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Battlefield 2142

In the Battlefield universe, 135 years from now, a new ice age is coming. This is a good reason to make another first person, multi-player, online, team-based shooter game. According to the back story, living space and resources are growing thin and humans are forced to fight - each other, and to the death - for survival. The Pan-Asian Coalition or PAC attacks, while the EU tries desperately to defend its turf from the Russian-speaking aggressors. All this (and the potential controversy) is forgotten fairly soon, though, as teams battle round after round to capture flags to win territory, or to bring down the enemy's Titan, a mighty floating aircraft carrier.

Battlefield 2142 (BF2142) leads Electronic Arts' Battlefield franchise to the 22nd century, two hundred virtual years after the first hit game Battlefield 1942 from Sweden-based developer Digital Illusions CE (DICE). The second true game in the series, Battlefield 2 (BF2), was a huge critical and popular success, but the minor title Battlefield: Vietnam and expansions to BF2, developed by DICE's Canadian subsidiary, were less popular and not as well received by gamers. DICE Sweden is back behind the wheel with BF2142, which bodes well for the title. Using a modified BF2 engine, BF2142 should be playable by most if not all the fans of the previous title. The advantage of a huge, established fan base should help propel BF2142 into the elite of multi-player online games. On the flip side of the coin, the game runs the risk of being outdated before release, as BF2 is close to two years old now, and its engine is basically an upgraded version of BF1942's, from 2002. The latest Battlefield promises first person, high-tech futuristic combat - does the old warhorse have enough left in reserve to deliver?

The Emperor's New Uniform

With the engine's venerable lineage, BF2142 should have no problem running on all kinds of PC hardware. However, unlike its predecessors, the game officially supports only video cards with Shader Model 2.0 or higher. Although it's not a problem for almost anyone buying a new computer today, dropped support for GeForce 3 and 4 as well as Radeon series up to 9200 will disappoint owners of some classic VGAs, who could still play BF2. There could be several reasons for dropping support for older shader models, including reduced development and support costs, better overall performance and a more consistent gameplay experience. In a competitive online game, the latter is especially significant: particle effects like smoke and fire, limiting a player's vision, as well as shader effects such as blurring, imitating disorientation from shock or pain, can mean the difference between victory and defeat. How players perceive the game's environment should be consistent enough that nobody gains an unfair competitive advantage.

If the graphics have been streamlined for the benefit of the gamers, however, there is no excuse for a glaring omission: still no support for widescreen resolutions. Or, for that matter, the most popular resolution of today, the 1280x1024 pixels of many LCD screens. Only 4:3 aspect ratios are found in the graphics options, so that owners of 5:4 aspect ratio screens such as 1280x1024 will have to contend themselves with 1280x960. This means picking between losing a bit of screen real estate (64 vertical pixels) or losing the correct aspect ratio, picture sharpness and possibly responsiveness (due to the monitor scaling up the image).

Popular 5:4 aspect ratio: black bars on top and bottom

Popular 16:10 widescreen aspect ratio: black bars on the sides

The same applies for owners of widescreen monitors, except that they lose even more screen space to black bars, or suffer even worse distortion due to stretching. DICE claims that native widescreen is not supported so that some players would not enjoy an unfair advantage due to a wider field of vision. This is obviously a smokescreen - what would prevent an owner of a 4:3 display from choosing a 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio, if the advantage is so huge? Black bars should be elective rather than forced on the majority of players.

The interface and control schemes are virtually unchanged from BF2. This is both good and bad: while the game engine certainly well-tuned, some obvious bugs in the physics engine persist. Most of the weirdness happens when you hop in one of the game's futuristic (but somehow strangely familiar) vehicles. Run your buggy over a cliff, and it'll catch fire and explode underwater; land your gunship or transport just a tad wrong and you don't just scratch the paint - the aircraft will grind itself into a flaming wreck. If you dare hop in vehicles, especially as a passenger, expect a fiery virtual death every now and then. Perhaps DICE's rationale for not fixing this erratic behavior is that accidents occur in real military operations as well.

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