Battlefield 2: 10 months on
April 25th, 2006 by RobboSince Battlefield 2 (BF2) dropped back in June last year, you could say I’ve put in a good amount of play into it. Certainly enough for me to raise a point or two without fear of being called a noob. Then again, I’m not sure that’s a fear we ever escape.
When BF2 was released, it got bloody good scores. At the time, I would have completely agreed with those 90-95% marks. The game really brought home the holy trinity of teamwork, killing and shouting that is usually only enjoyed by PC gamers religiously - that is to say at Easter and Christmas when everyone is off work and can get together for a LAN (party).
Very quickly, this praise fell away, as the BF2 community began to realise that this game might not quite be the finished article. The Blackhawk helicopter, for example, was far more powerful than any other vehicle in the game when fully manned. Two engineers sitting in the cabin could repair it whilst two minigunners merrily piled bodies all over the map. Everyone sitting in the helicopter would get a point when someone was killed by it. This became known as blackwhoring, and is the reason why most players’ best scores were achieved on the Blackhawk city maps whilst playing as the US.
There were other problems too. ‘Dolphin diving’, the BF2 equivalent of ‘bunnyhopping’, (the method used by Counter-Strike players to move more quickly than they should be allowed, before it was very quickly removed from the game), was found within days of the game’s release. It gave the user more speed, and made them harder to hit. Surely for such an exploit to exist it must require a difficult combination of variables to reproduce? No. All you have to do is press the crouch and jump keys repeatedly.
So in the first few weeks we learned a lot about BF2. It was full of bugs that really should have been fixed before shipping, and the reviews didn’t draw nearly enough attention to these. BF2 encourages the player to earn points, get a good score, get promoted, earn badges, etc. An exploit in a single player game allows the user to cheat the game, and themselves. An exploit in a multiplayer only game allows a user to cheat every other player in the world. This is why it’s considered a big deal by those who play it - by those who paid for this under tested game.
In the months that followed exploits were fixed, exploits were created. The planes were made too difficult to kill, the planes were made too easy to kill. Balancing a game played around the world is clearly a difficult task, particularly when the QA team working on the patches is working in one office and numbers in single figures. Only from v1.2 did EA deign to bring community players on board to give feedback on the change list before it was finalised. You could have had this from day 0 EA. You could have had it from day -30. This is why some publishers have public betas. You might want to ask your mates about them.
The above is all old news though, I’m here to talk about the current patch, v1.22, and would you believe it’s good news? The balancing is nearing perfect. The game rarely crashes to desktop. As long as you’ve got the RAM, there’s no stuttering every few seconds. When I look back at how angry the game used to make me and my pals, there’s really no comparison. The experience you would get if you bought BF2 today is an exceptional one. It is an absolute joy to play on your own with a server full of strangers, (the strangeness of these strangers accepted), and it is positively brilliant to play in a squad with people you know. The annoyances are almost all gone. You rarely feel cheated by the game’s inbalance, only by your own ineptitude. This is how it should be. This is how it should have been at launch. This is now a 90% game. See you on the battlefield.