Battlefield 2: Bad Company and Battlefield 1943 announced

[Goffs]

Quote: Originally Posted by SportGamer24

Bad Company is such an underrated game...looking to pick both of these up!

i wouldve loved to see Bad Company on the PC just so i can use the mouse and keyboard...i refuse to play BC for the 360 because they dont have the southpaw controls and that really bothers me...

[Eton Rifles]

Hmm, I am left handed and think the controls on modern games favor left handed people. To each his own I guess.

[ryanm1058123]

Battlefield 1942 was my favorite game ever. It's a game that has yet to be repeated.

Unlimited Ammo sounds really ******** though. Hope they reconsider it.

[Klocker]

Quote: Originally Posted by mrnoobie

i wouldve loved to see Bad Company on the PC just so i can use the mouse and keyboard...i refuse to play BC for the 360 because they dont have the southpaw controls and that really bothers me...

a good system for using a Mouse/kb on X360

a bit complex but doable if you have the right set up

[Flawless]

Thanks EG for locking the other thread.


GDC 2009: Battlefield 1943 Game Demo

http://gdc.gamespot.com/video/620691...game-demo?hd=1

...

Eurogamer Hands-On 1943

Quote:

Battlefield 1943 may be simplified - three maps, three classes, one objective - but the key word is accessibility, not casual. There's a tutorial this time - the first in the series, rather unbelievably - that introduces you to the concepts offline and then lets you practice in planes and tanks unmolested by hostiles. There are facilities for private matches, clans and squads, and there are levelling and reward systems (Achievements/Trophies and a broader range of honours beyond that, although no unlocks), but for the majority of people approaching the game from scratch, it's a one-click process to start playing, and it's not difficult to understand what's going on. You pick an infantryman, rifleman or scout class and then choose where to spawn. But it's still Battlefield, and it still punishes you for pratting around.

Quote:

There's also a squad command system, similar to Battlefield: Bad Company. Commands are context-sensitive, so if you're staring at an enemy flag and issue an instruction, your comrades are told to attack; if you're staring at your own flag, they're told to defend. You can also spawn next to anyone else in the squad, rather than just the squad leader, so if he's a sniper hiding out in the distance, you can pick someone closer to the action and materialise there.

Quote:

Another distinctive facet is the technology itself. 1943 may be a download-only multiplayer shooter built for an impulse purchase, but as we noted last time it's also built on Bad Company's proprietary Frostbite engine, which means fully destructible environments - more so even than last year's physics-heavy console shooter. Propane blows holes in buildings, towers fall, and fences buckle under tank-tread - Christian was much more poetic. Despite this, and the 24 players running around the Xbox 360 version we're playing on devkits, the frame-rate ping-pongs between 30 and 60fps. It's enormous fun, but it still has me worried. There are sceptics among the Battlefield hardcore, but they should be converted when the demo versions hit around the time of the game's summer release on PC, Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. The bigger problem is going to be finding a look-in audience, because whatever price DICE ends up going with - and after discussing it with Liu, and the series' executive producer Karl-Magnus Troedsson, I'd be surprised if it wasn't 1200 Microsoft Points, although they won't commit just yet - people are going to say it's 'only got three maps', even though they represent hours of potential gameplay.

Quote:

For Liu though, the most important thing about Battlefield 1943 - a project that span off from his own experiments with Frostbite after Bad Company was locked down at the start of 2008 - is that it captures "the spirit of Battlefield 1942". When I speak to him after his presentation, he tries to sum it up. "I don't want to downplay the seriousness of war, but at the same time it's a lot of fun - just pure fun of being able to do basically everything in the game. One classic is to arm your jeep with C4 or dynamite and drive into the enemy base and just blow up everything. And it's not a mechanic that we built in just for that thing - it's just a result of the sandbox experience, and that together with more down-to-earth vehicles and weapons, because they're older, that makes the experience of Battlefield." Even though it's undoubtedly more accessible, it's hard to argue that Battlefield 1943 is anything but an extension of that, and the things it's doing differently sit very comfortably alongside the equally classic, headlong rush for the nearest helicopter. It's just a shame none of us appears to know what to do with one.

[allBthere]

i hate the price-points...why can't anything be 1000 points or 850 or 600. The nature of the 50, 200, 400, 800, 1200 set up makes the points totally redundant. just use dollars instead.

[Flawless]

Eurogamer: Bad Company 2 Preview

Quote:

The sequel to DICE's first ever single-player game, Bad Company 2 puts you back in control of Preston, one of four self-involved US soldiers who adopt an idiosyncratic approach to warfare. The first game saw them on the hunt for gold in a warzone, Three Kings-style, and while DICE is curiously reluctant to talk about the story in Bad Company 2, Gustavsson and Troedsson agree that it's a bit less tongue-in-cheek. "I would say that the guys have had their honeymoon," Gustavsson offers. "They were out there in the middle of a war, everything going on, not so much focused on the war, didn't have to worry about it; more worrying about court martial and missing out on the gold. But those times are gone and now life is turning more serious and they have to face what they're up to."

Quote:

One of our criticisms of the first game was that your adversaries weren't so much intelligent as accurate, and both Troedsson and Gustavsson talk about DICE's attempts to improve on that. "A big part of the AI now is we want to change how they move around you," says Troedsson. "Movement is a big part of how you appreciate AI. We want to have the [friendly] squad move more closely together to you, so you're still the guy who runs around and they follow you around. We want them to run to cover, into cover positions, look up, this kind of thing; we want them to do this kind of thing, and similar things for the enemy AI." Speaking of whom, Troedsson says that your enemies will be able to identify changes to the environment - like holes blown in walls - and use them to navigate through the world in search of you. Other updates include more realistic lines of sight and sound. "Before they were a bit - how should I say? - telepathic," Troedsson admits. Gustavsson, who takes a top-down view of the development side of the game, says this also feeds into one of his "pet projects", data-driven development. "We've been working on it; not just making the AI more alive, but also how we track difficulty - telemetry while developing the game so we can see where do people die, and why do they die, to get a better difficulty curve, to make the game more accessible while still deep," he says. If that sounds familiar, it's a similar process to the one adopted by Bungie for Halo 3 (outlined rather splendidly in Wired). DICE has also reacted to feedback on the single-player respawn and health systems. Neither developer will tell me what's changed exactly, but Troedsson says "people who didn't like it are going to be happy".

Quote:

One thing DICE is happy to discuss, however, is the multiplayer side of the game. Troedsson calls it "the main focus", even though today's reveal is single-player. "I want to point that out - that multiplayer is really key to what we're doing here, almost to the point that I would say the multiplayer in BC2 is more important than the single-player. This is where we get the longevity of our products, where we see the most dedicated fans, and this is also where we're spending most of our focus in the actual development," he says. He confirms that Bad Company's Gold Rush mode will return, and, although he doesn't explicitly say so, Conquest surely will as well, after fan feedback saw it added to the first game in a patch after release. Any co-operative modes? "We'll see." What I see is a big smile. Busted! Troedsson and Gustavsson are also keen to get behind player incentives in multiplayer. "What we have done in Battlefield products before has been about giving you all the tools directly the second you jump into the game," says Troedsson. "What we're looking at now is we want to create a system that is much more sticky and can keep the interest of people playing longer, by seeing how we can meddle with denying you some of the things at the beginning and seeing how we can pace it out - actually challenging the player to go out and do something specific in order to get something." "When we are out playing, we are selfish," adds Gustavsson. "I want to be on top of the list. And you need to recognise that fact. As soon as we started giving people score for healing people [in Battlefield 2], everyone became frickin' Mother Teresa... We're looking at that in Bad Company 2 as well, without going too much into detail. We're looking at how we can re-emphasise some of the team play with scoring incentives." One thing they won't be doing, though, is enforcing it. Squad play will be optional this time, and DICE is also looking at ways to make it easier to hook up with your friends.

Quote:

All that remains is to fill in the details, which will probably happen at E3, if not later, in time for the game to release at the back end of 2009, or in early 2010. With a renewed emphasis on the studio's multiplayer strengths, and as the Swedish developer's third single-player release, Bad Company 2 stands a better chance than most of escaping the fate that befell its last game, Mirror's Edge, which was crushed under the weight of Q4 rivals despite strong reviews. But it will be a while before we can tell whether compromises like Destruction 2.0 are sufficient to exceed the first game's promising achievements. Troedsson and Gustavsson are adamant though: it's not just Bad Company in the snow.

[Goffs]

FINALLY DICE WISED UP AND PUT IT ON THE PC AS WELL!