Pumping Irony

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.

I’m not even sure I’ll be able to formulate this into a cohesive thought with an actual point, but here goes anyway…

I keep the Battlefield 2142 demo installed just in case a friend decides to try the game out with me. My good friend Jostein did just that a few days ago. He’s an Insurgency addict, recently promoted to admin on the popular server he plays on, so coming to 2142 was a bit of a culture shock, just as going to Insurgency is for me. We each complain about the UI in each game, and being able to tell who’s friendly and who’s not in each game. One valid complaint he did have, however, is one I’d never really noticed since I play the real version of 2142: in the demo, there’s almost zero communication and coordination and any sense of “community” is nearly non-existent or at the least filled with the selfish, swearing, bunny-hopping kids we all know and “love.”

I’m not in a 2142 clan, and I can’t say I’m particularly “good” at the game, but while playing the full version I consistently get invited to squads, even when I’m already in one; sometimes I’m invited to clan-only squads. 90% or more of the time in my experiences, the squad leaders are giving orders, the squad is complying to advance the squad’s score for upgrades and the commanders are at least trying to do their job as well. Coordination and communication rule the day there. In the demo, by contrast, it seems to be rare for squads to even form, rarer still for the squad leader to bother doing his job.

FPS demos are (nearly?) always played on separate demo servers so demo players can never interact with “real” players, but allow players to continue playing endlessly. Well, until there are no more demo servers. In the MMO world, the trial period is limited-time but is not (overly) crippled other than the typical spam-prevention method of prohibiting trial players from sending tells or mail.

I can’t help but wonder if an MMO that had its “noob experience” separate from the “real world” like LOTRO does would go over well with an endless trial period; the catch being you can never leave the “noob world,” can never communicate or otherwise interact with players in the rest of that game world. And, if so, would that also create an extremely fractured community like we’re seeing over in 2142, both in terms of the trial vs. full players and of the mentality and attitudes of former trial-only players finally coming over into the full world?

In retrospect, January ends as a slow month for me in MMO’s. I spent time each day home (granted, my January schedule was rough so I wasn’t home as much as I like) attempting to complete the final Hunter’s League quest in Vanguard, but I am not willing to sit on my thumbs for hours on end looking for a group. I’ll give it 15-20 minutes and I’m out. I did finally notice people forming a group the other night just before I logged out but as luck would have it, I did not have the time for it.

I did a little bit of Guild Wars here and there, also. Benjeth has still been incredibly unsuccessful at winning more than a round or two in the Norn Fighting tournament in Gunnar’s Hold, and so is still lacking the ever-elusive dervish, Kahmu, to complete his list of acquired Heroes.

I did login to LOTRO briefly to check my inbox for kinship mail and I decided to go ahead and get the Bree Horse for Arwellyn, my Lore-master. I was sorely tempted to go ahead and pick up where I’d left off questing and such, but I still want to take a little more time away. Book 12 will be out soon, perhaps after that? I’m perfectly fine with LOTRO’s low-fantasy take on things, provided I have a high-fantasy alternative game (GW and VG) to balance things out. My kinship is just awesome, and wanting to do more and more with them is actually the reason for my break. When I agreed to allow myself to return to MMO’s after my WoW burnout from a couple years of fairly hardcore play, I vowed to not get sucked back into that mentality and I felt it very strongly in LOTRO so I had to take a step back. I’m still playing other games but only casually. This laptop is a piece of junk and while it did perfectly fine with WoW, it has difficulty even running GW on low settings so I’m basically game-less at work, which was not the case in the WoW days.

I also see DDO’s Module 6 will be out by the time I get home, so perhaps I’ll try picking up some DDO in February?

Otherwise, I spent a little time re-discovering the FPS genre this month. I bought Team Fortress 2 on launch day and I love the fun little skirmishes but it’s not something I can do for very long stretches of time. I also bought Call of Duty 4 on Steam and, while I’m enjoying the single player campaign here and there, the online game hasn’t been very compelling to me. A good friend has become completely addicted to the Insurgency beta 2 Half-Life 2 mod but it seems just like a “hardcore” (ie. no hand-holding, no frills) version of COD4. Small-ish urban combat skirmishes. That can be fun in small doses for me, but I’ve been there, done that years ago. I like the sensation of being in a war not a skirmish, so the Battlefield series fits the bill for me. I fell pretty hard for Battlefield 1942 back in the day. Vietnam did not run well on my system at the time so I didn’t bother with it. On my current system, 1942 crashes with dual-core CPU’s and I’m not willing to hassle myself with manually setting the game to only use a single core each time I run the game. So I’ve been back in Battlefield 2142 and loving every minute of it. I’ve even been playing the demo version so I could introduce the game to a few friends, one of whom used to team with me back in 1942 and was instantly addicted to 2142 and purchased the new Deluxe Edition (fully updated 1.4 game plus the Northern Strike booster pack) from the EA Store so we’ll get to play the full version when I get home next week. I’m hoping to get the Insurgency addict hooked on 2142 as well!

As for the blog, I’ve played around with a few extensions and I think I nearly have things where I want them on that end. I did end up installing the Sabre plugin to combat spam registrations. Overall the spam commenting wasn’t bad and Akismet caught all of them anyway, but I kept noticing one or two bot registrations every day, all of the form ab123456@yahoo.com (random letters and numbers but always yahoo.com) and I quickly tired of manually deleting them each day. So I apologize if capcha tests are aggravating for new users to register but at least it has put an end to the daily stream of bot users. Tom added the ‘random header images’ I’d asked for in the new Mandigo theme so I need to get busy and upload some next month. Ironic that I’m the one who got the ball rolling on this option, but will be one of the last Mandigo users to actually utilize it — I’ve noticed all the other MMO bloggers jumped on it as soon as Tom released it. Such is life… I did pick up some traffic and some new registered users this month, largely thanks to Brent at Virgin Worlds linking my STO post, and a few other blogs referring here as well. Discussions are still very quiet, usually just SmakenDahead and I, but I’m hoping to regain some of the activity I lost last year with the server crash.

Oh, just curious… I know Heartless Gamer has his own little TF2 Steam Community, which I’m member of (it’s tiny and I don’t think the gang has ever actually done anything as a group yet) but I don’t suppose there’s a blogger group or clan for BF2142 is there? That would rule… I know PvtHudson over at Wife Aggro mentioned last week he’d like to get back into BF2142 but in the very next post he said he was back into EQ2 for the long haul. Meh.