I played the Battlefield 2 demo all day today. [:0]
First impressions - it definately looked nice, but after an hour of play, I had the ho-hum feeling towards the 'rush for flag, hold to capture then repeat" gameplay which was what bored me to tears with Battlefield 1942/Desert Storm.
That was until people started figuring out and taking advantage of squads and the commander. This pretty much propels the game beyond what Enemy Territory does in terms of teamplay, I think. I love how squad members can spawn from squad leader's location (another idea influenced from Tribes), and the best thing is that the squad leader/commander can create or choose objectives for the squad, like blowing up artillery, bridges, capturing, or defending bases or points. So if you liked ET and it's objective based games, you can get the same sort of deal here. It's pretty ingenious I think.
I played as Commander a few times, but found it pretty boring. That's fine though, because people who enjoy that role will happily fight over each other to play it. [;)]. I'm glad that getting sniping kills is more difficult this time round too. One problem that's followed from 1942/Desert Storm is that people are camping around for planes/helicopters etc. So often you'll have 4-10 players just standing around at the plane/heli spawn pretty much for the entire duration of the map. And if there's one other bad notch I have to give the demo is that the gui for searching servers etc is very unresponsive. I'm talking about a second delay for anything I click, even to change something simple like the server list order, or to scroll down a bit.
The map that came with the demo is *great*. Hopefully all the official maps are like this. No more bland deserts and hills, but well designed populated maps with some open space, and other areas where you can weave through and get some sort of protection when you're on foot.
Anyway, that's my ramble on the BF2 demo. [:D]
Ive also been playing this like crazy and yeah its really awesome, im definetly getting a copy once it comes out now (somehow... still dont know how im going to fund that exactly). If you do get on a server where you people take advantage of the whole commander and squads setup it makes for some really cool gameplay. Ive been trying to have a go at everything, from spending entire games completely focused on the minimap as a commander (using voice chat and the commanders superior satelite to tell people where snipers are and then watch them creep up from behind and take them out was a particulary cool moment) to running around as a un assigned medic (shock paddles are really neat) and its all been great fun. The only gripes ive really faced are with.... well untactical players lets call them. the kind that do sit around at heli pads to spawn camp a whirlybird to go and crash it into the sea 20 seconds later or that dont follow orders etc. but theres only so much that the game itself can do to prevent that kind of behaviour, allthough the choice to punish or forgive a team killer, leave squads at will and create a mutiny upon your commander do help. Oh and the server browser is pretty darn awfull right now. There can be massive delays for simply scrolling (as souri said) and the server order buttons dont actually seem to do anything, or perhaps im just pressing the wrong things :S
so much rantage :P im gonna go back to playing now
Battlefield 2 MP Demo
*********************
Battlefield 2 Multiplayer Demo is Out ! Download it now ..
BF2 Mp Demo is battlefield2demo.exe 572.8mb (572,848,791 bytes)
Download Link's for BF2 MP Demo (Australian Traffic ) :
Internode Free Traffic Link :- http://games.internode.on.net/ or
http://games.internode.on.net/?page=filelist&filedetails=1461
iiNET Free Traffc Link :- ftp://ftp.iinet.net.au/games/demos/battlefield2demo.exe
Pipe Free Traffic Link :- http://3dgamers.planetmirror.com/pub/3dgamers/games/battlefield2/battle…
Bigpond Free Traffic Link :- http://www.gamearena.com.au/files/details/html/17047
Waix Free Traffic Link :- http://bur.st/~goodlet/battlefield2demo.exe
http://www.waix.net/~karjan/battlefield2demo.exe
Netspace Free Traffic Link:- http://files.gamespace.net.au/?sb_page=&sec=file&action=display&file_id…
Gaming SA - http://gamingsa.filearena.net/files/demos/Battlefield_2_Demo_GC.zip
Ausgamers (adds to quota traffic) :-
http://www.ausgamers.com/files/download/html/17047
Download Link's for BF2 MP Demo (Overseas Traffic ) :
ftp://largedownloads.ea.com/pub/demos/battlefield2demo.exe ( EA Games FTP)
http://www.gamespot.com/promos/bf2demo.html (gamespot Mirror)
http://www.3dgamers.com/dlselect/games/battlefield2/battlefield2demo.ex…
http://www.pcgameworld.com/details.php/id/5990/
System Requirements ( BF Demo)
* Windows XP (32-bit) with Admin rights
* 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 / Athlon XP or greater
* 512 MB or more
* 460MB of HD Space
* DirectX 9.0c compatible (*video)
* DirectX 9.0c compatible (sound)
Video card must have 128 MB or more memory and one of the following chipsets:
* NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 or greater
* ATI Radeon 8500 or greater
I'm running things on medium on my machine, so the textures aren't as sharp as those screenshots, but it's still runs pretty good (my machine is just above the minimum specs). I'm totally digging the special ops class. The C4 is awesome. You can blow up tanks with just two of them (I prefer taking them out this way than the anti-tank class), or leave them on runways and blow up planes and other unsuspecting targets. I've done this lots of times at the MEC base and it's hilarious. Sometimes I'll just hang around the helicopter spawn and lug 2 C4's on them and hiding behind the wall. Some guys will jump in and fly off, and I detonate. [:D]
You can place them around your base and when you see your flag go neutral, you blow it up, and you can do this from anywhere on the map. I'm usually the one blowing up the artillery - although I've started to notice that Commanders are repairing their own artillery by dropping supplies near them (supplies heal and repair everything close by).
I usually play on the GameArena servers (the 64 player ones), and they had the unlimited time hack going which provided some really cool games. Unfortunately EA are starting to delist servers doing that, so GameArena have put back the 12 minute limit (boo!).
I don't think I've really experienced some of the crazyness that goes on in that game anywhere before, with planes and heli's duking it out above you, artillery support coming in blurring up the screen, while you're frantically trying to fend off some enemy troops with a tonne of teammates.
Oh, I've had a go at Commander 4 times now, and that mode always crashes the game after a while :/
I've played this game a bit lately, and my initial impressions were quite high, but they're dropped off a fair bit.
Personally, I think that there should only be transport-oriented vehicles in the game (BlackHawk, APC, boats etc). IMHO, it would make the game far more interesting, as you'd have to rely on half-decent troop coordination.
I just got tired of round after round of players taking battle tanks and sitting just outside of spawn points, shooting those who have just spawned.
Similarly, having people taking the fighter jets, and dropping a salvo of bombs, killing five or six people in one salvo.
In fact, I think the game would take on another level if there were only transport vehicles and their control was dictated by the commander (of course, such a complex role would likely require at least two commanding roles). There are a myriad of reasons why I that this system would alleviate a number of problems present in BF2, but that's another rant for another day.
- a
Yeh, there's a fair bit of spawn killing with srtillery, jet bombing, and with vehicles like you mentioned. It would be nice if you could get a 2 second unvulnerability, because you're fodder as soon as you spawn. Or maybe make the spawn points slightly away from the flags and undercover.
People have gone pretty darn good at bombing from jets. You can watch them circle around and around spawn points and dropping their load, picking up massive kills.
playd the game the other day at a small lan (16 people). lots of fun, much better than BF1 - a lot of gameplay improvements. i still dont like aircraft, mainly because most people tend to jump in them and fly around shoting eachother rather than trying to complete the objectives or have any sense of team tactics. i still want to play in a good team game. in that respect i liked the smal map best - no aircraft and a very small combat area, meaning you were constantly in the think of the action, and the commander role was much more efective in this situation. so you certainly need enough people before you play a large map.
overall a good game, though not much new added other than the squads and commander, even the visuas dont look that great (they looked better in the screens and videos). almost the same as BF1 really.
so most of the game is just improvements on the existing game, it's a good game, but it's more of an upgrade than a sequal, classic EA sequal in other words.
It's not Battlefield 2, it's Battlefield 2005.
If only they had ditched the capture and hold random flag game mode. That was the big thing I really didn't like about Battlefield 1942/Desert Storm. If they had the link set up like Unreal Tournament 2004 so battles are more concentrated then this game would be much better. Throw in some critical map objectives and then it would be perfect!!
Argh i sware the actual game in the package that is B2 rules but everything around it stinks. The server browser, the accounts system etc.
The reason i bring this up now is because at the moment, i can't play. When attempting to login to my multiplayer account i either get a "server refused the connection" or a "database error" message (the second being way more common). Creating a new account isn't possible either, the same error messages appear. Brilliant...
Yeh, I had that problem last night. Seems like their central database server was down.
On a related issue about the server browser... quote:First of all, if you've played the demo, and there's something that irks you about it, then I regret to inform you that the retail game currently has the same problem ? there appears to be no difference between them (apart, obviously from all the extra maps, etc, in the full game).
Top of the irk list is the in-game multiplayer server browser, which lets you find servers running BF2 games and connect to them. To be brutally honest, this is a thing of horror which will repeatedly frustrate your efforts to connect to game servers. It's so bad that I wish I could turn it off. It's probably best to write down the IP addresses of a few favourite servers and type them in manually.
From [url="http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24079"]The Inquirer review[/url]. Typing down the IP is what I have resorted to as well since the server browser is so useless. [:(]
I finally bought it, the 1.02 patch makes it all good. I was also introduced to xfire, a very useful game messaging client.
[url="http://profile.xfire.com/redwyre"][img]http://miniprofile.xfire.com/bg/co/type/0/redwyre.png[/img][/url]
![http://miniprofile.xfire.com/bg/co/type/0/redwyre.png[/img][/url](http://miniprofile.xfire.com/bg/co/type/0/redwyre.png[/img][/url){kind=link}
My Computer cant run the demo, so I envy those whose computers can run it. gonna have to upgrade