I am really disappointed. At first, I was not too fond, then it seemed okay, and then the "okay" began falling off, and after many hours of play in 1.2, and after several changes of opinion on this, that, or the other... here is what I have to say:
Never have I seen a patch screw up the gameplay of a game as much as this with the exception of The Battle For Middle Earth... Developed in-house by EA...
I'm not here to b*tch about the AA being over-powered... Im not here to b*tch about helos and jets being nerfed 6-feet under... this is coming from the perspective of someone who plays on the ground. I almost never play assault or spec-ops, and I use the GL even less. I am an infantry player who plays primarily medic, support, and AT in that order. And as the above-stated player... I'm really sick of what this patch has done.
Lets start with the bugs and glitches:
There are graphical glitches galore. While the increase in performance is noticable and nice, they created some problems. While the graphical glitches I have experienced have not been game-breaking, and are well worth the increased performance... I just don't think there should have been so many. One of my favorites is a mysterious boat wake trail that shoots across the water sometimes at the speed of a jet and just goes in a straight line for as far as i can see. If this wake-line encounters land, it simply continues out the other side. And there is the misplacement of projectile impacts occasionally, and many others.
And the sound glitches. The weapon-fire sound loops are more frequent than ever and sometimes you can't hear you're tank/AT shots either.
And the poor glitches with the AT class are abominable. Sporadicly jumping out and back in of you zoomed mode once you pull it up, sometimes not being able to guide you missle at all. The blank-fire non-sense... This is really game-breaking, and it should never have been allowed to occur. It is such a widespread issue that I imagine at least half AT players have encountered it at least once, if not often.
But glitches do occur with new patches, so I give them a break, but there is much more than just glitches wrong here.
There are problems with implementation of the new features. Examples include the buggy AA missles and problems with movement. I don't know how many times i have gotten stuck for a few seconds trying to jump over a lamp-pole base, bench, or something of the sort. And there is the delay going prone, which is okay, but the instances when you can't get back up or get up and then it drops you right back to prone again, or when it looks like you start to get up, but then magically are back to prone with another delay. The changes to the movement capacity of soldiers was fine in my opinion, but they really dropped the ball on implementing it smoothly. I get stuck, delayed, and reproned way too often. Its frustrating and hurts the gameplay.
So some of the newly implemented features and changes that were good were a little buggy. Well, they shouldn't have been; they should have been ironed out by release... but okay, I'll cut them some slack here as well... it happens, i understand.
Then there are just downright stupid changes that were literaly taken to an extreme with little or no real thought on the effects of public gameplay. These I do not excuse. And there are many.
Lets start with the worst of the lot... snipers. Yeah, snipers could have used a minor accuracy bonus, this is true, but does any infantry player who is not a sniper think that they did a good job balancing up here? I can't find one. I understand that there will always be classes that are more useful and deadly in general, but this is utterly insane. Nevermind that the p90 only does 19 damage... its unlikely you will meet any opponent with more than 2-5 bars of health anyhow. Airpower (which is still just as effective as it ever was for those skill-less pilots who think otherwise... you may just now get 6-8 deaths instead of 2-3... omg) frustrated infantry and broke up pretty much any good infantry fights before patch 1.2. Well, now, airpower still rapes infantry if there is a good pilot behind the stick, but uber-snipers break up combat just as badly. It went from bad to worse. Imagine, if you will, being China on Wake Island and being pushed back to the north village. If you have any experience on the ground on wake island and with the new patch, you instantly understand what a sniper standoff that turned into for about 150 tickets. Oh, it was fun, let me tell you...
So snipers are a little over-powered... yea, but it goes beyond that... Didn't the guys who tested this see what kind of hit this takes to teamwork!?! Seriously... when half your team are snipers, you don't have much teamwork going on... This makes taking on Attack Helis a nightmare, as you can't get another player on your team to help you take it down, everyone wants to spawn camp with the sniper rifle. I can honestly say, that since the patch has been out, i have not had a single enjoyable round on the ground, regardless of how i performed, because the level of teamwork, which was pretty good on the server i play on previoulsy, was appalling. Maybe things will settle down in a few weeks, but its a permanent blow to teamwork and certainly to balance.
And lets not even mention the claymores... THAT is easily the biggest screwup in the patch, hands down.
Then there is the support modifications. Once again, support needed a little boost to accuracy, but what happened... they straight up shoved em off the cliff, thats what. I am a support player, so i may be a little biased, and while I dont see the support changes to be as big a problem as the sniper ones, I certianly agree they took things too far.
And I dont agree with the way they handled disabling shooting and jumping. I agree with many others that they took the easy way out to eleminate exploitive gameplay elements, rather than working out a proper solution the the problem. Speaking of which, the GL is still as effective and cheap as ever.
I have enjoyed playing BF2 for over 250 hours without really getting tired, bored, or frustrated (aside from air rape-age), but I have become so frustrated this week alone, its unreal. No, I'm not going to stop playing, mainly because there are no other good games out right now to play, but one thing is for sure, BF2 just got a lot less fun.
Never have I seen a patch screw up the gameplay of a game as much as this with the exception of The Battle For Middle Earth... Developed in-house by EA...
I'm not here to b*tch about the AA being over-powered... Im not here to b*tch about helos and jets being nerfed 6-feet under... this is coming from the perspective of someone who plays on the ground. I almost never play assault or spec-ops, and I use the GL even less. I am an infantry player who plays primarily medic, support, and AT in that order. And as the above-stated player... I'm really sick of what this patch has done.
Lets start with the bugs and glitches:
There are graphical glitches galore. While the increase in performance is noticable and nice, they created some problems. While the graphical glitches I have experienced have not been game-breaking, and are well worth the increased performance... I just don't think there should have been so many. One of my favorites is a mysterious boat wake trail that shoots across the water sometimes at the speed of a jet and just goes in a straight line for as far as i can see. If this wake-line encounters land, it simply continues out the other side. And there is the misplacement of projectile impacts occasionally, and many others.
And the sound glitches. The weapon-fire sound loops are more frequent than ever and sometimes you can't hear you're tank/AT shots either.
And the poor glitches with the AT class are abominable. Sporadicly jumping out and back in of you zoomed mode once you pull it up, sometimes not being able to guide you missle at all. The blank-fire non-sense... This is really game-breaking, and it should never have been allowed to occur. It is such a widespread issue that I imagine at least half AT players have encountered it at least once, if not often.
But glitches do occur with new patches, so I give them a break, but there is much more than just glitches wrong here.
There are problems with implementation of the new features. Examples include the buggy AA missles and problems with movement. I don't know how many times i have gotten stuck for a few seconds trying to jump over a lamp-pole base, bench, or something of the sort. And there is the delay going prone, which is okay, but the instances when you can't get back up or get up and then it drops you right back to prone again, or when it looks like you start to get up, but then magically are back to prone with another delay. The changes to the movement capacity of soldiers was fine in my opinion, but they really dropped the ball on implementing it smoothly. I get stuck, delayed, and reproned way too often. Its frustrating and hurts the gameplay.
So some of the newly implemented features and changes that were good were a little buggy. Well, they shouldn't have been; they should have been ironed out by release... but okay, I'll cut them some slack here as well... it happens, i understand.
Then there are just downright stupid changes that were literaly taken to an extreme with little or no real thought on the effects of public gameplay. These I do not excuse. And there are many.
Lets start with the worst of the lot... snipers. Yeah, snipers could have used a minor accuracy bonus, this is true, but does any infantry player who is not a sniper think that they did a good job balancing up here? I can't find one. I understand that there will always be classes that are more useful and deadly in general, but this is utterly insane. Nevermind that the p90 only does 19 damage... its unlikely you will meet any opponent with more than 2-5 bars of health anyhow. Airpower (which is still just as effective as it ever was for those skill-less pilots who think otherwise... you may just now get 6-8 deaths instead of 2-3... omg) frustrated infantry and broke up pretty much any good infantry fights before patch 1.2. Well, now, airpower still rapes infantry if there is a good pilot behind the stick, but uber-snipers break up combat just as badly. It went from bad to worse. Imagine, if you will, being China on Wake Island and being pushed back to the north village. If you have any experience on the ground on wake island and with the new patch, you instantly understand what a sniper standoff that turned into for about 150 tickets. Oh, it was fun, let me tell you...
So snipers are a little over-powered... yea, but it goes beyond that... Didn't the guys who tested this see what kind of hit this takes to teamwork!?! Seriously... when half your team are snipers, you don't have much teamwork going on... This makes taking on Attack Helis a nightmare, as you can't get another player on your team to help you take it down, everyone wants to spawn camp with the sniper rifle. I can honestly say, that since the patch has been out, i have not had a single enjoyable round on the ground, regardless of how i performed, because the level of teamwork, which was pretty good on the server i play on previoulsy, was appalling. Maybe things will settle down in a few weeks, but its a permanent blow to teamwork and certainly to balance.
And lets not even mention the claymores... THAT is easily the biggest screwup in the patch, hands down.
Then there is the support modifications. Once again, support needed a little boost to accuracy, but what happened... they straight up shoved em off the cliff, thats what. I am a support player, so i may be a little biased, and while I dont see the support changes to be as big a problem as the sniper ones, I certianly agree they took things too far.
And I dont agree with the way they handled disabling shooting and jumping. I agree with many others that they took the easy way out to eleminate exploitive gameplay elements, rather than working out a proper solution the the problem. Speaking of which, the GL is still as effective and cheap as ever.
I have enjoyed playing BF2 for over 250 hours without really getting tired, bored, or frustrated (aside from air rape-age), but I have become so frustrated this week alone, its unreal. No, I'm not going to stop playing, mainly because there are no other good games out right now to play, but one thing is for sure, BF2 just got a lot less fun.
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