Padchuckr

Just a quick preview on this impending tug on the Battlefield cash cow’s udder. Expect more later when the vitriol has had time to stew.

Battlefield 2 was, I hate to admit, a good game. Why do I hate to admit it? Oh so many reasons. First the endless cashing in on the addon packs that barely saw any play before being superceded. Second the loading times which were ridiculous for the technology requirements of the game. Third the fact it took over a year to patch the game into any sort of balance. Fourth the ballache with the servers. Fifth the lack of any decent single player or small scale multiplayer game worth a damn. Oh so many things to hate, and yet, all things considered, yeah I bought it, yeah I had some fun and yeah I’d do it all again.
But not with BF2142. No fucking way. Playing the beta right now and I shit ye not ladies and gentlemen, this is a title that looks to have “From the Makers Of Battlefield: Vietnam” written through it like a stick of Blackpool rock. Calling it a whole new game is a joke, at the most ambitious BF2142 is a total conversion, and not even an especially adventurous one. New models, new sounds, new maps, new game objectives, nothing that a team of die hard fans couldn’t, or indeed haven’t done. No work on the engine, no new graphics worth noting. In other words a lot of dated-looking shit compared to more modern fare.
So what’s the story in Battlefield 2142 then? Frankly who cares. Some end of the world crap, few factions left fighting over the remains, blah blah blah. Seen it millions of times before. What matters more in a game of continual fraggery like BF2142 is what does the setting mean for the maps, guns and the vehicles, and in this case all it means is that they seem to have simply been assembled from the most generic stereotypes available.

On balance what we seem to be dealing with here is a poor clone of Planetside using the BF2 engine, which seems to have come out instead as a kind of poor sibling to the Star Wars: Battlefront series of games. I expect BF2142 will be a roaring success and spawn addons and tournaments and all sorts, but I also expect that discerning gamers will most likely be flocking to Quake Wars when that’s released next year.