Battlefield 2142

December 18th, 2006 by bill · No Comments

Is Battlefield 2142 a worthy followup to EA Games’ Battlefield 2?

Well, there are some problems. Though it is set on the battlefield of the future, replete with mechs and drones and hover tanks, BF 2142 is not really even a major upgrade to BF 2. It’s more like… Battlefield 2.142.

That said, there are some interesting elements to the game that make it intriguing. The weaponry is futuristic but that future is not far off and modern weapons remain nearly unchanged.

The mechs are large walking tanks, a la MechWarrior and BattleTech. Fun stuff. Hover tanks are odd beasts to drive at first but decent once you get the hang of it.

Bottom line, Battlefield 2142 is a good game with some glitches.

Rating? Well, let’s say it’s about a 7 out of 10 effort that occasionally flirts with an 8. If the game were more stable, it would rate higher.

Game Modes

Conquest Mode - In Conquest Mode, armies from each side attempt to carve away their opponent’s “tickets” until they reach zero. Tickets are reduced by taking and holding spawn points and killing the enemy.

Titan Mode - New to this installment of the Battlefield franchise, the multi-player-only Titan Mode tasks each side with destroying the other side’s Titan — essentially an airborne aircraft carrier and base. The titans have impressive weapons, can launch helicopters, and can jettison you in a pod to the enemy titan or down to the ground. Inside your titan, you defend against enemy assault; inside their titan, you attack and destroy their reactor core. That is, if you aren’t stuck in the swamp of Titan Lag (see below).

Issues

Game companies rush games to market. Period. Almost every major game has serious issues and we can just hope they patch them quickly, and maybe throw in some freebies in the process. That’s not to excuse this practice, but with Microsoft leading the software world, is it any wonder that the paying public is seen as a better-than-volunteer test team? They release, we pay, we test, we complain, they patch, we test and complain more, they patch, and so on.

So, while BF:2142 is a lot of fun and EA is releasing patches for it, issues remain.

Titan Lag - The biggest gripe with the game is that if you venture down the stairs into a titan, it is as if you are swimming in molasses. Upstream. If you can manage to get back up the stairs half-way, things pick back up. Forum posts indicate that lag is being used by some commanders to keep others from assaulting their titan. Besides the obvious remedy of EA/Dice fixing the bug, you can spawn inside a titan, avoid the titan guts, or insist commanders do not move the titans — not guaranteed to work but seems to help.

Crashes - Another problem is frequent crashes after a game. After exiting the game, your system will restart. Now that is reassuring. Crashes after a round in Titan mode are supposed to be fixed in 1.06.

Patches

As mentioned above, EA is releasing patches for the game. The latest official patch is 1.06, but a beta release of 1.10 is available.

1.10 (beta) - From EA We continue our march into the Christmas holiday with more and more happening in the Battlefield Universe. This week we will begin public Beta Testing of the 1.10 update. In this update we are adding server options and a few game play enhancements along with a number of bug fixes. Some of these improvements are…

1.06 - From EA This update addresses a crash issue that some player experience at the end of a round in Titan Mode.

1.05 - From EA Today we release the 1.05 update for Battlefield 2142. As previously communicated this update will among other things make the experience better when playing Titan mode. It will also solve the transport exploit that some players have taken advantage of. Overall the update includes over 25 fixes. The fix list can be found at the end of the update.