Crunch Time

Battlefield 2 had a lot of great ideas and game features going for itself. It had very good map design for Conquest and a great balance in infantry and land vehicles, air vehicles could dominate for those that mastered them and the commander mode could actually change the battle for a team. It was a very fun game and I enjoyed my years of playing it.

With that said, it was very innovative, but it still wasn’t the greatest FPS of all time. Someone recently posted in the Battlelog forums a “Veterans Only” thread that was talking about how mods made previous Battlefield games great. While it is true that there were great mods in previous titles, they did not fix all the issues in any Battlefield game. Sometime back, a very long time ago, DICE mentioned that only about 10% of the player base even played on mods. So 90% are left out in the cold.

Anyway, this post isn’t about mods but it was asked “what game breaking things ever happened in BF2?” I’ve made lists of them in the past, but the internet tends to bury things over time and so I thought to make this post to have a central spot. This post isn’t to defend other Battlefield titles or to mock Battlefield 2, but to just post the facts about the issues at the time. They may seem like no big deal now, but they were back then and after years of support and patches, not all of them are an issue today.

So lets get started with the problems of the time:

Patch Releases:

For some reason people think patching  a game back then was the same as it is today and it wasn’t. You had to install the patches in order and in a certain order. So if you wanted patch 1.5, now all you have to do is install patch 1.41 first as they combined all the fixes. Before then you had several patches to go to get updated. Of course, a lot of the patches caused other problems, included, nerfs, and also tried to stop cheating and fix bugs. Check out the 1.5 bug fixes:

• Fixed the issue where picking up a player’s kit would cause CTD.
• Updated BF2OpenAL.dll from version 1.1.1.0 to version 2.1.8.1.
• Updated ch_gas_station collision mesh on Dragon Valley to be consistent with other gas station buildings.
• Fixed the issue where MEC artillery piece on Operation Clean Sweep changes to the USMC’s control when they capture the Airfield flag.
• Updated the Challenger2 HUD to show the correct icon instead of the M1A2 HUD icon.
• Changed a PLA FAV to MEC FAV on Road to Jalalabad.
• Tweaked the artillery respawn time on Dragon Valley for to 360 seconds as other artillery uses.
• Included a delay after weapon switch for the Bizon (PP-19) to 0.666.
• Updated the F35B’s lock delay to 1 second instead of 1.5 seconds to match other aircraft.
• Changed the Humvee camo on Taraba Quarry to be the correct design.
• Increased the splash damage of the UH-60 (Black Hawk) guns from 0.25 to 1.5.
• Updated the G36E HUD to react the same as other weapons during sprint.

Check those bugs out! This was the LAST patch in Battlefield 2. The game was released in 2005 and patch 1.5 was released in 2009. 2009! FOUR YEARS after the release of the game itself. This is only the bug section. There were tweaks and updates to fix many other things. You can look for yourself here.

I don’t know, but I think a crash to desktop just because you picked up a kit is a big deal. Plenty more to look at as well, but I think this makes the point well enough.

Check out all these other bugs. I really like the 1.22 patch notes fix for server stability.

 

Air Superiority

Battlefield 2 did a great job on its air power and a terrible job in its anti-air power. Maps that had mobile AA were OK if you had someone REALLY good with them. Basically air power was very like real life, unstoppable when you have nothing to counter them with. There were constant bugs in AA stations that caused the missiles to make these crazy circles in the air and not go after air vehicles at all. Also, they could easily be destroyed by air power and took a while to spawn back. So a good pilot memorized where these things were and took them out first then would rape the map.

Now you might think “OK, but the other side has jets as well! So its OK!” Well, no. It took skill to learn flying. I know, I had to learn it because I was tired of being beat down by these people that were just awesome. I was on both sides of this issue and I got a lot of easy kills because of it. Also the J10 was unstoppable. Remember the last patch I mentioned above? The one released four years later. That was the patch that finally balanced the J10 with the other jets in the game. Four years of J10 domination.

As far as I know the AA is still garbage in the game. I went to 2142 right away and AA actually worked in that game and, in my opinion, still the best balanced game ever made for the Battlefield series.

The bombs were so powerful and the flying ceiling so high that jets could swoop down, destroy whatever, and be back in the safety of the air in no time. There just wasn’t anything to counter this other than your own air and maybe MAA. Maps without air or had a lot of cover became very popular. So on top of all this you could attack the enemy base and blow up their jets before they took off and just constantly do circles of attacking and re-arming. Once people gave up getting in the air, you then focused on attacking the map with little worry.

Helicopters were awesome with the switch to gunner seat exploit and you can ride your TV missile anywhere. It was a one hit kill weapon that could be done at from the base. A big issue also in Battlefield 3.

Exploits/Hacks

There were a lot of them. Ways to slide into buildings in Karkand and under maps in Dragon Valley. You could flip boats under carriers and do constant repairs. The list of issues goes on and on and they were in previous games and in games today.

There were also all kinds of hacks. Wall hacks, aim hacks, commander hacks, even server hacks that would crash a server. With mod files and server files readily available there were some very dangerous things released. I was even a victim of that with GUID spoofing. Someone could get your GUID and inject it to the main servers and pose as that person. Here, check out my BF2 stats. The rank is correct, EA gave that back. But I lost everything else. They didn’t keep backups of stats and once wiped they cannot recover them.

I think you all get the idea on this as well. Battlefield 2 had a ton of map issues, exploits, and hacks that were stronger than what they are today.

Browser Server Issues

Battlefield 2 had an in-game browser that looks a lot like any other but it had issues of not displaying all the servers. For some reason servers would get knocked off the list and you couldn’t find yours. There were a lot of complaints for a long time by server admins that were paying a lot of their servers and not getting on the list. If you had the IP address you could join it, but what pubber has that?

Oh, but that’s not a big deal, right? I mean, so what if a bunch of servers cannot be selected at all. I mean, that’s not game breaking, right? You don’t really need servers to play a game. Oh wait…You DO! Well, not a big deal, it was finally fixed. In patch 1.41 that was released in November of 2006. Remember the game was released in 2005.

Server Instability

You also had servers just crashing and causing you to lose all your awards and game activity. You work on on ranking up and then you were disconnected and the server reboot with all stats lost. That happened so much. I remember I received my gold pistol award four times because of those crashes. A lot of rage on people losing rank and points because it took forever to get a higher up rank.

Then you also had VoIP issues. BF2 had VoIP but the lag of the servers and lack of bandwidth made it horrible. You couldn’t understand people most the time and this helped spur the use of Teamspeak and Ventrillo. People stopped using it. Server owners turned it off to help with lag. It was pretty bad.

All in all Battlefield 2 had some great times and some very bad, dark times. It was a great game and I had a lot of fun with it and doing all the fun things I did. It was my first “serious” FPS game that made me realize there was more to a game than just playing it.

With all that said, Battlefield 2 was not perfect and had some serious server issues, client side hit detection, game exploits, and hacking. It wasn’t the golden game that everyone claims it is today.

Also, these problems and issues DICE did learn from as you look at what has changed in the Battlefield games released today. Of course, some things are still the same 😀

I don’t doubt for a second that many will just dismiss this post and mention how they don’t recall any of these issues and they were not a big deal. Time will do that to someone. I’m just pointing out that there were issues, they are documented, they were there a long time, and I experienced a lot of them. I was not the only one either.