Battlefield 2

[firstadopter]

The <a href="http://www.fileshack.com/file.x?fid=7176">demo for Battlefield 2</a> is out. You have to love the cut throat business nature of Electronic Arts. First the hire the Desert Combat mod team because of its popularity, then after they copy every one of the team's ideas and release a copycat game (Battlefield 2), they give an ultimatum to them. You can leave NYC and move to Sweden, or you're fired. Ouch. Lesson to you developers out there, never trust BIG BAD Electronic Arts.<br><br>
*UPDATE*: As much as I want EA to fail due to their tactics these days, I have to admit BF2 is a mighty good time. Brings me back to the glory days of BF1942 finally with an awesome upgraded graphics engine. BF2 is definitely worth the download.

[arogan]

I picked up the dvd rom version from compusa. there is a mail in $15 gift card.

- key is located on the back of the manual near the top.
- takes forever to install. no way NOT for it to try to install dx 9.0c. If you hit cancel it removes the entire install. Fun you get to install it AGAIN.
- LONG load times. 3 promo screens that you can't skip each time you start the game. Not enough feedback to the user while something is loading. Sometimes you don't even know if you are locked up or just still loading. Typical game: Click short cut wait for several seconds to load, wait several seconds to get past the promo videos (I know you can zero the files to fix this but still just more annoying EA crap), Login into ea servers (some of your profile data is persisted on EA's servers) - several seconds, get to the main menu, pick multiplayer, let server list refresh - several servers showed 0 ping (bug?), don't click refresh (game became unresponsive or was it just loading something? lost patience), launch a server, hope you don't get disconnected, more loading, lots more loading, authenticate client data - several more seconds, ok ready to join the game now, enter the game, more loading, ok now I can pick my load out and and spawn point, appear in the game world, spin a round a few times so it can load everything around you, things pop in and jerky frame rate for several more seconds until it caches everything, ok I can finally move, shot and killed by a spawn camper. I think I could have completed an entire quest in Guild Wars in the same time.
- the quick multiplayer launch short cut wasn't much better. In that case it really does look like it locked up but instead it's just magically finding the best server for you and sticking you in the game. All the load times from above still apply though.
- Graphics: Yes it looks nice. It's a pretty nice jump over Battlefield 1942 but honestly does it look much better than say Joint Operations or source? With everything maxed out sound and graphics at 1600X1200 I was getting around 30-60 fps. Very playable for this style of game. To display framerate type this in the console:
renderer.drawfps 1
- key bindings: BF1942 had the WORST key binding system and this isn't much better. At least now it immediately tells you there is a duplicate key binding and tells you what page it is on but still not which function is in conflict. Now here is the worst part: there are KEY BINDINGS NOT SHOWN IN THE OPTIONS MENU. Phantom bindings exist which you can't remap and you'll spend hours looking for it but never find it. In my case it was "X" and "leftAlt". To fix it go to my documents, bf2, look at the global.con and figure out which directory to look in (mine was 002). Find the control.con (back it up) and delete the phantom bindings. HAIR PULLING ANNOYING! I could have finished a key story line mission in Guild Wars in the time it took to bind my keys.
- Horrible manual. For a game as complex as this I would expect a LOT more info. What 1 paragraph on flying aircraft. "Make sure you have enough altitude before nosing down in a helicopter." Oh thanks I couldn't figure that out on my own. I need more time on this but so far they seem much easier to fly than Desert Combat but not as easy as Joint Operations. This game really needs some tutorials for flying.
- single player wasn't bad. AI is ok but I had a guy run over me but at least the Ai apologized. I felt SO much better. HA!
- every time you change graphics options it has to "optimize shaders" which takes about forever on TOP of all the loading time. Also, this happened both times I touched the graphics options. While playing single player, about 5 min into the game everything freezes. It really looks like a hard crash, frozen screen, repeating sound. But I noticed the hard drive was thrashing so I wanted. Eventually it came back and everything was fine. It was like it was applying some gfx settings in the MIDDLE of the game. Granted it never happens again unless you go back and muck with the gfx settings. Maybe if you exit the game entirely and restart the game might fix this issue.
- Emphasis on this game really seems to be on all the vehicles. I guess I've always been more interested in the infantry.
- sniping seems to be more balanced than Joint Operations. You have to lead your target just right. Hard to snipe with other weapons. After a certain distance it really is hard to hit your targets. So far infantry weapon balance seems pretty good.

Overall I'm pretty disappointed so far. I was expecting a new engine that improved over the old and fixed most of the major issues I had with BF1942 and BFV. Instead I feel like I'm getting just a tweaked engine with all the old problems still there and some new bugs. It's like a slightly better Desert Combat except you get to buy it.

I'm going to spend some more time with this and maybe my opinion will change.

I think my 3 yr old son summed it up pretty well, "Daddy I don't like that game. Booting time takes too long."

[arogan]

- 4 hours multiplayer
- my opinion has changed quite a bit now. This game can really shine if you get into a good squad with a good squad leader and a good commander. When a squad leader gives good orders and waypoints, hangs back to say alive so that his squad members can respawn at his location, things really start clicking and I begin to see the advances in gameplay. The built in voice over IP works pretty well and really helps to coordinate things. There was this one time when we were moving as a squad through some dense trees getting prepared to take a flag when we stumbled across another full enemy squad. All hell broke lose but we survived and had a medic to patch up our wounded. Intense!
- I really like the urban maps where infantry play a much bigger role. I've been playing mostly special ops. Planting charges and blowing up stuff is fun. There's also quite a bit of strategy like sneaking into the enemy base and demo their radar, artillery, etc to cripple their commander.
- the Commander position is quite unique in that you can actually run around, shoot, and play like normal if you want. What you should really be doing is hiding somewhere, stay in the map screen, and command your squads for coordinated attacks. You can also send out artillery strikes (watch the FF though), scan the area, send out recon drones, etc. A good commander really does have a big impact on the team.

Join a squad when you jump into a server. It's the way this game was meant to be played and really separates this iteration of BF from all the previous versions. It really adds a great new dimension to the game. There are still quite a few bugs in this game, the load times are still very annoying, but if you can look past all the technical issues (which I hope get patched soon) there actually is a fun and innovative game in there.

I went from being pretty pissed off at this game to cautiously recommending it.

If anybody else is playing I'll be mostly on the TacticalGamer (http://www.tacticalgamer.com/) Server playing as [QT3]ARogan.

[Zeramos]

As a tip, for bypassing the opening movies, go to "Battlefield 2\mods\bf2\Movies" and delete everything but the menu.bik and menu_loggedin.bik, and no more movies. =)

The menu looks wierd without those biks, so i'd recommend leaving them.

[TheAngryIntern]

hmmm, i'm having some serious issues with the game 2 min after i install it. I run the game, and about every 10 sec or so it's like the game alt-tabs itself out back to the desktop. the game is still running, and i click on the start menu bar and i'm back in. Then when i get all the audio/video settings right (after a few more auto alt-tabs) i try to start a single player game and the game boots me back to the desktop and quits. wtf.

[TheAngryIntern]

i guess we can't edit our own posts? anyway, whatever those problems i was having were, they went away the third time i started up the game, and i was able to get a couple of hours in on the CAD/8BT server. Pretty fun, although i found out quickly that i don't know how to fly a chopper or jet!!! I may have to try the server you're on, arogan, too.

EDIT: weird, how come i can edit this post but not the previous one????

[firstadopter]

You can edit posts for a limited time after you submit. After that time, you can't edit the post. :)