War is hell, and apparently so is releasing a top shelf war game. Once again, a large publisher pushes a potentially huge game out the door before its ready, turning thousands of hard core early adopting gamers into beta testers. When will game companies realize how much pain they are causing their primary market? I haven't seen this much anger in a gaming community since, well, since the last big over hyped-game shoved out the door way too early.
I wrote about the Battlefield 2 demo when it came out, and it's probably the first time I felt better about a game demo than I felt after playing the final game. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that I dropped a cool $50 on the first day BF2 came out. After excitedly driving home a little faster than I should have, I ran into my office and with trembling hands, installed the game expecting a long night of gleeful destruction, name calling and electronic mayhem. Then I met the exact same bugs that I saw in the demo. And I was sad.
As I reported before, Battlefield 2 is a first person shooter modern combat genre game. You and up to 63 of your closest friends, can jump onto a single server and go to war. You join a side (U.S., Chinese, or Middle Eastern) and pick a class from Special Ops, Assault, Sniper, Engineer, Support, Media, and my favorite, Anti-tank. There's nothing better for your stats (or your ego) than firing a rocket at an APC packed with enemy combatants and watching the death notices scroll by.
Once you are in the game, you can join a squad of up to six players within your army. Being in a squad gives you a lot of advantages over going "lone wolf"; you can get supplies easier, get orders from your squad leader, and, if your squad leader is any good, get targeting orders which make you and your squad more effective in battle, which raises your scores, and eventually raises your stats.
Above the squad leaders sits a Commander for each army, a single player who has special abilities that can make, or break a battle: artillery, re-supply, battlefield scans and UAV drone planes. Each of these abilities is used on a 2D map of the battlefield, similar to a Real Time Strategy game, which each having to recharge over time after use. By using the overview map, the Commander can also give target orders to any of the squads under his or her command, whereupon the squad leaders can quickly accept or decline the mission, and pass the information off to their squad mates. Players who don't join squads don't get these benefits, and if you choose to play a Commander, be prepared to find that half of your team isn't available to command at any one time.
As long as everyone is playing nicely, and the Commander and squad leaders aren't completely idiotic, this chain of command is extremely effective and quite a lot of fun. If no one on your side chooses to be a Commander, or no one is formed into squads, or people think they are playing a Deathmatch shooter, then prepare for a night of hell. It is VERY easy to see the imbalance in battle when you have one side that is actually strategically following commands fighting another team of wolves.
On the battlefield, the missions take the angle of controlling and holding certain objective points on the map. The map chosen can "scale" based on the number of players the server is set up to allow, so smaller 8 on 8 games don't end up with everyone so scattered out they are too far away to fight. The combat area is usually an irregular portion of the map square, with "out of bounds" marked. If you wander out of bounds too far, you die as you go AWOL. This is a huge frustration for jet pilots who require a larger turn around radius and end up straying out of bounds, and could have been handled a lot better.
Team killing is another area where the game just gets maddening. Engineers have the great strategic ability to lay out minefields, taking out enemy vehicles and troops. Unfortunately, mines can also be detonated by your teammates who choose to disregard the big, red, warning symbol that comes up on the HUD, registering a team kill against you and allowing your teammate to take retribution against you. The same thing goes for those idiots who run across the path of your tank, turning themselves into a fine track paste. Point being, you shouldn't be punished if your teammates make stupid decisions.
Of course, to experience all this first person goodness requires you to wade, hip deep and uphill both ways through bugs, bugs and more bugs. The control interface bugs I wrote about from the demo were disappointingly still present. The server browser is nearly unusable, showing 0 ping servers, improper filtering and only marginally faster than randomly calling people in the phone book to see if they happen to be playing. I've had more than my fair share of "missing a guy who's standing perfectly still in the middle of my cross hairs" and lag, pointing to horrible network code. The first night you play, be prepared to have to wait a combined hour or so for the game to re-optimize the graphics after each time you change your screen resolution to find the optimal settings. Then, after that it easily takes me a half hour to start the game and find a server to join, if I can stick it out. There have been many nights that I've gotten disgusted and shut down the game to go jump into Half-Life or Counterstrike to release my freshly motivated bloodlust. Until the first patch came out, I couldn't start Commander mode without crashing to my desktop. At that point, I just curl up in the corner in the fetal position and cry.
Imagine my excitement when the first patch was released, shortly after the game hit the shelves! Imagine my anger and shouting when I found that the bugs I found in the control set up in the DEMO were STILL THERE! Sure, they were different keys this time, but the core issue was still not fixed - even though it was listed on the patch notes. (I have since found these instructions on how to edit the config files to bypass the buggy menus and properly set your key bindings. http://www.forumplanet.com/planetbattlefield/topic.asp?fid=7419&tid=1671636) And as a bonus item, the 1.01 patch had a memory leak, prompting an immediate release of a 1.02 hotfix. Now there's talk about a larger patch due at the end of August that will contain "over 140 fixes and improvements." Perhaps EA would've been better off waiting until Thanksgiving to release the game in order to fix all these bugs first.
Bugs and gameplay balancing issues aside, Battlefield 2 could be a really, really great game. When the game is working properly and your team is cooperating, the experience is absolutely amazing. Nothing can compare to a wing of helicopters roaring 20 feet over the water, full of Special Forces armed to the teeth. Or the screams of jets flying overhead while you are your mates are running from building to building, inching your way to the objective. When the game is on, the game is amazing and can completely suspend belief. My advice to anyone interested in this game would be to hold off and wait until the results of the 1.03 patch are in, while possibly saving a few bucks on the price by holding out.
To all game publishers who are trying to decide whether to ship a buggy game: go out and actually read the BF2 forums on pretty much any site. Do you really want to kill your trust in your hard-core, release day buying gamer? Don't publish a game for Christmas when it should really wait until March. We'd rather wait.
Dave lives with his wife and three kids, doing independant software development consulting and fits games in every nook and cranny of his free time. He particularly enjoys seeing new and fresh ideas from the Indie Game Studios, and believes that they are the true future of gaming. He'll play just about anything if you put it in front of him, and usually like about two thirds of it. He's also an "0ld Sk00l" gamer, having cut his teeth on Adventure, the Vic-20, Apple II and Infocom. Back when playing a new game meant you had to type the program in from a Family Computing magazine, during a snowstorm, up a hill, both ways.
