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Friday 17 June 2005

Battlefield 2 impressions [Lurks]

I'm not best to comment on this since I've only played the demo single-player where as I know others have been playing it loads online. However I have the saving grace of actually being arsed to type a blog, so you're just going to have to make do.
Basically, it's fantastic. It gets to being fantastic by being a cross between the best game you can possibly imagine mixed in with a slight dressing of lame bits courtesy of dumbed-down-by-EA syndrome.
The graphics are unbelievable now and the game seems almost more about the immediate surroundings like, say, Ghost Reccon, than the sort of wide open spartan places designed to be driven/flown over at high speed like its predecessor. It sort of looks like Desert Combat but really it doesn't play much like it. For a start, it's more about infantry. Vehicles are weaker and not quite as well implemented in terms of feeling all-powerful while camped inside one, as good old DC.
That said they drive and handle properly now, much better than '42/Vietname ever managed. At least on the ground. In the air, things have gotten predictably sat. Helicopters can be blown by any bozo with a mouse and no longer will be the sole preserve of the skilled-up elite (us). I haven't spent any time in combat in them, mind, so another clannie will have to comment authoritatively there.
Infantry wise, there's a lot to love. It plays like a proper action game now. You shoot guys, you see where the bullets go, you feel in control. There's also physics in there but it's more rag-doll than realistic. It's still better than the previous games though. There's also classes that make a difference, medics that revive, support that reloads ammo etc. In this respect it feels like it's borrowed from team fortress a little.
I do have some complaints though. I lay prone on top of a building with the M249 and even letting short bursts rip at an enemy at medium range, I was unable to land hits much less kill them. This is somewhat retarded. There's also a heck of a lot of fog of war going on here. A lot of the time you simply aren't going to be able to see. That's not necessarily a bad thing, a couple of smoke grenades and you've cover against snipers for example.
The best thing about it though, is probably the thing I haven't tested at all. The squad combat. You can have a squad in your team in a large battle and share voice communications. There's also a commander class. Now's the time for clannies to pipe up and wax lyrical about this because it sounds like it's amazing.
Oh, for Beej's benefit, out there on the front, I've captured a video to show off some gameplay. It's fairly low framerate since I captured at 1600x1200 by mistake and had to downscale it. Haha. It's still high resolution and should give a feel for what the game looks like.
Of course the damn thing would have to come out on Glastonbury weekend...

16 comments:

  1. Well, at first i thought the game was just fucking good, like a crap DC with nice gfx and better infantry (crap because frankly the map is way too small and the planes and helis is a joke). But then came a night when i stumbled upon some guys playing squads properly. Now, they have kept pushing this shit in every preview, but until you have played this game with a commander that knows his shit and proper squads you just havnt played it at all. Its nothing short of amazing.
    We need to try this shit out on some deserted server.
    Oh and since you get points for healing and dishing out ammo there aint many snipers and spec ops around anymore. But you do get revived all the time and youre almost never out of ammo. On public servers. I bet Satan is buying fleece underwear.

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  2. I have to say, Battlefield 2 holds more promise than HL2/CS:S ever did from this gamer's point of view.
    From the initial screenshots, to teaser videos, to full on demo videos - all of it dripped class and excitement. The recent demo release seems to have only increased that to an observable degree; which just goes to show that the Trauma (Desert Combat) guys were worth every nickel DICE paid for them.
    Of course, I can't actually play the demo yet as I have an agreeably stinky GeForce 4 Ti 4400 (128MB) which BF2 simply won't acknowledge as existing in the grand scheme of things. This is fine however - as el Brittus will be treating himself to a grand ole upgrade in the next few weeks, the likes of which will result in BF2 playing faster and more gloriously than Georgie Best in his heyday.

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  3. It's out next Friday. You saying you'll just like... not play it until you get around to buying a decent graphics card?

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  4. Map previews of the full game here, hardware guide here. Tweakguides has their usual page up which includes tips on how to get it to run in 1280x1024. Why on earth this mode isn't supported is beyond me when everyone & his dog has a lcd these days. [Yes I know its not a 'proper' ratio but who gives a monkeys when you've got horrible aliasing all over your screen, eh?]

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  5. Dice have always done that. They must be doing one of those standard developer things where they've just decided that's better. This problem has been in their games since the original '42. They were doing all sorts of bizarre font resizing back then that was blurry as well - they just don't seem to care.

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  6. Thanks for the vid Lurks. Looks good!
    The interface seems a bit quirky though. New maps will be very welcome, some of the DC ones were terrible. Spiny's link to the hardware performance guide is a bit worrying... the 9800Pro just can't do high qual (don't half the clan have these?) and even 6600/6800 [non-ultra] performance looks like it'll have to be cranked down. Bah.

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  7. What's the obsession with running it with everything turned to high? Isn't it good that a game provides the mechanism to ramp up the detail if you have monstrous hardware? A 9800pro will run it lovely. It cranks along very happily in 1600x1200 with the demo as far as it will go on an X800XT so I think something 6600 class will run 1280 type resolutions fairly happily.

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  8. As regards forcing 1280x1024 I've had mixed results. Forcing on the command line seems to hang the game and setting renderer.allowAllRefreshRates 1 in .\mods\bf2\Settings dosen't give extra res's on the menu like in '42. However editing Video.con and VideoCustom.con in .\mods\bf2\Settings\Profiles\Custom seems to stick as long as you don't change the res in the game (duh!). That ZIP of empty bik files to skip the intro videos is well worth picking up from Tweakguides though.

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  9. Or you can just rename them. Be careful to only get rid of the intro ones though, some of them are for the background videos in the menus.

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  10. Fucking EA and their unskipable videos. The wankers do it for trailers of games in their installers as well. As for the command line res changing stuff in BF2 demo, it works fine for me. I'm not doing 1280 though but it works fine in 1600x1200.

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  11. Splooging gamespot video review here. This is going to be very, very good indeed. Oh yes.

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  12. Two days to go. Anyone up for a proper session? Friday or Sunday night?

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  13. Gamespot game guide here.

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  14. Well its here. Fired it up at lunch. Its good altho theres a few things I noticed.1) No bots in multiplayer. (no co-op mode) very lame.2) Only one game mode (conquest)3) No single player structure at all
    Gives me the impression that EA leaned on em to get it out earlier. Bit lame whatever the reason and lets hope they sort at least points 1 and 2.

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  15. And then you play it & find that at it's worse it's still better than DC :)

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  16. Just back from holidays and BF2 is sitting on my desk so I cant wait to fire it up tonight! Do we have a server we can meet on yet?

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