Official: Battlefield 2

Good news: The PoE 2 (Point of Existence) mod was released today. Check out the official mod-team site for more details.

I'll post some impressions after I finish downloading and installing it.

Bad news: In what can only be seen as an attempt to sucker in as many ambivalent BF 2 players as possible, EA recently kicked off their sign-up campaign for BF 2142’s “Veteran Program”:

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As humanity fights for survival in the year 2142, your army needs you more than ever. Your past Battlefield 2 experience makes you an invaluable asset for the war of the future. As a Battlefield 2 player you have qualified for Veteran status in Battlefield 2142. This entitles you to bring your Battlefield 2 soldier name over to Battlefield 2142 before it hits the shelves, making that name unavailable for anyone else to take.

As a reminder of your heroic efforts in Battlefield 2, we are pleased to announce that you will also be awarded an exclusive Veteran indicator next to your name in Battlefield 2142, so other players will recognize that you’ve had a tour of duty in Battlefield 2. You will also receive an immediate promotion in Battlefield 2142, which will let you choose an unlock. Finally, you will receive a new verbal taunt to use in Battlefield 2.

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Sad news: The 1.4 patch remains “indefinitely” delayed.

Good news: The 1.4 patch snuck out the door today. EA Downloader seems to have the fastest download time for me.

Bad News: After spending some time with the PoE 2 mod, it seems more and more likely that BF 2 will never see some decent mods. Aside from a new “anti-vehicle” kit that includes a portable anti-air rocket launcher, there really aren’t any major, worthwhile changes to the core game. The ten or so new maps and two new gameplay modes are both pretty boring, and for some reason all the maps have a mysterious dearth of transport vehicles. Also, for some ungodly reason, the developers felt like the tanks needed to be about twice as abundant/powerful as they are in vanilla BF 2. Add all of these problems up, and you get an extremely unbalanced mod (air-vehicles and artillery also got nerfed in favor of armor) that seems to go out of its way to irritate infantry players.

Thanks for the news on 1.4 . Downloading now. I downloaded POE2 this weekend and spent some time with it too. I enjoyed some of the maps more than others. I wish they would have made the anti-air missles part of the anti-tank class.
You are right about the lack of transport vehicles. I found myself hoofing it on foot far too often. More jeeps please.

The commander artillery system was also wonky. I liked the regular BF2 system alot better. This mod does have potential, though. A couple of the maps were really fun. It workd with xfire too, but has to load twice.

It appears that CTD is the new "name-glitch" (i.e., the problem gets worse with every patch and never seems to go away despite contrary claims from the coders).

The fix log claims to have solved all the game’s CTD issues, but after installing 1.4, I can no longer play single-player without having a CTD as soon as I click the "start game" button. I have no clue how regular multiplayer is working right now since my internet connection is running super slow as a result of a local power-outage last night. I hope for EA/DICE’s sake that this is not just another case of the incremental patch being FUBAR in comparison to the full patch.

The BF2142 beta was released to FP subscribers and from what Ive read its clearly BF2's son. That is, load times are still out of control including the "optimizing shaders" trash. And supposedly its even been hacked up with the same hacks used on BF2.

The battle is over before it started. Just preorder Quake Wars.

quake wars was pushed back into 2007 and 2142 comes out pretty soon... even though i know QWET will be superior in every way, I'll still probably pick up 2142.

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Originally Posted by Diff-chan

The BF2142 beta was released to FP subscribers and from what Ive read its clearly BF2's son. That is, load times are still out of control including the "optimizing shaders" trash. And supposedly its even been hacked up with the same hacks used on BF2.

The battle is over before it started. Just preorder Quake Wars.

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Hmmmm, it is a beta and all....

The load times are long but it will probably be roughly the same as BF2(which is long when you change your video settings)

From what I've played, it is pretty fun. The lag goes from good, to almost unplayable. Then again, it is beta.

The server interface is ALOT better than BF2. They also implemented a buddies list(which should have been in BF2) and it works well. Still no outside-inside game chat like xfire though.

The stuff thats in-game is lots of fun. Titan mode is lots of fun and goes far beyond simple conquest mode. The weapon unlock system is cool too. Lot more stuff to unlock and customizable classes are the way to go with this game. I liked how rigid the BF2 class system was, but I also like what they are doing with 2142's system as well. My engineer/anti-tanker is great.

As much fun as I've had with the beta, I still will not buy this game day one. I'll probably wait a couple weeks to see what goes on as far as bugs and other issues.

I'm sure that Quake Wars is going to be fun and all, but Sedition is right, ET:QW isn't going to be out till 07 and there really isn't anything new out there right now so 2142 will probably see my money unless there are major problems.

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Originally Posted by wEEman33

It appears that CTD is the new "name-glitch" (i.e., the problem gets worse with every patch and never seems to go away despite contrary claims from the coders).

The fix log claims to have solved all the game’s CTD issues, but after installing 1.4, I can no longer play single-player without having a CTD as soon as I click the "start game" button. I have no clue how regular multiplayer is working right now since my internet connection is running super slow as a result of a local power-outage last night. I hope for EA/DICE’s sake that this is not just another case of the incremental patch being FUBAR in comparison to the full patch.

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I got the full patch after 1.3's incremental debacle. The problem I had with the Euro Forces maps crashing on me is gone finally. Multiplayer seems solid. No CTD's for me, but the night is still young. Jalalabad is such a cool map too. It looks like it will be getting lots of playtime on servers.

After a complete reinstallation of the game and the full 1.4 patch, things seem to be running smoothly for me. Nonetheless, the fact that I even had to do that much just to get the game working again is a serious aggravation.

Technical issues aside, the new map is great so far, though it does seem to favor the US side more than the MEC. Specifically though, the general vulnerability of what little armor the map makers included plus the plethora of attacking/defending options for on-foot soldiers have spawned some of the game’s most intense and strategically satisfying firefights to date.

Additionally, the new “infantry only” option seems to have weeded out some of the whiners and stat-whores from the regular, ranked servers, so I suppose I can only include that option as a positive even though I’ll probably never use it myself.

Assuming that my connection remains reasonable, I plan on playing pretty consistently for the next few days; find me through Xfire if you want to join up for some squad-play.

I'll find you this weekend, I'm sure. Everything seems to be looking up, finally.

Got this installed just now. I haven't played enough to see if there any big fixes or new bugs, but I can say that the game runs a lot better. My system can easily run the game at max settings, but before I could not have AA turned on for some reason, nor have my max resolution. Now I have everything up to max and AA at x2 and the game runs as smothe as could be. I have off tomorrow night, so for those that still care to play the game (wEEman, Changeling, and Destro) we should play if no one is busy.