Battlefield 2

With that title, i shall now give you the update on BF2 that i promised for friday.

Ill start with the gameplay. Now this would entail both a singleplayer campaign and a multiplayer run about in most games, with BattleField 2, the singleplayer might aswell not be there, its completely useless, they said they completely revamped the AI for the bots to play against, however for some reason... i think their not even on the same level of the ones from BF1942, their just plain stupid. Okay onto the Multiplayer. The game is Conquest: Assault, plain ande simple. Run about grabbing outposts, those outposts if you controll them, you can spawn there, if you dont, and the enemy does, they spawn there. Plain and simple. Each side has "tickets" which are really lives, each time a person on your team dies, the "tickets" of your side go down. One team can gradually get the other teams tickets to go down by controlling all of the outposts or flags as i shall call them from here on in. So in a nutshell, the gameplay of it all is basic BattleField 1942. Tanks, Helicopters, Jets, boats, and dune buggies all grace the field of battle. Three different factions are availabe, all decided by which map you play, but their all pretty much the same. US Marine Corps, People's Liberation Army of China, or the Middle Eastern Coalition Troops. Now these are all fictional battles of course heh. One thing i dont like is that since those are the sides, with BattleField 1942, you had the Axis and Allies, so it made sense who you were fighting. This time around, the USMC are in every map. I dont think it would be that hard to have a Chinese against the Middel Eastern Coalition (MEC). Ah well thats just me. The kit system for your choice of fighting is as follows.

Spec Ops= Your a soldier armed with a small assault rifle. Fully autmatic for all sides. Your pistol is scilenced. You have grenades and specific to your class alone, C4 that can be used on vehicles, traps, bridges, or enemy instalations such as artiellry guns and radar tower.
Sniper= The soldier appears in a Ghillie suit and carries a sniper rifle. The rifle for the USMC is bolt-action, High Power, High Accuarcy. For the MEC and PLAC, semi-autmatic rifle with less accuracy and less power. Your pistol is also scilenced. Your aslo blessed with grenades and specific to this class only, Claymore mine. Now this mine can be used effectively best if you suituate yourself ontop of a building that only has one ladder to get up on to, Take your spot on the building and put the claymore at the top of the ladder, and your safe from the enemy trying to take you out. Of course that is if they dont have helicopters.
Assault= The basic grunt. Your equpied with an assault rifle. For the USMC, you have an M16A2. This limits you to only 3 shot burst or semi-automatic. For the MEC, you have the AK101, medium-high power with high accaurcy, good rifle. the PLAC has the AK47, higher power with less accuracy. (side note: the MEC and PLAC should have switched assault rifles, doesnt make sense to have the more advanced to the MEC and the less to the PLAC) With this your also given a single smoke grenade that can be used effectively to cross open ground. Your assault rifle is also graced with the ablitity to have a Grenade Launcher (no hande grenades for you!). Your given a limited number and are able to lob them some distance.
Support= This is where we get really into the squad combat. The support class is given light Machine Gun. (side note: I know your spose to prone with this gun to be accurate, but even proned and firing only 3 shot bursts, you still cant hit anything more then 100 yards, you can with some skill but its a little discouraging) Your given a grenade and an ammo pouch. Heres where we get squad based. Since there are virtually no ammo crates in the game, only given from supply drops, the way you get more ammo is from these Support classes. The ammo pouch, when you have it out, gives you ammo and a freinds ammo who are nearby. You can throw the pouch down, it will give out ammo but if a teammate runs over it, he gets the full amount of ammo back but he pouch disappears, your given a limited number to throw away but you always have one left that you can hang on to. When in a vehcile, you give your team mates inside it ammo and any team mates that walk along next to the vehcile ammo.
Engineer= Your given a shotgun. USMC gets a high power pump one, the PLAC and MEC get a semi-automatic one but not nearly as powerfull. Grenades aside, your also given Anti-Tank land mines, limited number of course but one tank rolls across it, kaboom. Finally, your also given a trusty wrench. With this wrench you can fix tanks, jeeps, bridges, artiellry, radar, UAV trailers, the works. Its a all in one powertool thats not powered but anything the a flick of the wrist. Quite impressive. If your in a vehicle, you can fix the vehcile automatically if it gets hurt, if a freindly vehcile drives along side yours, you fix his too.
Medic= Your given the rifle the Assault Class has however no grenade launcher, oh boo hoo. However your given hand grenades and thats about it, except of course for two more items that are so vaulable squads. One is like the Support class ammo pouch, its a medic pouch, having out gives health, throw on ground, full health is given back. Same deal inside vehicles, heal freindlys inside and those who walk along. Now here comes the best weapon in the game. You can get a kill with it, its rare but it can happen. The defilibrator, ala Shock Paddles. If a freindly dies and is only critically wounded, you will see an extra icon above his head that would normally represent his head, one bar represents his health, if dead it is black with the extra icon. Run over to your fallen comrade, give him a shock and boom, we have a soldier back on the field. Its all good you konw, even if it was a head shot. If you are however shot with a large caliber weapon, lets say a Tanks 120mm round to your face, your labeld as "killed" and not "critically wounded"
Anti-Tank= Your given a Sub-Machine gun. USMC gets a MP5, MEC gets the 45 round Bizon (only 2 magazines though) and the PLAC gets a new varaition of the WW2 PPSH41, instead of a round 100 round drum mag, you get a 30 round banna clip round. Its effective, however you only get the one mode of Automatic fire. Hand-Grenades are also there. Your also given an Anti-Tank rocket launcher. The USMC gets the SRAW and the MEC and PLAC gets the Erynx. Both are single shots however one does reload it and you get about 4 rounds out of it. Both of the anti-tank guns, when one right clicks, when one fires, if left-mouse is held down, one can guide the missle in flight by moving the mouse, the middle of the screen is where the rocket will land, so that way its pretty much lock on target to a tank, that is of course if you dont get shot while doint this.

Thats it for the classes. When one drives a tank, or helicopter, or Jet, your player actually changes so as to represent the head-gear of what that would look like. You get an oxygen mask if you hop into a Helicopter or a Jet. Thats cool to me heh. With that, not all of the surfaces are completly bulletproof. If you stand behind a tin gate thats compelte, and rounds are shot through it, you can get killed. Ive allready explained the commander mode to you in the other post so its not necessary for me to talk about that indepth here. I will however talk about the Squad System. I told you about how communication is broken down heh. The squad system is as follows, one can make his own squad or join an existing one. While in the squad, the squad leader can hold down a key and request artierllery, UAV, or some other such thing from a radial menu. Holding down another key will bring up another radial menu of Attack, Defend, move, fix, so forth, where you point in the middle of your screen, a marker will be placed, from that marker, your squad will see it on their mini-map, and see it on their screen. It actually places down a little smoke grenade, Orange=Attack, Purple=Defend and some other such things. The commander can aswell give you an order and with a click of either page up or page down, you can accept or decline. When you accept, the order of move here or attack here will be sent to the rest of your squad and acts as if the squad leader put it down himself.

Ill get onto the graphics which goes hand in hand with some of the bugs and conflicts ive experinced. Ive allready talked about how good it looks. It looks spectacular, on lowest of low its not really though, i mean low low low, it looks quite bad, but hey Medium looks good. On from that heres a bug ive expereinced, that every does... well its not really a bug actually, a game engine problem. As one loads up a map and starts to play it from the first minute to the next 5 he will experince a extreme drop in FPS. This is because the game engine since the maps are pretty big on some of the 64 player servers, does not require you to fully load up all the textures, and only allows the textures you see right in the screen in front of you to be loaded. Its a weird type of streaming technology and it doesnt work that well. If you have the top of the line Graphics card like the X850XT, you will still expreince this problem. The next bug i have found comes from two sources that dont have such high standards in this area. Customer usage of their products... heh. EA, well we know how EA acts towards Customers, either it works or it dont, complain to us and we shall just laugh in your face. The next comes from a company who i do like because they do build a great product, ATI. Their drivers on the other hand arent the best in the world. Nvidia is a good competitor against ATI especially now with their new GeForce 7800 and 7xxx series. However what kept them in the game this long was their drivers. Their drivers are top notch and never have problems. However with ATI, first they had all ATI users not able to play Call Of Duty for 4 months because of a driver conflict. This time around, they installed programs with the latest drivers for cards that are really old. Such as the ATI bios Poller, that conflicts with BF2, on top of that, the ATI destkop manager also confilcts with BattleField 2, i suppose this is spose to happen with BF2 mainly because the graphics engine and rest of it were all made by Nvida. Okay with that, the only real problems ive had playing the game were from that stupid streaming of textures.

Now on too some of the maps. Some of them are down right fun, others... not so much. Many maps (and since their are only 12 this is a large part of them) Have the USMC attacking from a base that cannot be captured against the rest of the map. All of the outposts are controlled by the other side and they are on the defensive. 3 maps i can vividly tell right now, out of the 3 only 2 are really fun to me. Dragon Valley is one of those that is fun, having the USMC attacking the Chineese outposts, it becomes a really good battle because though water is all around the map, alot of areas are shallow and can allow all types of vehicles to cross not just amphibian ones. The next one i find a great deal of fun is Strike at KarKand. Again the USMC is attacking the entire map with no base of their own, starting out with only about 20 more tickets then the other side, these maps will always be a fight for the defense since none of their bases is safe from capture. Strike at KarKand features a entire city battle in a middle eastern city. Dust swirls in from here and there and at the very end of the map, the Factory for the MEC force. This is a very hard map for the MEC force if they do not know how the map is won for the USMC. The USMC wins this map easily by sneaking by at the very early stages of the map and aquiring the Factory from the MEC. A well organaized squad can do this within 5 minutes of the round start, from there they can take the armor that spawns from it (the only armor that the MEC can get) and from their, take it along with Jeeps and spread out and capture the remaning city outposts from the MEC force. If that happens, a giant pincer move can be put onto the MEC force, slowly but surely exterminating them from 2 front war. If the MEC force can play well enough, having one squad protect the factory or at least the route there, they can force the USMC armor down the streets and take them out from multiple angles from the tops of buildings. Its a fun map. The last map is Operation Clean Sweep. This features a string of islands all connected in a half circle shape. Again all controlled by the MEC. The USMC has one lone Carrier of the shore and is spose to capture each point. Now this is a map thats not fun because A: The USMC does not have enough boats and helicopters to make one good stand and B: On the 32 player server, the map is too big, on the 64 Its crazy big. All combined with night, the map becomes not a defense against offense but run around in dune buggys trying to hold positions from helicopters that fly in low and capture points. The map is simply no fun, if this was a driving game, the game would resemble this map down to a T but its not a driving game, this is WAR folks!

Okay you think im done, well i am, almost, one more thing to talk about thats new in BF2. Ranking. Ranking, if one was smart and thought about how to do it inside this type of game would be like this, have a set amount of skill points and kills the player needs to get, and just have it update when they reach those points, all this being not server side or EA side but on the user side. Now of course this might lead to the cracking of the program, but hey EA lets make a program that actually is good! With that Ranked servers (not all ranked) cost way more to rent, perhaps around $500 a month for 32 player server, not fun on the wallet. Along with that, all of the skill points and promotions and ribbions and basic awards have actually take screenshots of your game, and they upload them to EA. With that EA will have to take the screenshot, though automatically with the line code it tells them what it is, it actually takes them a while to update your ranking. So if you play your heart out on a Ranked server from Dusk till dawn, and little messages pop up saying you been promoted and so forth, when you disconnect, and check your stats its not updated. This is why i thought you had to do the round rotations fully for it to register. It only registered once correctly after a game and that was on launch day before everyone else got the game heh. With that, ranking is updated overnight, its not even tried though on the weekends as if they shut off and stop working completly, however they promise that everything has been recorded and will be updated tommorow. I just hope so heh.

And thats all i can really write about Battlefield 2. Its a massive game, its fun to play if you can get by some of the drawbacks on what they try to acomplish. They are being very ambitious with what they try to do and build the ultimate online first person shooter experince. I think they pull it off well enough to warrent a complete good either 9.5 or 10 out of 10 score. Okay then, im gonna go off and play some more, my account name is HellStorm obviously heh. One more thing though, and this is just me boasting. People say the game is alot tougher, one can not kill anything and one cannot live 3 seconds without dieing, yet i do the opposite of it and often become best player on the server in all accounts of combat kills, teamwork skills, flags captured, driver assists and so forth. Its a fun time, and thats all i have to say.