BF2: Preview vom Northern Brigade Clan

Die Jungs des Northern Brigade Clan hatten die Gelegenheit BF2 antesten zu können. Und zum Glück stellten sie ein Preview zusammen. Abgerundet durch ein spitzen Video.

On Thursday 18th November some of us guys in Northern Brigade went to the DICE office for a little BF2 visit. We met the BattleField 2 crew, the EA folks and of course, we got to play the game The purpose of this little drill was for DICE to get some external feedback on the game. They also wanted us to tell the rest of the community about how BF2 is shaping up. And guess what? There´s not one, but TWO movies recorded ingame as we play. All edited up for you by mr KOiN, so enjoy.

EA and DICE played on one team, Northern Brigade + some media guys (PC gamer etc) on the other. When first getting into the game you get a bit overwhelmed by everything that´s new. First we just ran around TK:ing each other to get a feel for the weapons and vehicles, trying the voicecom, the reporting system etc. One thing that strikes you at first (but you get used to it quickly) are the impressive graphics in the game. Everything is really detailed, from the players to vehicles, buildings and terrain. The player models are 5000 polygons up close, but the graphics engine scales the down (LOD:ing) to 450 when they are far away. The build we got to play was said to be 70% finished, so yeah there were some bugs in there but not a helluva lot. They only let us play one map though so maybe there are work needed on the other levels. Here are some things we noticed/heard during playing or talking to the crew.

Classes - There are 7 different kits/classes to choose from. No big surprises, but there were some kits that stand out as different. Two kits, the Medic and Support kits, lets you heal/revive people and also drop ammo for other players ? both of which will score points for that player . The Special Forces kit has a c4 and the laser designator that works together with airborne forces. In the spawn menu you see a bar that displays the ability of each class to sprint (all can sprint, the bar just shows for how long they can do it). Depending on what weapon your guy is using the spread/deviation is different, also taking into consideration your position. For example, I was playing as the heavy gunner and couldn´t hit anything with accuracy unless I was prone.

Reporting Gone are the F-button style reporting system. Now you just press "Q" and you get a little menu of stuff you can say/report. A very cool thing is that if you look at tank, press Q and choose ?spotted?, your player will say ?Enemy tank spotted?. The tank will then be highlighted on the minimap for the other players on your team.

Deforming and destroying There´s been a lot of rumours around the ability to blow stuff up in BF2, but here´s the deal: You cannot blow up buildings, roads etc. The only thing that can be ?deformed? is objects that are part of the game play like bridges, radars etc which will be of great strategic use. According to Lars Gustavsson they gave up on grand scale deforming because A) it can change gameplay too much B) there are a lot of network code issues with sending the information about what is deformed and what´s not. Too bad, we hope to see it in BF3?

BFTV? Well, maybe? The ability to broadcast live has been on the top of the wish list of all clans since BF1942 released. EA is aware of this, but somehow (why oh why!?) they have decided to not include BFTV in the release (though it might come in a patch). But wait! Don´t stop reading yet, BF2 has the ability to record demos (like CS for example). The demos can be watched ingame or be rendered out to AVI as a stand alone file, the movie attatched to this article was recorded that way.

Squads and Voicecom Each side can have their team broken down into squads. A Squad leader can give order too his squad or request orders from the Commander (more about that very cool feature later). As a player you can see little arrows telling you where the rest of your squad is and so on. Your buddys also show up on the minimap. The Squad system might improve gaming on public servers, making it easier to cooperate with other players. DICE has implemented Voice over IP in the game, so there´s no need for thirdparty software for communications anymore. The Voicecom follows the chain of command: Squad leaders can communicate with other squad leaders and with the commander. The average grunt will only hear his own squad. To tell you the truth we didn't pay a lot of attention to the Voicecom thingy as we were sitting next to each other and could just yell at each other instead. That said, it did look and sound like a solid system. It will be interesting to see how it will be used on public servers...

The almighty commander This function is what´s really going to define this game during clan wars. The commander is not a player on the field, he is more of an entity controlling and supervising what happens on the battlefield. He has a top down view of the map and he can call in artillery, drop ammo crates and set waypoint for his players. In fact, the commanders view looks like a completely different game, more like an RTS thingy, Command&Conquer style really. As long as your teams radar stations are intact he can see everything on the map. And where he can see he can shoot artillery - although the artillery is being balanced with a long reload time, so, the commander will have to choose his targets wisely . The only way to stop him therefore is to take out the radar stations and the artillery. It´s easy to imagine the first few minutes of a clan war is going to be all about commander vs commander, them trying to kill off each others radars and artillery. If your teams commander can't see or shoot he´s pretty useless. But radars and the artillery can always be repaired, Im guessing that the commanders best friend is going to be some poor bastard playing as engineer standing by to repair his toys Since the commander can see it all, there´s no use for old tricks like contesting on roofs etc. It will be very interesting to see how the clan community decides to use the commander. There is a server option to turn him off, so if two team want to go at it regular BF style that´s an option?

Points, a public friendly system To make it a bit more worth while to play as a support or medic or engy character you now score points for a lot of stuff. You get points for heals, for supplying ammo , repairing etc. In fact the points system has been totally revamped. If you do a lot of damage to an enemy but another player finish him off, you still get a point (That´s right, no more yelling ?FRAG STEALER!?). The driver of a vehicle will score points when the gunner gets a kill etc. Kinda like an assist point in hockey Hopefully the new system will make for a better public playing experience now that there´s point dealt out for the more ?supportive? roles as well as the master fraggers.

The global ranking system Everything you do in the game on a ranked server is tracked and stored in a stats database. Depending on how good you are you will increase in rank over time. Right now higher rank basically means you get more weapons to choose from in each kit. They save all kinds of stats in the database to be able to put interesting leader boards on the web. Right now EA has something like 47 different leader boards, like top scorer, best newbie and even who's driven over most people All of your scores are stored along with your profile at the EA servers.

Some other stuff we asked:

NB: Will there be modding tools/map editors released with the game? EA/DICE: Yes, we are releasing the tools we used to build the game. There´s going to be a level editor, FX-editor, animation etc. We´re really excited about what the modding community will do with all this.

Conclusion Obviously one map is not enough to judge a complete game. But from what we saw, heard, and how the game felt we think DICE is going to shape this title into a beast of a game. We´d like to thank DICE for having us over, but next time forget about lunch, not only did the eating cut away from quality gaming time, but I got some kind of food poisoning from that chicken salad (or was it fish? Impossible to say) Over and out, RascaL

So that´s it! We´d like to thank the good folks at DICE for having us over, GG guys! We hope you all had fun reading this and watching the movie. See you all on a whole new kind of battlefield next year

Movie 1 (42 meg, Divx):

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Movied 2 (84 meg, Divx):

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