So I got Battlefield 2 the day it came out because I loved the 1942 and Vietnam games. Unfortunately my computer was not up to the task and I gave some dude on eBay a great deal on a “cool” game. Flash forward about a year and I have recently built a kind of top of the line computer and am able to play all the new games. So my questions are…
Should I buy Battlefield 2 seeing as how it is still full price($50)?
Having read the other BF 2 threads I see a overall positive view by other SDMB members but I am wondering if it is still worth 50 clams.
Is it neccesary to buy the Special Forces add on? Just wondering, whether it be actually required to play online or just so freaking special that I would be dumb to not buy it.
You don’t need to buy Special Forces and shouldn’t feed EA by doing so.
You’ll probably spend most of your time on the regular servers even if you do purchase it, which makes the purchase kind of silly. If you do purchase it, you’ll be able to use some additional weapons in normal games. Weapons that other players won’t be able to use (unless they pry it from your cold dead hands.) In general, these “second tier” unlockable weapons are better than those allowed to regular players. However, the relative skill of the player is still the deciding factor in most fights.
Battlefield 2 itself is riddled with technical flaws. The frustration that these flaws result in is unbelievable. For example, you’ll be one hit away from destroying a light tank and saving a flag only to have your rocket pass through the tank because the hitboxes desynchronized. You’ll try to jump up from prone and run a few steps to dodge a rocket, only to suddenly warp back to being prone again because of a poorly implemented delay designed to defeat “dolphin divers.” The entire game feels loose. It is hard to explain in words, but you’ll understand after trying it if you’re familiar with a tight game like Unreal Tournament or the Half-life engine games.
The response from the developer to these problems and others is poor. Fixing these problems is the job of DICE Canada, who is perhaps the least competent development studio in North America. Every fix brings in more problems. Their balance changes are heavy-handed and simply swing imbalance in new directions instead of reducing the net imbalance of the game. The actual studio, DICE Sweden, is trying to rush out the sequel to Battlefield 2 in order to beat Quake Wars to the market. Battlefield 2142, the sequel, looks like a total mess. It’s little more than a cosmetic alteration to the existing engine. Everything screams “rush job” and that the suits at EA are cracking the whip on this thing trying to cash in and help their falling profits. They’ve done the same thing in Battlefield 2 with bullshit marketing practices, such as the aforementioned pay-to-win unlocks of Special Forces and later adding advertisements in a patch.
All of that said, when all of the little blemishes are out of sight, Battlefield 2 is an extremely fun game. At least, I think it is and I’m not alone considering that it is the second most popular first-person-shooter on the market. Of course, I certainly can’t tell you what you’ll like. What you need to do is play the demo and get a taste for the game that way. Trying it out for yourself is the best way to know if it is right for you.
I don’t think I’d pay $50 for it at this point. $40 would be better. It’s got to be on sale somewhere, I know they have a lot of copies at my local Costco. Not sure what the current going rate is, though.
At this point there’s not much of a reason to buy Special Forces, and no reason at all to buy the Euro Forces booster pack. For a while there there were a lot of Special Forces servers, but people decided they didn’t like playing using the night vision, so most of the SF servers went back to the normal game, or only play a small subset of the maps that come with SF. The vast majority of servers are plain vanilla BF2.
It’s a very fun game. When things are working right it’s some of the most fun I’ve ever had playing an FPS. When they’re not, it’s extremely frustrating, mostly because you know how much fun you could be having if the game weren’t screwing up. Also, it gets addictive in a RPG sort of way as you start getting the unlock weapons and amassing a big salad bar of medals and badges.
Battlefield 2 is a total blast. I wish I could still get my son’s computer to run it; unfortunately, he wasn’t happy with the speed in D&D Online and started messing with the network settings and neither program has worked since.