News Battlefield 2 BF2: Preview vom Northern Brigade Clan

BF2: Preview vom Northern Brigade Clan

BF2: Preview vom Northern Brigade Clan
von Redaktion 26.11.2004 2 Kommentare

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.

When we came to the office we were greeted by Lars Gustavsson, DICE´s lead designer and producer for BF2. Before he let us get our grubby hands on the game he gave us the grand tour of the DICE office. We met a bunch of animators, programmers, modelers, sound guys etc, all working on BF2. According to Lars the team is around 70 people strong right now and they are making good progress. It was pretty interesting watching all those guys and girls working together to build the game, each one focusing on their part of it. The level designers screens hooked us most, they were flying around on their maps fine tuning textures, spawn points etc.

After the tour we got a briefing by the executive producer from EA, Sean Decker, giving us an in game tour of BF2. I was sitting there listening politely when suddenly, drumroll, he said the magic words: turn on your monitors and let´s play!

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.

Jamil Dawsari (Associate Producer/Designer) from EA told us that C4 not only sticks to vehicles, but also to other players. It was not intended that way first, but they might keep it in the game. I hope they do.

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 a Linux version of the server at launch: EA/DICE: Probably not at launch?.

NB: What about moving skies/Random spawn points to prevent pixel shooting EA/DICE: We have moving skies implemented. The spawn points are semi random (there are a set amount of spawn points, but its random which one will be used). We´ve also implemented random spawn times on vehicles. And planes spawn indoors, under cover.

NB: Will there be dual monitor support? EA/DICE: No.

NB: Will there be an invitational beta? EA/DICE: Not decided yet, and it´s something that we in the team don´t decide over.

NB: How will the engine handle undergrowth over long distance? In BF-V the grass scales off over long distance exposing the player. EA/DICE: We´ve solved that for BF2, if a player is hidden in vegetation he cannot be seen from any distance.

NB: Is it possible to customize you look with arm patches etc? EA/DICE: Not at launch, we´ve run into some texture issues and we have to leave it out as of now.

NB: How much damage can the soldiers take? Is it going to be one shot one kill or more of an arcade feel? EA/DICE: It depends on what kind of armour your soldiers has. Different kits contains different levels of armour. The heavy assault guy can take a lot more damage that the specops guy for example. And of course the damage depends on what kind of weapon being used.

NB: How many players are the levels optimized for? How many maps are there? EA/DICE: Each map has three settings, 16, 32 or 64 players. On the 64 players version of the map you get a really big area, where as in the 16 you get a tighter feel to the map, so as you see the game is very flexible. There´s 12 maps in the game.

NB: Will some building materials be penetrable by bullets? EA/DICE: Yes, you can shoot through some walls etc depending on what they are made out of.

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

More impressions

RascaL: To me BF2 felt new and fresh. But also very confusing at the beginning. There´s so much new to learn. The gameplay looks very promising with the new commander/squads thingy. And the game was beautiful? I. WANT. TO . PLAY . MORE? Most fun: Hard to say, the game is so gonna rock in many aspects :)

Luthor: The commander function is by far the greatest change from BF/BFV. It will be a tough thing to balance properly, but combined with the squad system it will make for a much more organized and interesting game, both in public play and clanwar. Overall it feels like BF2 has alot more information available to the player, and more different options - benefitting the thinking player more than the aiming player.

Oh, and graphically beautiful of course, but that's just eye candy ;-)

KOiN: The next level indeed. I am very excited about what we will see in the next 16 months with the cups, ladders and leagues. What will the modders do with this baby and how many kick ass movies will we see from the machinima scene using this new and improved real life killer.

dRD: As expected it looks and sounds great. The gameplay seems really nice although you need to play alot more than we did to say for sure. I really like the responsivness and overall feel of the infantry. More like CS/Quake 3 and less sliding around like you did in BF1942. Beside all the new big stuff like the commander function and the squad system, the smaller details like the shellshock effect ala Call of Duty, ricochetting bullets doing damage, crouching in turrents, able to use your weapon in the passenger seat and being able to shoot through different material creates a more realistic and intense environment wich I really missed in previous titles.

I also spent some time flying choppers but I almost always ended up crashing in panic trying to steer away from missile locks. I am still hearing that warning sound in my dreams :) There is still a lot of polishing to do but I think this will be a blast both in public and for competative gaming. Bring it on!

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):

Mirror1 Mirror2 Mirror3

Movied 2 (84 meg, Divx):

Mirror1 Mirror2

Kommentare
26.11.2004 17:44 PunkBuster
Sieht meiner Meinung nach echt super aus, freu mich drauf
26.11.2004 18:39 Kid
kann nur zu stimmen :)