by a missile, they'll fix the heli.
With a good pilot, you can come down in on a flag, take the position by hovering for only about 5 seconds, and then move on.
On the ground... it takes about 3 good hits of a bazooka or tank to take out a helicopter.. With the slow reload times, you can't do that in 5 seconds... so you have to have several players targetting the heli. But then you have those four engineers up there repairing...
What this means is, essentially... the only way to take out the helicopter is to hit it with another aircraft like a plane or heli, or completely overwhelm it from the ground. It's hard... real hard... When President Bush said his job was hard, he obviously never tried to take out a heli in BF2.
Meanwhile the guys on the ground are dodging fire from the heli, trying to hit the thing... And those guns are awesomely powerful. and when it leaves taking back the flag.(not always easy, now that it's a spawn point)
Oh, I haven't tried this... but I think having one support player as pilot or gunner may mean the engineers will get rearmed. So when they aren't repairing they can drop mines and grenades all over the place. Fun fun!
Essentially the game is a lot of fun if you're in that helicopter.
Otherwise, the second most fun you can have is to take Special Ops. Find yourself a car... load it up with C4 packs, and then drive around getting all Yassir Arafat on the enemy tanks. That is... you ram 'em and everybody blows up! You, the car, the tank, and the occupant of the tank! Doesn't help much with your score, but it's still fun!
Kind of reminds me of when RTCW was still in beta, and you could run down the hallway with the flame thrower without injuring yourself. Great fun, if you're the guy with the flame thrower.
I'm hoping they fix the game with the next patch.
BF2 Lance Corporal sodablue
... and I know what I'm talking about; from March '04 to March '05 I spent a year in an infantry company in Baghdad. So, here's my mini-review, with an eye towards comparing the game to its real-life equivalent.
.50-cal fire, kneel, and shoot the .50-cal gunner in the head, I'm going to punch my computer. Yes, this occasionally happened to great effect, in WWII, Korea, Vietname, etc., but the reason you hear about those cases is that they are extraordinary. 99999 times out of 100000, that guy is dead.
Battlefield 2's weapon characteristics are *nothing* like their real-life counterparts. In real life, I can hit a 3-ft. plastic target at 400m with a single round from my M249. I can put five out of seven rounds into a *real* person, much bigger than the target, at the same distance. In Battlefield 2, I'll be lucky to hit a guy with 3 rounds out of an entire 200-rd. box, at about the in-game equivalent of 100m, while laying prone. Hint to DICE: squad support weapons are not innacurate. None of the weapons portrayed in the game have the poor accuracy the game displays. If they did, real militaries wouldn't use them. Please don't artificially retard weapons to balance gameplay; instead, rework the levels. Terrain is often a deciding factor in real combat. Why should your game be different? Besides, the soldiers you're portraying in-game are not truck drivers, pay clerks, or light-wheel mechanics; they are combat arms soldiers. They are trained to move, think, and fight in combat, so how about you let them do that without imposing silly constraints on their ability to fight?
Here's a thought: if you must artificially impose limitations on accuracy, base them on a player's in-game rank. That's quite a bit more realistic - I know I was calmer, steadier, and more accurate at month six in Baghdad than I was on day three.
Here's another thought: one area where most games do not impose artificial constraints is the effect of suppression fire. This is the exception to the rule of arbitrary limits, and America's Army got it right: if someone is shooting at you, your accuracy suffers based on how close they're hitting. This is how it is in real life, and this is how it should be in game. The next time I see some lone wolf jump up and run right into a hail of
All of these bitches seem to be about weapon accuracy, but, hey, that's a core bit of the game. So, next on my list... if I am riding around in a M1 Abrams tank, see somebody hovering over a flag in a Havoc or a Hind, and land a 120mm HEAT round right below their rotor shaft, what happens in real life is this: the chopper explodes, crashes to the ground, and everyone inside dies. It does not drift a little to the side, turn, fire some rockets, and then fly away. Modern HEAT rounds are made to penetrate upwards of 800mm of RHA - they're made to defeat main battle tanks. Modern attack helicopters are made to withstand 20mm cannon fire. Do the math.
Support catastrophic kills on armored targets. If I land a round right on the turret ring of a T-80, the tank is going to explode, spectacularly. It's not going to turn, shoot at me, and then run away.
Tanks are not anti-infantry weapons. They are anti-armor weapons. The coax machine gun, and turret gun, are effective against infantry *at range*, but pretty much useless up close. The main gun on a main battle tank can be used to great effect on infantry when they're hiding in buildings, but if you land a round close to an infantryman in open terrain, you're probably just going to scrape him up or give him a few burns. Sabot rounds don't fragment enough to have a grenade-like effect on infantry, and HEAT rounds dissipate energy too quickly to cause much harm when they strike anything other than a wall, armor, or other such material. And these are likely to be the only two types of rounds a MBT will load. Of course, *hit* someone with a 120mm round, and they're done.
AT-4s, SMAWs, SRAWs, etc. etc. etc. probably w
Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!