March 8th, 2005
Attention all you Unreal Tournament and Halo 2 junkies — The next lineup of the Battlefield series (1942, Vietnam) is coming to a store near you in just a few months, and it looks like it’s shaping up to be fantastic.
If you’ve enjoyed teamplay shooters before then you absolutely must look into this title.
First, watch this trailer of the battlefield food chain (or Bigger Fish). I recommend “Battlefield2.info” as the download site (.rar extractor required) because a) there’s no signup, b) it’s fast, and c) It’s in German… And Germans are cool.
In this BF installment the theater is modern with hightech vehicles and weapons, but Battlefield 2 is hardly just a facelift. I’ve been reading some things that have me very damn excited:
There are some cool class-kits to chose from. Including:
Squad Leaders. Oh boy.. this may be the best thing to come to online shooters, yet. Have you ever wanted to planned to team up with a friend to deal some hurt in UT? Sure, but inevitably you’re out in the field and one of kicks it, and the game places a considerable distance between the two of you. Only in passing or very strong effort (forgoing gameplay) will you see each other again. Well no more. As a squad leader you can invite friends to attach to join your “Squad”. This isn’t a clan or a long standing relationship but a short-term game mechanic. If one of your squad mates were to die, he would spawn AT his squad leader’s location. Suddenly you’re a cohesive team with an effective tool to hold or assault objectives. Bad ass. As an added twist - the squad leader’s score is simply the average score of everyone in his squad.
Commanders - your team can have a battlefield commander who sees the battle via an overhead map. They can coordinate with Squad leaders to assign objectives or coordinate joint strikes and air support.
Medics have an area of effect heal but only when their medpack is equipped. If a soldier goes down in a fight he may not necessarily be dead (it depends on how bad the killing blow was). A medic can bring back fallen team mates with some electro paddle fun. And yes they can be used as hand to hand weapons, too. Finally - there are no med packs laying around in the maps, but your friendly medic can throw some on the ground for you to consume.
There’s a new reward system. You earn points for fixing things, healing, ASSISTING the capture of objectives, for getting kills in the defense of objectives, etc. Finally a metric for team work.
Voice over IP — out of the box
A stamina meter to allow for sprinting and more importantly to prohibit bunny-hopping.
The graphics engine is phenomenal, which leads into one of the more important things for an online shooter…
The community. A quick glance at Total Battlefield 2shows that there are already mods in development. Even beyond that there are mod-teams that have Switched from the Half Life 2 engine over to BF 2. Um.. HL2 is a gorgeous engine, so take these words seriously:
“It looks like we’re going to switch over to the Battlefield 2 engine. It’s graphically superior to Source and is also more user friendly. In addition to this, it supports vehicles for online play and also has heightmap terrain generation.
Sorry to all of you who were looking forward to a Source version, but we go where opportunity is.” [– The Verge of Armageddon Team working on a C&C Renegade Mod]
That’s an impressive statement.
BF2 should be released in the second quarter of this year. A more specific guess - June, soon after E3.
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Coming Soon: Battlefield 2
