Quantcast Battlefield | Vagary.TV

Battlefield Archive

0

The 3D Review: Three Great Games to Celebrate the Rise of 3D

By
Christopher Coke
– November 18, 2011Posted in: Blogs, Columns, The 3D Review

You know what’s wonderful about the time we live in? 3D is coming into its own. For my job here, I keep an eye on a lot of games. Nearly all of them work with NVidia’s 3D Vision – or will when they’re released. I was actually surprised when I booted up RAGE to find out it didn’t. Reader, we’ve arrived at a point where 3D is worth the investment; in nearly every case, having that 3D set will make you better off than the gamer who doesn’t (and it’s the “have nots” who call this a gimmick). You get depth, immersion, and a picture far clearer than you’d see on a standard, even higher priced, display. Today, I thought I’d celebrate that fact by highlighting three great games that will draw you in with their 3D effect.

The Witcher 2

Though it got off to a rocky start, the problems have been fixed and 3D now runs flawlessly. The Witcher 2 stands out as a landmark RPG with one of the best, most detailed game worlds of this generation. It also sets a new standard for fantasy-themed realism as the developers have polished the game to a shine. Combat is fast, fluid, highly situational, and is coupled with a deep, if a bit short, main story. Enabling 3D in The Witcher 2 will bring you closer to the veil than ever before. It is, quite frankly, a game you can use to floor your friends.

Notes: 3D is primarily used for depth – like most games – but turning up your convergence can lead to some great pop-out effects.

Recommended Settings: Depth: Mid-High Convergence: High

Dead Island

Dead Island seems to be a pretty divisive game. Some people love it while others decry it for launch-day bugs. There’s one thing that argument misses: Dead Island makes you feel like you’re in a zombie wasteland. Where games like Left 4 Dead 2 focus on running-and-gunning, Dead Island makes you the survivor. Weapons break down easily but can be repaired and upgraded with a series of modifications rewarded from completing MMO-styled quests (and getting Diablo style loot drops). Enemy respawn timers are also unconventional, such that you never, ever feel safe wandering around completing tasks. The best part, though, and what keeps me coming back to the game again and again, is the combat. Being mostly melee-based, you’ll spend a lot of time hacking away at necks, limbs, and craniums with visible, and sometimes gloriously slow-motion, results.

Given the game’s scenic beginnings and city-street ends, it’s not surprising that 3D brings the experience to a new level. Since the game is in first-person, depth plays a huge part in judging swing-distance and really experiencing all that the environment has to offer. There’s nothing like looking out over a bay and truly feeling the distance that separates you from the rest of society. That said, it’s also pretty damn cool to see a severed limb fly inches away from your face.

Notes: Dead Island is a game that suffers from the tragic “moving shadows” effect. While I’m not technical enough to know specifically what causes it, I do know that raising convergence literally moves lighting elements around the room. Still, the depth effect is fantastic and there is a happy middle-ground to be had.

Recommended Settings: Depth: Low-Mid Convergence: Mid

Magicka

Magicka is a unique and incredibly fun game. Played from the top-down perspective, you play as a questing wizard, ala Vivi in FFIX, and combine up to five elements to create your own spells. Want a firefall? Combine fire and earth. How about an ice ray? Combine ice and the particle beam. How about a cold-beam of electrically charged icicles? You can do that too, amongst many other single-target combinations, area of attacks, and self-buffs, all in over-saturated HD.

I’ve long believed that isometric views were some of the best to be had in 3D. I look at it more like looking down into a box where toy men and women fight deadly beasts in well-made sets. Adding depth to this perspective only makes the illusion more believable. The intense, firework-like combat demands your focus and, before you know it, draws you in. Magicka ranks highly among my list of indie 3D favorites.

Notes: Unfortunately, the game also suffers the same moving shadow effect as Dead Island. The isometric viewpoint is much more forgiving of this; however, I found anything beyond 50% convergence to be too much.

Recommended Settings: Depth: High Convergence: Low-Mid

Since a lot of you are still on the fence, and more are buying in every day, here’s a list of some great 3D-supported games that may have been out for a while or require a little tweaking: Dirt 2 and Dirt 3, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, The Witcher, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2, Audiosurf, Borderlands, Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online. All of these games a worth your time and make the hardware worth owning.

That’s going to wrap it up for this edition of the 3D Review and I’m already feeling a bit late. Here I am talking about “how interesting times are” this and “gee whiz, Jimbo” that, and November looms all the closer. If this last year has taken us ever into the backyard pool of amazing 3D, this holiday season looks to wash us out to the ocean with the sheer amount of amazing content on the way. Stay tuned, 3D fans. More good stuff to come.

The 3D Review is a regular feature at Vagary TV and highlights the latest and greatest in the world of 3D gaming. If  there’s a game you’d like reviewed or a topic you’d like to see, send it to Chris at Christopher.Coke@Vagary.TV

14

Why Battlefield Hasn’t Beat CoD (And Why They’re Closer Than Ever Before)

By
Christopher Coke
– October 7, 2011Posted in: Blogs, PC/Mac, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

Amongst shooter fans, there are two camps: that of Call of Duty and Battlefield. For years these two sides have thrown venom at each other. To be fair, it was mostly EA throwing the collective monkey-poo but animosity has flowed both ways. As heir to the throne apparent, EA and DICE (the studio behind Battlefield 3) have worked hard to seed the gaming community with doubt for CoD’s killer formula. There’s more to shooting guns than shooting guns, y’know. The games have gotten better and better, each series coming more into its own with every iteration, but one thing has kept Battlefield from seizing the throne. You, America. You’re the problem… but maybe not for long.

Sit a minute while I weave a tale of two matches. In Call of Duty, you join the game, pick the load out, then sprint around the map, shot-gunning, grenade launching, and knife-killing noobs before someone snipes you from a far off window. In Battlefield: Bad Company, you do pretty much the same, except for one key difference: you spawn on your squad. You take cover in trenches and behind crumbling buildings. You rush towards the objective only to find you’ve run off alone and — you’re dead. In CoD your K/D ratio soars. In BF it doesn’t much matter. CoD makes you the army. Battlefield makes you a soldier.

And that, my friends, is why Battlefield has lost to Call of Duty each and every year smack has flown. The game makes you rely on other people in a time when players want nothing more than the world itself; it forces teamwork or it makes you fail. And you know what that means. Mics. No one ever has a mic (on PS3). No one even wants a mic because, well, you’re on the other end. And they’re playing like it’s CoD. Call of Duty  makes no such gestures. You have a team but you can safely ignore it. Battlefield doesn’t reward you for playing it like a game but like a war simulator; you don’t act as a squad in a real battle, you’re dead.

That’s also why Battlefield 3 is so important. The match-up against Modern Warfare 3 will be the last before we know if the shooter audience is changing hands… and DICE-EA seem keen to make sure the Call of Duty franchise plays second fiddle. By making a number of small tweaks to weapon damage and health, DICE has blended the best of both worlds. Guns, even pistols, seem powerful and never weak like Bad Company 2. Enemies drop fast if you’re aiming and it’s easy to feel deadly – even when you’re squadless. It fits like an old glove on a Call of Duty players hands and adds depth they didn’t even know they wanted.

Reading that, you might be tempted to think Battlefield 3 has finally cracked and embraced the CoD model but you couldn’t be further from the truth. Players who work as a team will always do better than those who don’t. Location, plan of attack, and load-out choice are still as strategic as ever, if not more so. XP rewards highly encourage that teamwork, too; a player who attacks and defends objectives, or the players attacking those objectives, will always outscore stationary sniper. Finally, the addition of prone and many tweaks to loadouts and gadgets make surviving a close-call much more likely. Machine gunners are also medics, so when you drop to your belly under a hail of fire, there’s a much better chance of hitting a first-aid kit and making it to cover.

Modern Warfare 3 will almost surely outsell Battlefield 3, but if they want to keep their top spot, they really need to impress. If their final product feels like an iteration when Battlefield seems like an evolution, the days of “Call of Duty  #1!” being a foregone conclusion might well be over. By this time next year, the landscape of first person shooters might be swinging in a new direction.

Battlefield 3 releases October 25th, 2011
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 releases November 8th, 2011

0

PC Version of Battlefield 3 will Require Origin

By
VTV Staff
– August 14, 2011Posted in: News

We’ve highlighted before how EA is pushing to get people to adopt the Origin service, now it seems they are going to force those  of you who purchase Battlefield 3 for the PC to use it. Confirmed on Twitter by Community Manager, Daniel Matros, “Anyone who plays Battlefield 3, even if they purchase the retail box will be required to use the Origin system.”

Though many people may denounce EA business decisions, it is no different then what Valve has been doing with Steam; requiring Steam to be installed on PCs for their games.

0

EA Cuts Online Multiplayer Servers For A Few Older Titles

By
Gregory Hutto
– July 13, 2011Posted in: News

Electronic Arts will be shutting down the severs for a few of its games. These games are said to be played be a mere 1% of EA’s customer base, and the games that are going to lose their online gameplay support have newer titles available.
The games include Battlefield 2: Modern Combat, Need For Speed: Most Wanted, the original Army of Two, the original Skate release, and a few others.

“The decisions to retire older EA games are never easy,” stated the recent service update. ”We would rather our hard-working engineering and IT staff focus on keeping a positive experience for the other 99 percent of customers playing our more popular games.”

Fortunately, all of the games being retired have a sequel or updated iteration still functioning online. The full schedule of upcoming server shutdowns is available here.

0

Modern Warfare 3 URL Leads To Battlefield 3 Website

By
Gregory Hutto
– July 12, 2011Posted in: News

It was recently discovered that www.modernwarfare3.com redirected Web surfers to the official website for EA’s Battlefield 3. It was originally assumed by many that EA had made some sly trickery in order to garnish more attention to their game, as they’ve been quite vocal about being a “Call of Duty” killer. Though, EA’s not the party to blame in this.

It was later discovered by Net Media Now that the URL www.modernwarefare3.com has been taken for quite some time, and it was originally an anti-propaganda site, stating

“Modern Warfare is crap. On November 8, 2011, the most over-hyped first-person action series of all-time returns with the copy and paste sequel to the lackluster Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.”

The cached version of the site went on to say that preorders of Modern Warfare 3 would reward customers bonus content, only available to “fanboys who don’t know that Battlefield 3 is a better game.”

The site was recently taken down and instead set-up as a redirect. It’s odd to think that Activision didn’t already have access to this Web domain, as many publications reported its secured status sometime ago, but it’s satisfying to see that EA isn’t behind the debacle.

1

XBOX 360 Review: Homefront

By
Chris Scott
– March 19, 2011Posted in: Reviews, Xbox 360

First person shooters are a dime a dozen in the game industry so every new game in the genre needs to have a hook to capture the interest of its prospective audience. Developer Kaos Studios set out to one up the competition with Homefront by setting their game in a near future where a unified Korea has occupied the United States west of the Mississippi. It is a horrifying premise to be sure and to bolster the game’s credibility, Kaos has enlisted the help of John Milius, the writer and director of the 1984 film Red Dawn.

Beginning with real footage of Secretary of State Hilary Clinton condemning of the North Korean torpedo attack on a South Korean warship in 2010, Homefront sets the stage for a grim yet horrifically believable future where the United States collapses and succumbs to the invasion of a unified Korea. And then the game starts and all the effort they spent setting up this horrific vision of the future is wasted by setting it in a game that is so unbelievably flawed.

Players will play as Jacobs, an everyman pilot that is trying to live his life in occupied Colorado. Jacobs is arrested by the Korean military but it is not long before the local resistance cell busts him out, hands him a gun and thrusts him deep into the war against the Koreans. Jacobs was not busted out by chance though, the resistance is in need of a pilot for a secret mission that could help turn the tide.

As it turns out Jacobs is not just a pilot but he is also a crack shot who seemingly had more than a little bit of special forces training. So the resistance sets to work using Jacobs for all kinds of dangerous missions that no single person would ever be tasked to do. Need a sentry turret taken out? Jacobs is your guy. Need someone to target enemies using a fancy gizmo? Jacobs knows how to do that. How about sniping people from a football field away? Yep, Jacobs can do that too.

I know that as a game Homefront is trying to keep the player engaged by giving them a variety of different things to do but when coupled with the realistic setting that Kaos is going for, it seems a bit silly. Additionally the absurdity does not stop with Jacobs being the go to guy for everything, it is the little things that really take the player out of the experience. For instance resistance squad member Rianna wearing a stylish top that shows off her mid-drift, or Conner endangering the entire mission by running Rambo-style into a mass burial, and do not even get me started on the unbelievable final mission.

Narrative issues aside the game fails in the most important of areas, gameplay. Nearly every aspect of the design is poorly implemented. The shooting feels loose and sloppy. Squad A.I. is nearly useless and Jacobs must be dressed in a Lite Brite outfit because no matter how low of a threat level he may pose, the enemy will target and sustain fire on him exclusively. In addition to making the player into a virtual bullet sponge, the game has nasty difficulty spikes and magically appearing enemies making cheap deaths a normal occurrence. With the campaign clocking in around four to five hours and coupled with the numerous cheap deaths the game is probably far shorter than it seems.

If all of that were not bad enough, the level design is terribly uninspired and emanates with the vibe of “been there, done that”. Homefront’s campaign seems to be a game that had a high concept idea but Kaos did not know how to bring such an idea to fruition while still remaining fun and so instead of exploring other avenues in execution Kaos decided to run the tried and true rout ultimately making the game seem like a sub-par clone of Modern Warfare 2.

With the myriad of problems in the single player, one would assume that the multiplayer would be equally as problematic. That would be an incorrect assumption as Homefront actually delivers a solid, if extremely derivative multiplayer experience. Homefront’s main game modes are Ground Control and Team Deathmatch. Deathmatch speaks for itself and playing in that mode it really seems like a Modern Warfare clone. Ground Control on the other hand borrows extensively from the Battlefield series as it blends a mix of the standard Battlefield modes Rush and Conquest into something relatively new and exciting. In Ground Control both teams will be assigned neutral capture points. Capturing and holding the points for a set amount of time will force the losing team to retreat further into the map to protect new control points. The first team to capture and hold two sections of the map, wins.

Much like any modern-day shooter, Homefront features a persistent leveling system that is designed to retain players for long periods of time. By playing the game and leveling up, more and more unlocks become available making your virtual soldier harder to kill. In addition to weapons, equipment and abilities that can be unlocked there is a unique game type that can only be unlocked once players have reached level seven*. This game type Battle Commander is just a variant of Team Deathmatch and Ground Control. The added wrinkle being that when playing in Battle Commander players that are doing well are marked for elimination and a bounty is placed on their heads. On the surface it may not seem like a big deal but having a player on a spree marked adds a ton of pressure to that player and it may very well eliminate camping, at least in this game mode.

Battle Commander is not the only new addition to the tried and true formula though. For every action that is performed in a match the player gains battle points that can be used to buy vehicles or support upgrades. The battle points system works like a more balanced version of the Call of Duty kill-streak rewards and it introduces a risk reward type payoff where players can risk banking their points to unlock more powerful vehicles that could help turn the tide their way or they could just play selfishly and help themselves with personal upgrades.

Technically speaking the game is nothing to showcase in your living room but it is serviceable enough. Where the game falters though is in its presentation aspects. The menus and on-screen prompts are right out of 2003 making immersion into the world nearly impossible as Homefront reminds you at every turn that it is a game.

I think what is most disheartening about Homefront is that it spoiled a prime chance to create something different, something meaningful. Homefront is certainly not something different, it is the same game we have been playing for years. In a genre that is heavily populated with better quality, Homefront is just not worth spending time with, let alone money on.

2 out of 5

*While it holds no bearing on this review I personally despise the locking of game types in multiplayer game modes requiring players to “rank” up enough to unlock all game types.

1

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and multiplayer storytelling

By
Magnus Risebro
– January 12, 2011Posted in: Blogs, Magnus' Blog, Staff Blogs, Vagary.TV

Having cleansed my palette with both Halo Reach and the annual Call of Duty, returning to Bad Company 2 has granted me a revelation about multiplayer: Design-philosophy used in single-player games can be applied to multiplayer with surprisingly favorable results. Let’s analyze:

FPS campaigns usually set the stage with one goal in mind; provide a visceral, intense experience. The more a shooter excites my survival instincts and compels me to kill these d-bags shooting at me, the more that shooter has succeeded.

The Call of Duty series popularized the approach of pushing the player through heavily-scripted sequences to achieve this effect, a design-method that has become widely used for all action titles, shooter and otherwise. When scripting is used successfully, the player can be manipulated to think and feel just what the game wants him or her to, and thus can be provided with the aforementioned intense and cinematic experience.


Battlefield: Bad Company 2 also sports a CoD-clone campaign (final mission set on an airplane anyone?), however, the most filmic moments are found in the online multiplayer.

Though praised by critics, Bad Company 2’s multiplayer offering pulls a trick so clever it passes right over many gamer’s heads:
Where FPS multiplayers traditionally dump a load of hopefully-balanced guns and maps in players’ lap and asks them to make their own fun, Bad Company is more ambitious:

Every map, from it’s building placement to vehicle-spawn time, is designed to make multiplayer matches feel like Hollywood battle-scenes. More precisely, to feel like scripted video games aping Hollywood battle-scenes.

In BC2, the most effective ways to play are almost always the most spectacular and rewarding. As a player, I could camp in the second floor of a remote building and earn myself a few points for killing unsuspecting enemies walking through the door. However, a more fun option would be to play as an engineer and maintain my teammate’s tank, putting myself in danger, but crucially, earning a lot more points.

Employing a risky and team-oriented playing style will reward you both with thrills and points, paradoxically making team-play the most selfish option.

In Call of Duty campaigns, soldiers on screen are AI-chess pieces playing out a script the game demands you follow, in a Battlefield match, those helicopters swiveling out of control and exploding in fiery clouds are being piloted by real players on the other sides of internet connections.

The sniper on a faraway rooftop headshot-ing the  enemy soldier in front of you is a flesh-and-bone human being, as is the enemy soldier himself.

Through the magic of carefully thought-out design, all of these people are brought together to shape battles worthy of the silver screen.  And when it works, it gives the sensation of scale, intensity and immersion found in triple-A single-player experiences.

Yes, the odd match might be populated by jerks who would sell their grandmothers for perfect K/Ds, but the number of – and I hate to say this – epic moments far outweigh the frustrating ones.

Multiplayer games rarely hold my attention for long before I hunger for another single-player adventure, freed from the constraints of other people, but Battlefield fills out the story-craving part of my heart as well as the competitive one.

Coming from Norway, it is in my blood to despise our Swedish neighbors, but when they make games of this calibre, I am content with fighting them virtually.