Battleangel

The game hasn’t shipped yet but I just had to try out the demo obviously.

Even though the demo doesn’t let you try out much in terms of vehicles and is time limited to one 10 min round on the Oman level (the only level), it was still very impressive. And considering how much time I spent playing BF 1942, this game will surely not disappoint. The game runs incredibly well considering how well it looks and the design and fluidity of the gameplay has also improved greatly. The downside of the demo was of course the cramped map but I hear there are considerably bigger vistas to explore in the full version. Even if good maps could be the Achilles’ heel of the game since it only ships with 12 maps in total. Though I’m sure there is bonus content coming and 3rd party additions as well.

I’m also wondering what kind of reactive or destructive environments we will see. From the demo, it seems that there is nothing you can actually destroy in terms of structures, cover and so on. The most I could do was run over a road sign. And demolish UAV / Radar / Artillery stations using C4 of course. But the previews I’ve seen claims “fully destructible environments.” Go figure.

Oh wait … I just saw the FAQ:

Q: How destructible are the Battlefield 2 environments?
A: The BF2 environment is not fully destructible. That means you can’t just destroy everything. However you can destroy key points such as bridges, which can be repaired by an engineer.

The commander and squad feature seem nice but were a little much to master in the first run, especially given the limited cooperation and fluidity of bots. Even though the AI is better than BF1, it’s not just the same thing.
Concealment and Cover have been revamped also. Now you actually have to think twice before taking cover since lighter barriers only reduce and do not cancel out damage completely.
Concussion effects, like when you stand too close to a tank that fires a shell. Minimal damage but a nasty blurring and disorientation that could throw you off guard.
Medics have been improved since you can now not only die on the spot (like when you’re blown up or run over) but also be critically wounded in which case you can revived by a medic within the spawn time limit.
Soldier Packs / Classes now affect the vehicle you are in. A medic kit can turn an armored car into a mobile hospital station and so on.
Battlefield TV, the new demo recording feature is a nice addition also. Most developers don’t bother with this these days. Reminds me of the good old days of Doom 1.

• Gamespot Preview

Update: I realized there are ways to make the demo experience better by ironing out some of the nuisances.

• Remove the time limit: Go to mods/bf2/python/game/gamemodes and open gpm_cq.py. Find and comment out the line host.registerHandler(’TimeLimitReached’, onTimeLimitReached, 1) so that it says # host.registerHandler(’TimeLimitReached’, onTimeLimitReached, 1)
• Kill the intro videos: Go to mods/bf2/movies and delete, rename or move demo*.bik, dice.bik, EA.bik and Nvidia_logo.bik.
• ATI problems: Even though I’ve had no problems with my R9700 and latest drivers (5.6) there have been instances of crashes and black screens reported. EA suggested rolling back to Catalyst 5.1. Or perhaps Omega will do the job.
• 1280×1024 resolution: Change game shortcut to read “bf2.exe” +menu 1 +fullscreen 1 +szx 1280 +szy 1024
• 32 player (single player) Oman map: Described here.
• Unlock weapons (SP) Open /python/bf2/stats/unlocks.py, find defaultUnlocks = [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0] change to defaultUnlocks = [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1].

Love the python scripting btw.

EA of course went totally psycho over people hacking their clients and servers:

EA and DICE both fully support server-side modding in the sense that we have intentionally exposed a good deal of Python functionality to the end-user, primarily to encourage modders to tweak game types and scoring (on UNRANKED servers) once the full game is available. That said, we have come to discover that two items that were not a part of the demo feature-set were hacked in the Battlefield 2 demo. We consider both of these changes in violation of the Tools EULA that each server operator accepted in installing the server software.