In my gaming group of guys that I hang with, Fe has always been our de facto leader. He always seems to be the one to actually get us organized to set up a gaming session and it was with his influence that we actually have expanded beyond our comfort group of just computer LAN games and moved into the arena of board games (which I find some measure of irony in the round-about manner in which something so “retro” seemed to have come back into fashion).
In any case, Fe has finally after three weeks of just sampling it in the LAN shops, obtained a personal copy of Battlefield 2. And since then, his enthusiasm for the game has increased exponentially and as a result, so has the rest of us.
I was never really a big fan of the original Battlefield 1942 up until the now famous Desert Combat modification hit the scene, but even then my interest waned after I realised that the limitations of basic game engine was not overcome by the modification. The gripes I had with it came from the “feel“, a subjective term that I use when it came to describing how different factors of the game (and others in this genre) combine to create a gameplay experience. Usually the factors involve stuff like character movement, weapon feedback and usage, the underlining network code and other myriad vectors. It’s akin to how one car handles differently from another even though they both do the same thing.
So anyway, I always found the “feel” of the first Battlefield to be, for the lack of a better term, “loose“; controls was not so responsive, weapons didn’t really feel right and you couldn’t really tell if and when you take someone down, the scoring system needed work and the netcode was prone to lag.
All this changed with Battlefield 2. I have to say that the new engine that DICE developed fixed most (if not all) the problems that were in the first one. However, as with most cases of evolution, it added newer problems as well. I believe that too much time was spent focused on the graphics of the engine and yet it doesn’t appear to be that much of an improvement above whats on the market at the moment. The physics engine on the other hand is fantasic, but seems to suffer from a lack of testing, made even more prominent since it was licensed engine that was just incorporated during development.
This unfinished feel continued in other areas such as a terrible server interface, an unforgiving key configuration screen, unusually inaccurate weapons, exploitable teamkill system and irregularities in the scoring system.
Yet what the game does right, is the much more unified feeling of playing in a team. The squad and commander systems are fantastic, support class are much more useful (baring a few areas), vehicles are great and if everyone in a team has half a mind and acts to work together, the game supports and greatly enables the team to do so, which just gives a much more fun experience when it actually does happen.
That being said, I’m enjoying playing in a game that allows us to actually work in a team. We still need to work at our teamwork though, too long playing solo seemed to have formed bad habits, but as the game gets better (or actually gets finished depending on your point of view) I hope we improve as well.
Oh and having global tracking stats for everyone? That’s just icing on the cake. I always liked having something to work towards. Putting me in an environment where I’m free to do whatever I like usually has me confused for some time before I lose interest.
