Infantry only, bug hunters need not apply
The new Battlefield 2 patch (v 1.4) is out, and it includes two notable new features:
The most publicised is the new map – Road to Jalalabad. So far most people view it as something of a cross between Strike at Karkand and Mashtuur City, sans helicopter and bridges. The only two slight flaws are that it has too much armour – a US team that captures the first control point will have access to three tanks, more than most maps have in total – and that in the infantry-only mode (see below) the US mainbase is far too vulnerable to spawnraping. I haven’t come across the latter yet, as I haven’t played RTJ on infantry-only yet, but from some of the forum posts I’ve read it seems like a pretty serious flaw for servers that don’t bother enforcing their no-spawn-raping rule (seriously folks, if you do not have an admin on the server at ALL times then DO NOT turn kickvoting off!).
Perhaps the more significant though is the new ‘infantry-only’ mode. This had been much requested, and in fact some servers had previously been enforcing ‘infantry only’ rules through kicks in violation of the Ranked Server TOS. I have to say, although I was unsure about it at first, now that I’ve played a couple of infantry-only games I’ll probably be spending most of my time in them. Sure, I enjoy driving a tank as much as anyone, but it’s no fun if you’re the people getting blasted without much effort.
The problem with vehicles in Battlefield 2 is not so much their power, but the lack of balance. A tank can take out multiple people with a single shot, whereas it will take up to 4 anti-tank rockets to kill a tank. I’m not calling for down-to-the-last-rivet realism in an unquestionably arcade-type game like BF2, but surely making tanks so overpowered (just watch news stories about Iraq and you’ll realise how many well-placed rockets a real tank can survive. generally none.). The same can be said about helicopters and aircraft – even if hit by two AA missiles (assuming BF2’s still-buggy heatseekers actually get within half a mile of their target) a helicopter will probably still be able to take out the person carrying them. It is here that the lack of a BFV-style portable AA missile is most keenly felt. Giving one to, say, the anti-tank class as an optional swap instead of the anti-tank rocket, would solve the overpowering of helicopters at a stroke.
The infantry mode, then, eliminates tanks, helicopters, planes, everything that players of Battlefield 2 complain is ‘overpowered’ (remember, the ‘n00b tube’ got balanced a patch or two ago) – including commander artillery. There is no other way to describe it than ‘it rocks’. Seriously. Previously only the people in the vehicles (or a medic in a large, but crap, squad) could hope to get a halfway decent score. In my first game of infantry-only I had a score of 48 and was in the bottom half of my team! Aside from the lack of tankwhoring, the most obvious difference is that a lot more grenades are being used. Not to excess though, plenty of other weapons (especially the flashbang and support ammopacks) have gained in relevance in the new gametype.
Having said that, it isn’t all good. Many of the old bugs have either not been fixed (like the ‘crashing to desktop’ bug which seems to have been a new ‘feature’ since Patch 1.3) or been made even more bizarre – the teamcolour bug has been ‘fixed’, but now kills of people who are actually on the other team (and appear as such, correctly) will sometimes register as teamkills! How DiCE managed this I don’t know, but having patches that increase the number of bugs is a novel approach to software maintenance, and seems to be unique to this company – they are even touting what in any other game would be considered a bug (the inability to move after standing up) as a feature! If this was intended to stop ‘dolphin diving’ then it has been a fuckup of spectacular proportions – I have been dolphindived more in the past two days than I have in all the time I’ve played Battlefield 2 since it came out. Releasing a game in an unfinished state is contempt for your customers, failing to fix at least a sizeable majority of the flaws after six (!) patches is simply pathetic.