NEW PREVIEWS OF BATTLEFIELD 1943!!

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Never mind Bad Company - welcome to Dimwit Company. Nobody's talking to one another - hardly surprising, since the guys to either side of me are Italian, French and Spanish - and once the landing craft hit the beach, we've all regressed by about seven years. Italy's landed a biplane upside down on an anti-aircraft gun, and I'm stuck fast in a trench. In a tank.

Battlefield 1943 may be simplified - three maps, three classes, one objective - but the key word is accessibility, not casual. There's a tutorial this time - the first in the series, rather unbelievably - that introduces you to the concepts offline and then lets you practice in planes and tanks unmolested by hostiles. There are facilities for private matches, clans and squads, and there are levelling and reward systems (Achievements/Trophies and a broader range of honours beyond that, although no unlocks), but for the majority of people approaching the game from scratch, it's a one-click process to start playing, and it's not difficult to understand what's going on. You pick an infantryman, rifleman or scout class and then choose where to spawn. But it's still Battlefield, and it still punishes you for pratting around.

There are five control points on each map, like the one we're seeing today - Iwo Jima, after last month's reintroduction to Wake Island - and the European press gathered at DICE's wind-battered Stockholm headquarters have more difficulty negotiating the keycard door to the balcony than they do contesting the territory on the second map's thin, turbulent sliver of Ogasawara. Fighting seesaws between an airstrip at one end through trenches and over grassy hills past a lighthouse to higher ground at the other, and while all the vehicles are present and correct, it's an infantry war; automatic weapons, bazookas, sniper rifles, pistols and - gloriously - katanas doing the best of the killing.

"We have designed the levels now with 24 in mind, but that's not hard-coded. You can always squeeze in more players," Liu says when we ask about the PC version.
Yet there really is a lot to it, just as there should be, and it's been tweaked smartly. Snipers blink - a well-judged stab of disorientation - into their telescopic sights and trace anyone daft enough to wander around out of cover; bazookas eviscerate the arrogant tanks; and the new bomber wings are repelled by anti-aircraft fire (another clever bit of balancing - rather than an unavoidable artillery strike, when a bombing run is called in from a special shack the team in the crosshairs now has a slim chance of repelling the onslaught).

DICE has played around with these maps, despite their heritage, and the results appeal to old and new. Senior producer Patrick Liu tells me that the small team deliberately reorganised them symmetrically. "Wake Island used to be one team defending the island and the other team attacking it. Now we've made it so there are two carriers and both teams are attacking the island, just to make things fair. Otherwise, for a total newb, it's extremely hard to get into asymmetric gameplay."

There's also a squad command system, similar to Battlefield: Bad Company. Commands are context-sensitive, so if you're staring at an enemy flag and issue an instruction, your comrades are told to attack; if you're staring at your own flag, they're told to defend. You can also spawn next to anyone else in the squad, rather than just the squad leader, so if he's a sniper hiding out in the distance, you can pick someone closer to the action and materialise there.




One big tweak came only very recently, in response to feedback on the Wake Island trailer. Apparently you all thought it looked too much like Battlefield Heroes, DICE's toonified third-person PC spin-off. Iwo Jima is considerably darker. Presumably if you pipe up again, Guadalcanal - the third of the maps, which no one has seen in its 1943 form yet - will be set at night under clouds inside Tim Burton's head, wearing a blindfold made of dried blood and mucus. "Guadalcanal is also a good blend of vehicles and infantry, but it's such a huge map and also has a lot of hills. There's a lot of sniping in that level," Liu says of it.

Another distinctive facet is the technology itself. 1943 may be a download-only multiplayer shooter built for an impulse purchase, but as we noted last time it's also built on Bad Company's proprietary Frostbite engine, which means fully destructible environments - more so even than last year's physics-heavy console shooter. Propane blows holes in buildings, towers fall, and fences buckle under tank-tread - Christian was much more poetic. Despite this, and the 24 players running around the Xbox 360 version we're playing on devkits, the frame-rate ping-pongs between 30 and 60fps.

It's enormous fun, but it still has me worried. There are sceptics among the Battlefield hardcore, but they should be converted when the demo versions hit around the time of the game's summer release on PC, Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. The bigger problem is going to be finding a look-in audience, because whatever price DICE ends up going with - and after discussing it with Liu, and the series' executive producer Karl-Magnus Troedsson, I'd be surprised if it wasn't 1200 Microsoft Points, although they won't commit just yet - people are going to say it's 'only got three maps', even though they represent hours of potential gameplay.

Killing someone with a katana is a mark of honour - so much so that it's recognised by a specific mark of honour.
"We are considering how we can communicate that," Liu says. "For fans that are familiar with Battlefield, they know how deep it is and how many hours you can get out of just one level. For new players, it is difficult to communicate how much playtime you get out of these few levels. We know from experience that the Wake Island demo for 1942 was played a lot. Some people never stopped playing it. So I don't have any answer to how we can solve that, but yes, it is an issue."

For Liu though, the most important thing about Battlefield 1943 - a project that span off from his own experiments with Frostbite after Bad Company was locked down at the start of 2008 - is that it captures "the spirit of Battlefield 1942". When I speak to him after his presentation, he tries to sum it up.

"I don't want to downplay the seriousness of war, but at the same time it's a lot of fun - just pure fun of being able to do basically everything in the game. One classic is to arm your jeep with C4 or dynamite and drive into the enemy base and just blow up everything. And it's not a mechanic that we built in just for that thing - it's just a result of the sandbox experience, and that together with more down-to-earth vehicles and weapons, because they're older, that makes the experience of Battlefield."

Even though it's undoubtedly more accessible, it's hard to argue that Battlefield 1943 is anything but an extension of that, and the things it's doing differently sit very comfortably alongside the equally classic, headlong rush for the nearest helicopter. It's just a shame none of us appears to know what to do with one.



http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/312265.html

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DICE's next Battlefield is a downloadable game coming to consoles and the PC. We try not to get shot in a hands-on session.

SAN FRANCISCO--Stockholm is a long way from San Francisco, but that didn't stop EA from flying out a select number of DICE employees to show off a pair of new Battlefield games at a GDC 2009 event earlier this week. While a teaser demo of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was the star of the show, Battlefield 1943 was on hand to be played by anyone in attendance. We grabbed a controller and gave it a spin and got the chance to see a new map not shown in the game's previous outings.



The new map is based on Iwo Jima and offers a lush island setting cast under a warm sunset. Compared to what has already been shown, Iwo Jima is a relatively small-scale map that focuses more on infantry combat rather than vehicular fighting. Of course, there are still plenty of vehicles to operate; Iwo Jima features fighter jets, jeeps, tanks, and boats. Tanks are a destructive force of nature, able to smash through trees and wooden structures with ease. Planes take a bit of getting used to, but dropping bombs from on high is a blast. Boats provide a good way to transport troops from spawnpoints out on a cruiser at sea, and jeeps, well, they're not the most effective on this map with all the hills and trees getting in your way.

With support for 24 players, this map had a lot going on. We were never hard-pressed to find some sort of scuffle nearby, and the vehicles available to you mean you can find it by land, air, or sea. With three different classes, you can also choose from a few different combat styles. The methodical player can roll as a scout in a ghilli suit, planting remote-detonated explosives on a road and waiting in the bushes until a jeep loaded with enemies comes driving by. The target-practice enthusiast can hop into an antiaircraft gun and shoot at the fighter jets buzzing through the sky, or hop into an air-raid shelter and call in his own assault from on high. Run-and-gunners can just dash around with a machine gun shooting anything running nearby. Bottom line: There are plenty of ways to wage this war.

Battlefield 1943 uses the Frostbite engine, so it looks and feels a lot like the original Bad Company. Those playing the console versions will find that it controls almost identically and offers a level of destruction similar to last year's comedic caper starring B Company. You'll see trees topple over and walls exploding into bits, so any place that seems safe one moment could be the exact opposite a moment later. And though the game's visuals aren't quite as sharp as Bad Company's, they're not far off and still look great for a downloadable game.


 
1943 looks great for a downloadable game.

As of now, EA hasn't announced any pricing for Battlefield 1943. It's described as a "premium" download, so we'd guess the price will be somewhere in the $15-20 range. Of course, that's just speculation, so we'll have to wait for the official word. Battlefield 1943 will be out this summer for Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and PC.

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The year 2002 doesn’t seem like that long ago, but in the history of video games it’s like a lifetime ago. That’s when the original Battlefield 1942 came out for the PC, introducing the world to one of the most consistently great multiplayer shooter franchises, and also marking the moment when one of the best development houses out there truly arrived on the gaming scene.

Obviously I’m talking about the Battlefield series, which saw multiple expansions of the 1942 franchise, as well as the excellent Battlefield 2142, Battlefield 2, Battlefield Bad Company and much more. As for the developer, we’re talking about Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment (a.k.a. DICE)—or, more accurately, since Electronic Arts purchased it, EA DICE. In addition to the Battlefield series, they’re otherwise best known for the Rallisport games and last year’s Mirror’s Edge.

But Battlefield 1942, while not exactly their first game, was the one that put the Swedish devs on the map. What made the game so special that it was more than just a bunch of soldiers running around a level shooting at each other. It involved vehicles and capture points and player classes, components that have become far more ubiquitous in multiplayer games in the seven years since the title originally came out.

Battlefield 1942’s deeper take on multiplayer shooter action stayed true to the fun more than anything, spawning a type of gameplay that infused the entire Battlefield series. So, it’s got to be worth it to revisit that game, right? How about on the Xbox 360 as part of the Xbox Live Arcade catalog, with the code gussied up for the newer technology platform? Battlefield 1943 is more of a remake than a sequel, albeit a streamlined remake with a couple of cool new features thrown in to make it worth the download.

 
If real battles were are crazy as the ones in Battlefield 1943, then war might actually be fun.

Even if you’ve never played the original, Battlefield 1943 should feel very familiar to anyone who’s spent a decent amount of time playing games online. The basic gameplay hasn’t fundamentally changed: You still need to take over control points using the special abilities of your class and whatever vehicle may be close at hand. Two teams, representing the Axis and Allies, play a game of tug of war, trying to take and maintain a hold on those capture points as long as possible.

In overall scope, Battlefield 1943 doesn’t approach the same scale as Battlefield 1942. The maps are just as big and no elements of the gameplay—with the exception of the class system—have been nerfed. It’s just that there are only three maps, all focused around the island battles of the Pacific between the Allies and Japan. While this slimmed-down game is a far cry from a full remake of the original, it has to be leaner to fit onto XBLA as a download.

Whether you’re an old fan from the PC days or someone totally new to the experience, you shouldn’t let Battlefield 1943’s thinness detract you. It’s still a great game, and looks better than ever thanks to the fact that it’s powered by the Frostbite engine, the slick graphical engine that powers the great-looking Battlefield: Bad Company. It may be a smaller treat than the original, but it’s a tastier one.

The game also adds a few gameplay elements, notably the ability to take limited control of bombing runs over the islands. You can still fly fighter planes, but the bombing runs are more like a special attack that’s more interactive than you would expect. It’s great when you pull it off without getting your bombers shot down—and very devastating when the bombs hit their mark.

Despite these changes to the game, the most important quality of the gameplay hasn’t changed at all. That would be the fun level. Battlefield 1943 is as action-packed as the original, offering up a lot of wild and wooly action, with just enough of a nod to realism to make the WWII weapons and vehicles seem authentic. This is no hardcore war game. Rather, it’s good, old-fashioned, fast-paced online multiplayer action, something we’ve come to expect the Battlefield series to do better than anyone else.

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