The Battlefield Franchise site posted the glorious news that the 1.50 patch is final and available for download!
I’ve been participating in the public 1.50 beta for a few weeks now and have really been enjoying the changes, the new maps, and the wide screen support. The new maps have been repeatedly tweaked in accordance with testers’ feedback, and they play like a charm now! Always great to have more maps and more support in these games, and I’m still amazed it ever happened, considering it’s an EA-published title.
What I do not approve of is DICE repeatedly demonstrating they keep their heads firmly implanted in their rectal cavities. Command line switches? C’mon… it’s one thing as a quick shortcut to login with command line switches in the game shortcut, it makes an already lengthy process of loading the game and logging in a little quicker. But some of this stuff — namely the new wide screen support — is an option that hello!?!? should be in the friggin’ OPTIONS! This is a game not SSHing to a Linux server to do administrative work. The only reason I ever found the wide screen support to begin with was doing a web search for it. Even the readme.txt doesn’t tell how to do it, only that “We have seen a massive demand for widescreen resolutions in Battlefield 2142. This feature is still in a Beta state for your use and is not yet fully supported.” Oh, and don’t even get me started on the Battlefield series still having the fugliest fonts in gaming… or that my avatar can drive a hover-tank, climb a tower to snipe my foes, or fly aerial vehicles but goddamn if he doesn’t stub his toes trying to run over railroad tracks a couple pixels high…
Just to clarify, to enable wide screen resolutions, add the following switch to your BF2142 icon: +widescreen 1 then in the video options only wide screen resolutions will be in the drop-menu to select.
Tags: Battlefield 2142, FPS
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Since widescreen monitors are becoming the norm rather than the exception, more and more developers need to either work that support in at release or patch it quickly. I don’t expect wide screen support for BF1942, but for a game thats only been out a short time like BF2142, I would expect WS support when it was released and for it to be easy to use.
Sorry for your head ache.
Not so much as headache as just aggravating when developers are that clueless. DICE aren’t the only ones apparently — KAOS is adding limited joystick support to the PC edition of Frontlines in the next patch, but waiting til the patch after that to actually add it to the in-game options. So joystick players are being directed to the forums for instructions on how to edit a configuration file or whatever bullshit in order to enable it.
If you make a new option, then immediately add it to the options menu. Is that seriously not obvious?
The readme says the WS support is a *BETA*. That means (to them) it’s not supported and may screw up the game or your system. They want to avoid the headaches that some newbie may play around with the setting and suddenly wonder why their game looks warped or doesn’t fully fill the screen.
I’m sure there will be an option in the Option menu once they feel it’s working well enough to not worry about issues.