I've played everything thus far in the Battlefield series of games: the original Battlefield 1942 (BF1942), both of its expansions (viz., The Road to Rome and Secret Weapons of World War II ), Battlefield Vietnam, (BFV) and now Battlefield 2 (BF2). After fighting BF2 for a month, and since then playing it for quite a few hours, I can say unqualifiedly that it is the greatest game in the series but also the buggiest, most unstable game I've ever seen.
BF2 shines in the visual department. Literally. When the sun is up and cresting the glare can be blinding, just as in the real world. Half-joke aside, the game's visuals have come a long way since the original BF1942, which was no slouch for its day. At a high resolution with image quality enhancements enabled (i.e., anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering), BF2 brings an eerie, cartoonish verisimilitude to computer gaming.
It's so obviously a video game that it's impossible to think it's real. The colors are far too bright and vibrant; the architecture is far too cleanly angular; the soldiers and their kits are far too much like something out of a G.I. Joe cartoon. There is a clear, consistent, and perfectly chosen artistic style underlying even the most subtle touches. It makes the game overwhelmingly, well, game-ish.
And yet there are moments when the game's beauty and "realism" cause me to suspend disbelief to the point where it seriously creeps me out. The very opening movie has a sequence that does it to me, when the attack chopper peels off after killing the soldier manning a stationary missile launcher. Folks, I have seen that exact same maneuver when driving past Camp Pendleton, albeit with a different bird. That's just too close to reality not to hit home.
It's as if the developers deliberately set out to make something that looks so good, that comes so close to mimicking all the right moves, all the right weapons, etc., that it doesn't need to be photorealistic to work. It reminds me of Tolkien's beloved writings, insofar as it has such an authenticity while remaining obviously fantastical. I know I'm not capturing what I'm trying to say, but this is the best my limited prose can do. Suffice it to say that the game is a real looker.
Unfortunately, that comes at a price, and a pretty high price it is. I have a pretty beefy system, but I can't run the game at anything approaching a high resolution. I'm not entirely sure this is representative of the code for the visuals, however, as I'll explain later. Suffice it to say that you are going to need a beast of a machine to run BF2 in all its glory.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The sounds in BF2 are positively superb. The cracking of each weapon is different and seems perfect to my ears. The M16A2 is a bit compressed but otherwise much like the real thing. The AK-47 has its own distinctive chatter, a bit different from how I remember it but great nonetheless. The same can be said for all the weapons, sound effects, and even ambient noises. Heck, the first time I ran up to a moored boat, the sound of water lapping against the dock was so realistic I was reminded immediately of summer afternoons at my paternal grandparents' cottage on the lake. It was that realistic.
The voice acting is equally superb. As before, all of the dialogue is recorded in the respective languages, which lends a great deal of flavor to the game. I grew so accustomed to the Japanese commands in BF1942 that I eventually came to recognize certain words. Though I confess that Chinese and the language of the Middle Eastern Coalition (MEC) —Arabic?—are presently little more than gibberish to my ears, it all seems like very convincing gibberish nonetheless. Kudos again to the developers for nailing the languages.
Too bad the implementation sucks rocks. The audio code is so pathetic that the installer crashed on me as soon as it got to the part where it sets the microphone volume. As soon as I turn on EAX emulation or set the audio options to use hardware instead of software, the game crashes within a minute or two of joining a multi-player game and won't run a single-player game at all. For that matter, the game won't even run if I have a second audio device in the system! I'll go into greater detail about the game's bugs in the content section. Suffice it to say for now that the audio implementation is unforgivably bad.
As to the menu system and controls, the interface of BF2 is both a step forward and a step back. In the forward column, the buttons and their logical groupings are the very model of clarity, making it simple to navigate with ease. Yet it's also a step back in that the profile selection is thrust into the player's face every stinking time he runs the game. Come on, developers, you've given me the ability to store the name and even the password I want to use; how hard is it to give me an auto-login checkbox as well?! BFV did away with this nonsense, and I was glad to see it go, so having it back isn't welcome.
When it comes to the in-game controls, BF2 is as flexible and powerful as any other game made. Too many other games that provide vehicles give the player no way to remap the in-vehicle controls, Unreal Tournament 2004 (UT2k4) being the prime example in my mind. In contrast, BF2 provides a welcome set of options for common, air, land, and sea. Frankly, the only thing I've wanted to tweak and haven't been able to change —I'm not saying it's not in there somewhere, I'm just saying I haven't found it yet—is an option to invert the Y-axis handling when using the TV-guided missiles on an attack chopper.
But perhaps the greatest innovation of all in terms of BF2's interface is the attention to detail given to the command and control portion of the game. When I play team-oriented multi-player games I try to play as part of the team, and a very large part of this means that I use whatever in-game communication mechanisms are available. Yes, I'm almost always on TeamSpeak 2, Ventrillo, or something similar with my on-line buddies, but using the in-game communications helps to cut down on overtalking and bandwidth use. It also makes it possible to convey information to players not using external voice chat programs.
The problem with most games is that the communication interface and/or command and control interface are unwieldy, and that's putting it charitably. Tribes 2 was one of the best games I've ever played in this regard, having a great voice command system as well as a top-down commander view. But none of the other games I've played even come close to the power and simplicity of BF2. The key and mouse combination is absolutely unbeatable.
When I see the enemy, all I have to do is hit the 'Q' key with my left hand and click the left mouse button with my right. The game's context sensitive system intelligently broadcasts the proper warning to my teammates. As a squad leader, I can issue commands easily and quickly. The developers deserve huge recognition for assembling the very best communication and command and control interfaces in existence, and I hope other developers will sit up and take notice: BF2 defines how it should be done.
But all is not wine and roses; there is, unfortunately, one portion of the interface that deserves the most excoriating criticism possible: the multi-player server browser. I can summarize all of the problems with one statement: the developers used GameSpy technology. I really don't get it. I really don't understand why so many games incorporate GameSpy technology. It has sucked for years, it does suck, and it will suck for the foreseeable future. Every single game I've seen that uses GameSpy technology for its multi-player browser has the same problems over and over and over.
To list the litany yet again, servers sometimes don't appear. Applying filters sometimes causes the server list to disappear completely. When the filters don't kill the list entirely, they don't work. I can set the not empty filter, for example, and still see lots of servers in the list with zero players. The browser is also glacially slow, and that's putting it charitably. Heck, I can literally run All Seeing Eye (ASE), get a complete server list, and get to the point where BF2 is loading the map in the time it takes the in-game server list to refresh! In short, the browser is about as badly broken as it possibly can be, thanks to that "quality" GameSpy code. Sheesh.
I'll start with the negatives, for they're easily summarized. First, BF2 still has plenty of idiotic spawn raping problems, though one of the worthwhile changes is the lack of "spawn waves". Whereas BF1942 and BFV used a system according to which all dead players on a team respawned at exactly the same time, BF2 is a lot smarter: players spawn individually and always after the same interval. That makes it a lot harder for an enemy to park a couple of tanks near a spawn point and unmercifully rape each spawn wave with a single volley.
A second, distinct improvement in that respect is provided by the squad mechanic, which allows the members of a squad to spawn at their squad leader's location. Of course, if their squad leader is dead then there's no option other than spawning at a "hard point", but all this does is give the squad leader more incentive to behave like a leader in the first place. I appreciate both of these changes, but I still think that more sheltered points would make more sense.
The auto-balancing code is also not merely a pain in the rump, it's downright broken. Because the in-game browser sucks, I like to use ASE to find good servers. ASE's filters aren't broken, so I can easily get a list of only those servers that have auto-balance disabled. There's nothing I hate more than trying to play with a few friends in our own squad, only to have the stupid auto-balance code rip us apart and shove one or two of us onto the other team. Unfortunately, joining servers with auto-balance disabled doesn't mean it really is disabled; I've had servers switch me anyway. This really needs to get fixed.
I'm also sorry to say that BF2 allows bunny hopping in the most ridiculous manner imaginable. For those who don't know what I mean, BF2 allows players to jump as frequently as they want to, as long as they have sufficient stamina. So it's possible for players to jump, jump, jump, right in the middle of close quarter battle, the result of which being that they're very difficult to hit. This is stupid enough on its own, for nothing looks sillier than a bunch of grizzled, battle-hardened, MEC soldiers hopping around like bloody bunnies. What's worse is that it seems to inflict little to no accuracy penalty. It's ridiculous that a guy jumping back and forth has any prayer of hitting me, while my point-blank shotgun blast does him no damage. It's like stepping back into Counterstrike, which at least fixed the problem some years ago.
In terms of balance, the only glaring issue I've noticed is that attack choppers are either ridiculously overpowered or far too tough to kill, one of the two. In the real world helicopters are tank killers, plain and simple, so it doesn't really bother me much that they can blow a tank to bits with just a single rocket strike. What's positively ridiculous, however, is how much damage they can take. It takes two direct hits from the main gun on a tank to kill an attack chopper. That's not one hit, folks, but two rounds from a very large gun to a very fragile aircraft.
The M1A2 Abrams tank, for example, has a 120 mm main bore; that's a round nearly five inches across! I'm sorry, but it's bloody ridiculous that attack choppers should survive that, and the unbalance is only exacerbated by the relative difficulties involved. That is, it's easy for choppers to hit tanks, but it's pretty tricky for tanks to hit choppers. The situation is even worse with air-to-air missiles, insofar as I've seen an attack chopper soak up three of them and still fly away to fight another day.
And this complaint isn't a complaint made from the standpoint of concern for realism, not at all. I don't care how realistically the interactions between the vehicles and what not are. I'm betting that anyone who has played a game with a good attack chopper pilot and gunner would agree, though, that they're ridiculously overpowered. They're quite fast, excessively deadly with missiles, guns, and TV-guided missiles, and are tough as nails to boot. Because they're in the air, they're also harder to hit from the ground than it is for them to hit ground targets. So I'm sorry, but when a tanker scores a direct hit, the damned things should blow up!
The team kill (TK) blame-responsibility algorithm is utterly moronic. I've had teammates run into the side of my aircraft during takeoff, and I get penalized. I've had teammates drive their helicopters and/or planes into my helicopter/plane, and I get penalized. Heck, engineers and snipers get the blame when their fellow morons idiotically drive over "friendly" mines or walk in front of "friendly" claymores. It's hard to believe the stupid things the TK handling code does, but they happen a lot when playing on public servers.
Sadly, the developers somehow also managed to overlook the painfully obvious potential for medic/engineer/support point-farming exploits. For those whose minds aren't warped enough to think of such things, ponder for a moment how easily a medic, engineer, or support player could accumulate points if only he could somehow heal, repair, or resupply repeatedly. I'm not going to go into the details, but from what I've seen it's possible for miscreants to accumulate hundreds of points in a single round through collusion. Such exploits will supposedly be fixed in the upcoming patch, and I certainly hope they are. What amazes me is that nobody seems to have thought of this ahead of time.
Finally, in the negative column, the vehicle damage code needs some reworking. It's bloody ridiculous that a tank should be so easily damaged by gently bumping into a wall. It's similarly ridiculous, or perhaps even more so, that players can get killed instantly if one of the little boats runs into his foot at a low rate of speed. Some vehicles are damaged far too easily by surrounding objects, whereas the player is killed with barely a touch from even the smallest of vehicles. Some rework is obviously needed here.
I realize that sounds like a lot of complaints, and, to be fair, there are a lot of things that need to be fixed. But to be clear, BF2's game mechanics are absolutely brilliant when taken as a whole. That's why I wanted to get the negatives out of the way first, to leave the reader with the positive impression the game so richly deserves.
First, in the positive column, is the minor improvement provided by the removal of scope drift for all snipers. BF1942 and BFV both had the annoyingly realistic—See? Realism isn't always a good thing in a game!—scope drift when zoomed in on target. BF2 puts this to bed, which makes sniping much more a matter of skill than scope control. It's a pity the default sniper weapons are so underpowered, though, taking one shot to the head but two shots to the heart to kill. Claymores are a sniper's best friend, however, for they provide exactly the sort of cover that "teammates" so often won't. On the whole, the changes to the sniper class are a mixed bag, but I think they represent a positive step forward.
Even better is the fact that the game mechanics really do reward all the classes. Playing as a medic or anti-tank soldier in BF1942 was a largely thankless task. Sure, you helped out your teammates, and you could very well make the difference between victory and defeat, but the players at the top of the scoreboards were always the top pilots, tank drivers, and assault fighters. This is clearly not the case in BF2. In fact, quite often the player at the top of the board will be a medic or even an engineer on vehicle heavy maps. It just makes sense to reward the different classes for remaining focused on their own areas of specialization, and it's great the developers figured this out.
It should also be recognized that the command and control and in-game voice communication features are the very best of breed. I've played a lot of different games, as anyone reviewing my all-time favorites rankings can easily see, and I have to say that BF2 absolutely nails this aspect of game mechanics. Command, control, and communication are all blended near-seamlessly into a simple-to-use, consistent, context sensitive system that not only provides useful information to teammates but plays a big role in the larger, strategic focus of a game. The basic interface is simple: look at something, press a key, and select the appropriate function.
If reporting an enemy tank, helicopter, plane, or even just infantry is what you're after, then simply looking at them, hitting 'Q', and clicking the left mouse button will report them to the entire team. Because said reporting is context sensitive, and because said reporting paints an enemy target on the radar that continues to update for a few seconds, this simple action makes it possible for anyone, anywhere on the battlefield, to provide great intelligence data to the commander and the rest of the team with a simple, fast sequence of actions. Though often overlooked, this sort of notification interface is absolutely wonderful for those who make use of it.
To illustrate how powerful this is, stop and think for a minute about how it makes life easier for pilots. I was playing just last night with some friends on a server where we were getting creamed repeatedly on the Daqing Oilfields map. It wasn't hard to see why, either: the U.S. team was dominating the air and creaming us with their attack choppers and planes. So when the next round started, I jumped into the cockpit of the SU-30 and went to work. I was splashing enemy aircraft left and right, which clearly helped my teammates on the ground take and hold ground. What made my job a lot simpler was the fact that the ground pounders were calling out targets. Face it, when you're zooming high above the battle it's hard to tell friend from foe at a distance, and it's not like those jets can turn on a dime. Having a nice, big, flashing, red enemy chopper lit up on my radar made killing them simple. So if you're trying to play as a team, take my advice and call out all the major targets you see; you'll be doing your team a big favor.
The command and control mechanics are equally powerful and simple. To issue attack orders to a squad, simply look at the target, hit a key ('T' by default), and click the left mouse button. Other useful orders (e.g., defend an area) require only a slight movement of the mouse to select the desired command. The game doesn't always seem to get the exact location at which I'm looking, but it does a good job more often than not. The result of all this command/control/communication brilliance is that BF2 makes it easier to coordinate squad tactics than any other such multi-player game.
And that's to say nothing of the commander's interface. I'll be honest up front and say that I haven't played as a commander yet in a multi-player match. I've already logged more than fifty hours with the game, but I simply haven't accumulated enough rank yet to get into the commander's slot. From what I've seen in the single-player game, though, and from what I've read, it looks to me like the developers have nailed this aspect of the game too. The commander is a regular player on the field, so it's not like some games (e.g., Savage) which basically force the commander completely out of the action. It just happens to be the case that he's a "regular" player who can fly unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drop supplies, give commands to squads, and, of course, call down fire from the big guns!
So, if a commander is playing it smart, he'll typically play as a sniper or a spec ops guy, someone with a decent scope for spotting who can remain out of the main action. Of course, I've seen too many dolts rushing headlong into battle, but these are usually the commanders who get voted out of office—and thank God for the mutiny mechanic at times like those. Whatever the case, the commander can switch to an overhead view of the action, from which he can give detailed orders to squads or even to individual players as needed. He can help his team out by deploying UAVs to serve as eyes in the sky, causing all enemies but spec ops players to appear on the radar. He can drop supply crates at key points, which is the very best way, I should add, to keep those front-line tank drivers happy. And don't worry, you rear echelon... er... let's just say REMFs and leave it at that, you too can score big points: just call down artillery fire on the enemy.
Oh, and did I mention the degree to which teamkills are punished? The game assigns heavy penalties to those jerks who live to give the rest of us grief. Thankfully, I've seen quite a few servers with auto-kicking enabled to punish too many TKs. Now if only the developers fix the stupid blame-assignment code, it will all work nicely. I can't understand for the life of me why some servers turn off the ability to punish, but I'm betting it's due to the poor assignment of blame. We'll see.
Finally, BF2 does something impossibly smart for the FPS genre, something almost no other FPS game has done before: it gives us all incentive to keep playing! That's always been the achilles heel of FPS games. Seriously, folks, I could only score so many frags with the rocket launcher on the original Quake DM4 map before I gave it up. I loved the map, and I got really good at it, but there just wasn't any good reason to keep playing. There wasn't anything more to be seen. There wasn't anything more to enjoy.
This is not the case with BF2, insofar as more play means higher ranks, and higher ranks mean more weapon unlocks, better odds of commanding a game, and all sorts of awards and ribbons. Admittedly, the awards and ribbons are merely for show, but they do remind the player of his accomplishments and are surprisingly pleasant as such. But the weapon unlocks and better chances of commanding, well, those are certainly worth the effort. I'm sure BF2 will grow boring someday, but I'm confident that BF2's "longevity features" do much to delay that day's arrival.
In short summary, even though the game's mechanics have some clear, easily avoidable flaws, on bulk the game mechanics are fabulous. They don't redefine the genre in a bold new way, or anything like that, but they do polish and refine what's already been done to the point where perfection is actually within the developers' collective grasp. If only they can fix a few things, BF2 will have the most perfect multi-player FPS game mechanics possible, given today's technology.
BF1942 didn't have a story. BFV did no better. Thus, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that BF2 basically has no story either. The game consists solely of a number of maps on which to play, which may or may not be linked to some larger story in the designers' minds. So if you're the type of gamer who needs to be sucked into a good story in order to have fun with a game, then BF2 will be just as much of a crushing disappointment as the prior games in the series. But if you're like most gamers, you probably won't even notice; you'll be too busy having a blast. And as I said before, that's just fine with me. I don't think every game needs a story in order to be fun.
Ok, the first thing I have to get off my chest is my main complaint with BF2: it is buggy/unstable as hell! Seriously, I have never seen a game this bad before. I thought Raven Shield (RS) was bad, having so many hit detection issues, frag/scope/ladder/etc.-lock bugs, and so forth. I thought that the original BF192 was bad, having so many audio problems. But BF2 truly takes the cake. You see, those other games would at least run. Yes, there were game play bugs, stuttering, and all sorts of other warts, but it took me a month of fussing around just to get BF2 to run for more than five minutes without rebooting my machine completely. That's nuts.
My current system runs literally dozens of other games without a hitch. And I'm not talking about games like Minesweeper, folks, I'm talking about Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, The Battle for Middle Earth, Tribes: Vengeance, DOOM 3, and all the other latest-and-greatest, system-breaking games. I play all of those at 1600 x 1200 x 32 bpp, usually with 2x to 4x anti-aliasing (AA) and 8x anisotropic filtering (AF), and though they do occasionally crash it's not a big deal. In contrast, BF2 is the most unstable, crappy code I have ever run on this computer, hands down. And it's not like I'm running it on incapable hardware; no, I've got an Athlon XP 3200 CPU, 2 GB of physical RAM, an ATI Radeon X800 XT video card, and a Creative Labs Audigy 2 Platinum sound card. It should run easily at a comfortable resolution.
Let me give a brief recount of my first experience with the game. The first bad omen was when the installer crashed. The installer, for crying out loud, crashed back to the desktop without finishing. I later figured out that this was because the microphone configuration utility was crashing. At the time, I uninstalled and reinstalled just to be safe, but still the problem remained. So I launched the game, tried to load a single-player map, waited for the "shader optimization"... waited... waited... and waited... After ten minutes with no discernible activity, I killed the process. The next time I started the game, I got to the menus and tried to configure the options, but as soon as I clicked the "Audio" button BF2 crashed back to the desktop immediately. For nearly two weeks, the best I could do was play for maybe five to fifteen minutes at a time before BF2 would crash back to the desktop, or, far more often, reboot the machine completely.
After nearly a month of fighting with the stupid game, losing basically all my free time trying to get it to run, I now have it working reliably. I can now play for hours on end with almost no crashing/rebooting. It still dies on me about once every few hours, but for the most part it's stable. What's completely unacceptable are the restrictions I have to live with to run this piece of crap. They are, in no particular order, as follows:
So, I'd have to say that BF2 wins this year's Still Steaming Pile of Dung award, as well as the Beta Software Released to Public award. I don't know what kind of drugs the developers/publisher were taking to think that BF2 was ready to be released, and I don't know how they managed to ship something less stable than the demo. All I can tell you is that the game needs patching worse than any other game I've ever seen. It's that bad.
That ridiculous nightmare aside, however, when the game works there's a lot to enjoy. All of the maps with which it ships are good. There are a few of which I'm not all that fond, most notably Zatar Wetlands, but BF2 is the only game I've seen that ships without a single clunker of a map. Seriously, there isn't one map in there that isn't worth playing. Like I said, I'm not fond of Zatar Wetlands, but even that has grown on me over time.
More remarkable, I think, is that many of the maps are absolutely magnificent. Most games have one or perhaps two stand-out maps that become instant classics. With Quake III Arena it was Q3DM17. With Unreal Tournament it was Deck 17 and Face. With BF2, though, I'm hard pressed to choose between Sharqi Peninsula, Daqing Oilfields, Strike at Karkand, Songhua Stalemate, Mashtuur City, Kubra Dam, and Gulf of Oman. Seriously, I have never seen so many top-notch maps in any multi-player game. If there's an award out there for best multi-player maps, BF2 should win it.
The array of vehicles is also absolutely first rate. BF1942 and BFV both distinguished themselves for having great transports, ships, planes, and even submarines in the former. BF2 can hold its head high in living up to its pedigree. All of the vehicles are great fun to use, particularly the ridiculously over-powered, unbreakable-titanium-armored attack helicopters. As I've said already there are some balance issues, but these will presumably be addressed in the upcoming patch.
I could go on for quite a while about all the great stuff in BF2. I could talk about how the selection of player classes is great, how each is well defined and how all have great weapons to use. I could talk about how the single-player AI is actually pretty good, in stark contrast to the prior games in the series. I could talk about how all of the elements of foliage, buildings, spawn points, etc. fit together to make the maps as great as they are. But this review is already too long. Suffice it to say that there is an awful lot of game packed into BF2. And once the game is running in a stable configuration, it's one heck of a good time.
Given that BF2 is largely intended to be a multi-player game, everything I've said concerns its multi-player aspect, but there nevertheless remain some important observations to be made. First, the network code is about as flawless as anything I've seen. True, the game seems to be quite the bandwidth hog, but as long as the player has a good connection he will have a near-perfect gaming experience. I have seen a tendency for lag to become a bother on larger servers with lots of players, but I suspect that has more to do with the server's ability to keep up than with the network code. Unlike the other games in the series, I haven't seen any problems beyond occasional lag in all the hours I've played, and that's really saying something these days.
It's also worth noting that BF2 ships with Punkbuster right out of the "box". Most of the cretins who cheat will simply have to find another game to ruin. I have no idea how difficult it is to hack Punkbuster compared to other such anti-cheating software, but I know that I haven't felt like I've been playing with even a single cheater during all the hours I've played. That too is really saying something these days.
The conclusion for this review is a simple one: BF2 rocks. Yes, it's buggy as hell internally, particularly as regards its audio code and whatever else has been screwing me from day one, and yes, it does have the various rough edges I've mentioned. It's also fair to say that the core gameplay really hasn't changed much from BF1942 or BFV; i.e., there is a clear sense in which BF2 is "just a rehash" of those other games, to be reductionist about it.
But none of these things matter for one simple reason: the game is truly great fun to play. The developers have had years and two prior games to get it right, and after playing BF2 I'd have to say that those were merely prequels. BF2 is the real thing, folks, and it's the most entertaining multi-player game I've come across in quite some time. I think it's the game that's finally going to dethrone Raven Shield as my all-time favorite multi-player game, in or around the first-person shooter (FPS) genre.
So unless you absolutely despise FPS games, have a really crappy system, or can't get the demo to work—the released version is actually buggier than the demo if you can believe it—stop reading and go buy a copy of BF2 today. I can virtually guarantee that you'll love it. The game takes all that is great from the prior iterations and polishes it to a lustrous sheen, adds a bunch of great new stuff, and fixes a couple of the problems along the way. It does have its own warts to be sure, but BF2 is an absolute blast in spite of them. See you online, soldier.
08/21/2005