Battlefield 2

For about the past year, a great chasm existed in my gaming world.  While games came and went, very few games stirred my soul or ignited the pilot light which fires up the adrenaline engine or causes profuse amounts of cursing and swearing from the difficulty. 

Sure, games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 stood out on their own in terms of graphics and single player action, but it’s still single player.   Of course they also contain deathmatch but after so many years of deathmatch playing since the Doom years over 14400 baud modems, there exists nothing new to prove with deathmatch.

While other games I played like Everquest 2 provided the human interaction in questing and task completion, the inability to challenge oneself against another human opponent still left a void. 

In other words ladies and gentlemen, the current games undertaken by this reviewer and his meager budget failed to kick me in the nuts and make me go wow.  The last games which did that for me? Naturally, it’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein and then Enemy Territory.  On the surface they appear to be straight forward shooters but as one dug deeper the use of class-based soldiers, a dependency on those soldiers for supplies and health, objective orientated goals, and a top notch physics engine for at least somewhat realistic weapon effects made these games not just another shooter but an entirely new class of shooter.   Those remain the type of first person shooters I want and until Battlefield 2 came out I wondered if anyone was going to try and replicate what I wanted.

Fortunately, DICE and EA did not just replicate the basic components of a team based shooter and call it a day, they’ve actually expanded on the gameplay and stuffed it down a crack pipe which requires constant and repeated smoking. 

Battlefield 2 represents not only a great sequel to the first game Battlefield 1942 (whose popularity can not be argued though it’s quality of gameplay can), but also a great successor to all team based shooters that came before it, including both games in the Wolfenstein series. Dare I call it the new gold standard of team based shooters?  Damn right I do.   

What makes Battlefield 2 so compelling and make one forget about everyday mundane things like eating, sleeping, or family members?   Plenty! Let’s review some of the highlights.

First, the system wide point system.  Now 99.9% of games in the history of video games have kept score since Pong but BF2 takes scores to a whole new level of insanity.  Not only do you gather points in a game each round, but then those points accumulate over time resulting in promotions, weapon unlocks, and nifty new rankings.  It’s point whoring to the Nth degree.  And dammit if I don’t want a new fix each time I play.  Yes, gimme that needle! What? It was used by another medic? I don’t care!! Just give me those points! What, we need an engineer to repair the helo?  Fine, I’ll do that?  Now we need a support guy dishing ammo to the snipers?  I’ll be there!  Hook me up with the fix. No, don’t bother with avoiding any scar tissue from all the other shooting up, just jam those points in there!  If Battlefield 2 was a hot woman, the point system would be her breasts lactating beer.

What I don’t understand: how the hell do some people already have over one hundred thousand points?  Sharing one username with multiple friends across the globe for literally non-stop playing?  Stat padding or other nefarious methods I would think. Or perhaps they do not need things like sunlight or possess a desire to not leave their parent's basement.

Second, is the squad based management system and its utilization.  Breaking a team into smaller components makes sense of course but the two new additions to the squad level make squads in BF2 more than just an organizational method.  First, each squad leader serves as a roaming spawn point.  The immense benefit of this should be immediately apparent.  With such mobility for a spawn point, spawn camping is greatly reduced. Also, if you should die and your squad leader still lives (and is not stupid), you can immediately pop up next to the action again rather than running from a spawn point to wherever the action exists. 

What infuriates me to no end, however, is when the squad leader is a reject from the short bus and decides to man a single seat jet or stationary position, thus negating the ability to spawn off of them.  The second feature of BF2 that is great for squads: Voice Over IP.  No more secondary programs needed; now it’s built right into the game. More importantly, the squad leaders can communicate at two levels: both with their squad and their commander. This allows for some semblance of control while still allowing for communication, smack talking, and general shenanigans.

The final feature that makes BF2 transcend previous team based shooters: vehicles.  Up until this point I avoided vehicle based games for no real reason other than I thought it subtracted from the game.  Well color me wrong because tearing around in an M1A2 tank headlong into the fray, missile lock warnings screeching through your speakers provides a fantastic rush.   

Of an interesting technical note is that the tanks and helicopters and even the character models appear, at some level, to be polygonal rather than bounded boxes.  If, for example, you fire a missile at an enemy tank but it goes low, the tank will actually hit dirt rather than the damage box representing the bank.  Also, if a missile is shot at one of the transport choppers it can go THROUGH the chopper since the doors, at least on the Blackhawk, are open for crewmen to see.  This also allows foot grunts with more ammo than brains to try and pluck enemy combatants out of a chopper.  Naturally, I am one who has more ammo than brains.  The falling dead bodies out of a chopper is just to satisfying not to attempt.

With the game set in the near future, vehicles are easy to identify as to their purpose and function. Tanks, helicopters, water boats (as opposed to non-water boats), planes, and jeeps dot the landscape. Yes, I know, “Sphinx Battlefield 1942 and Halo did that too.”  Ok that’s fair enough, but I didn’t play those games, I don’t have the pull of Gamespy.  Battlefield 1942 was yet ANOTHER WWII based shooter and I had my fill of those in Wolfenstein. As for Halo?  Console shooter, the less said about THOSE games the better. 

The only down side that I see right now involves the physics dictating the bullet flight from weapons.  Instead of there being a delay between shot and impact (as in Wolfenstein for example) it appears that bullets hit the moment they are fired suggesting that a corner was cut in the design process.  Notice how in this video when the sniper keeps his sight stationary against a moving target the target instantly dies. Wouldn't a more realistic approach require the sniper to lead or follow the target?

Battlefield 2 epitomizes what can go right in a team based first person shooter.  Vehicles, voice chat, effective squad management, and a point system which challenges the player to do better will surely keep BF2 on my hard drive for a long, long time.