Review (Anthology)

This is my second attempt at this review. On my first try, as is my custom, I rambled somewhat incoherently about the game and eventually exceeded even my own personal threshold for tangential musings. I wasn't getting anywhere near the small set of issues that I wanted to compose the heart of the review. So, I started over and am just going straight to it. For the sake of posterity, my original treatise is included at the end.

Good

• The vehicle controls and physics are terrifically intuitive and fun. A caveat, however: when I say 'vehicles' I mean everything except planes. A design preference was clearly given to playability over simulation, which isn't to imply that a high simulation factor isn't fun, just that it depends on the context. According the whole of BF1942's gameplay, a lighter level of simulation is both fitting and enjoyable.

• The graphics really are nice. I'm a sucker for long-range visibility, which has always been and still is rare, and BF1942 delivers. Plus, the trees are great, and I'd love to see the technique for transitioning between levels of detail catch on in other games.

• The player classes are instantly familiar and all uniquely useful. A team that makes good use of all of the classes will trump the team that doesn't. The game may not possess laser precise class balancing, but it's still commendable.

Bad

• Destroyed vehicles vanish too quickly. I understand the excuse for it, but that doesn't make it enjoyable. I want smoldering wreckages, at least for a minute or two.

• I said that classes are all useful and reasonably balanced. Unfortunately, snipers are a little *too* useful. I'd liked to have seen a stricter practical requirement for snipers to be prone and still, thus forcing fewer shots.

• Planes are implemented rather poorly. The flight dynamics leave much to be desired, and I mean in terms of fun, not even pure simulation (which as I said isn't really an issue). Plus, the entire aerial experience is hampered by an inappropriately low ceiling.

• Some monumentally bad map design. Omaha beach is nearly unwinnable by the allies. Kursk is just lame. Berlin degenerates into a spawn-camping massacre for the Russians after about 2 minutes. Operation Husky is another beach bloodbath for the allies. Sure, there are some gems like Tobruk and Guadalcanal, but for a game with this few maps out of the box, *none* of them should be this bad.

Ugly

• The AI in this game is perhaps the worst I've ever seen in a shooter. God bless DICE, I guess, for even trying. I'm torn between being grateful that the game even attempts to let me play cooperatively, and to fill out multiplayer teams with bots, and being bitter and spiteful that the resulting experience is so excruciatingly frustrating as to be criminal. The bots can move around and shoot decently enough, but BF1942 is, as much as anything else, a tactical game, and the AI can't tactical its way out of a paper bag. Yes, I know 'tactical' isn't a verb. I'm not going to belabor this point, so suffice to say that the AI is so bad, tactically, that both co-op games and regular team games with only a few humans degenerate into a hideously mutated game that is obviously nothing even close to what the designers intended. Think playing baseball by yourself.

• Humans suck. Seriously, the only thing worse than the AI in this game are the humans in this game. Humans are the absolute bane of multiplayer gaming. They're brutish, stupid, selfish, petty, mean, immature and obnoxious. On the one hand, I feel bad heaping this issue on BF1942. The game didn't make people this way. The problem is that it does almost nothing to discourage it. BF1942 is a lot like football. When it's played by two highly-trained, nearly professional, practiced, prepared, and dedicated teams, it's amazing. When it's played by two randomly associated groups of anonymous people, it's essentially pointless and stupid. The only way I was able to stomach playing BF1942 online was by restricting myself to a server operated by a particular clan that had taken draconian measures to reduce the selfishly stupid behavior engendered by the game. Their server maintained a modicum of civility via the regular presence of clan members on the server who possessed the authority to enforce the clan's server rules by both kicking and banning players. Some example rules are:

  • no entering uncaptureable enemy spawn points

  • no vehicle kamikazes

  • no intentional team kills

  • reduced nametag distances

  • disabled hit detection

  • no disrespecting any other player

  • no complaining about server settings

  • And last, but certainly not least: a 90 second spawn delay, which all by itself seems to prune out most of the smacktard players. It seems that people who thrive on being jerks need to indulge themselves with a very high frequency. Waiting 90 seconds is intolerable for them, like smoke to mosquitoes.

  The 201st has this to say about its server rules:

  "If you find these settings or rules to be 'retarded', 'gay', or 'lame' then this server isn't for you."

  Indeed. But such a strict set of rules is a very small price to pay for what I immediately discovered to be a vastly improved game experience. It's sad that it takes such an explicitly punitive environment to maintain civility, but the same holds for this public server called Earth.

• Charging $20 a pop for the expansion packs. Sorry EA, but the genie is out of the bottle for user-created content. Having the dev team crank out a handful of maps (and of questionable quality at that) and charging for it just makes me hate you even more. Both of the BF1942 expansion packs consist of about what we've come to expect from either the id or epic mod community within about two weeks of the release of a new game. I'm very sorry that the BF1942 engine sucked enough that there was no hope of additional licensing revenue, but that doesn't mean I'll forgive EA/DICE for charging money for what the other, better developers are giving out for free. Just as I was writing this review, I went and bought two more copies of UT2004. If there had been a way for me to spend some money and say 'fuck you' to EA, I'd have done that too. I guess I'll just have to settle for this little soapbox: Fuck you, EA.

• This one made me want to strangle someone: if you change a keymapping and inadvertently create a conflict, the UI tells you there's a conflict, but that's it. You have to dig through the four or so pages worth of keymappings, mousing over each one, to find the conflict you just created. Holy Jesus, that's bad UI.

• Wow, I'm so worked up I nearly forgot about the blood being AWOL. There are a few mods to choose from that restore some reality to the battlefield, but that's beside the point. I am so sick and tired of the obtuse, misguided, and downright ridiculous notion that removing blood from A FUCKING COMBAT GAME somehow magically makes it suitable for kids. The game consists entirely and exclusively of shooting people!

Beautiful

• Shooting stuff with tanks. Becoming proficient with the ballistic trajectories of the tank rounds is great fun. Even though a lot of BF1942's strength comes from it's mixed-mode play (infantry, tanks, planes, AA guns, etc..) it is indisputably the tank play that leaves the best impression. Everyone seemed to love the Desert Combat mod even more than the original BF1942, but I'll be honest, I had more affection for stock BF1942, since DC flattened out and sped up all of the tank rounds, taking a lot of the finesse out of achieving success with the ballistics.

Summary

Is BF1942 fun? As always, that's up to you. Unfortunately for BF1942, it is mostly up to the people that you play with online, more so than any other game I've played. And since most people exhibit little or no redeeming social values in an online game setting, more often than not your BF1942 experience will be negative. This isn't technically BF1942's fault anymore than it is the fault of the deck of cards if you play poker with people that cheat. Nevertheless, the issue became the defining characteristic for the game and for that reason I cannot segregate it from my opinion of the experience. For my own money, BF1942's greatest fault is that it doesn't let me circumvent the issue of stupid people, preventing me from successfully scaling the game to a private LAN environment with just a few people (who presumably are less stupid and better behaved). Still, under the right circumstances, BF1942 can deliver a large scale, imminently playable taste of WWII combat that is simultaneously free-wheeling and satisfyingly tactical.

[The following is my first rambling stab at this review]

Battlefield 1942, to a degree heretofore unmatched by any other computer game, is simultaneously alluring and repugnant. A siren's song, it whispers seductively of the promised land of large scale WWII combat, of class-based teamplay without the steep learning curve of a Tribes 2, of an honest-to-god tactical but easy-playing military shooter. It lures you in with mouth-watering graphics, intuitive vehicle controls, instantly familiar player classes. But once you've succumbed to its sultry advances, you find yourself in bed with a diseased hooker wearing 2 day old make-up and hacking what you hope is just a 4-pack-a-day perma-cough and not TB.

Wow! Where did that come from? That was harsh. Certainly didn't expect for that to come out when I started typing. But there it is. It's out in the open now and we just have to deal with it. Clearly I've got some anger issues surrounding BF1942. Let's put on our Freud hats and get to the bottom of this.

Here's the deal: on paper, BF1942 looks terrific. Not just that, it elicits an embarrased 'duh' from anyone who's been around gaming the last 10 years. Why hasn't anyone done this game before? Platoon-sized WWII combat on large maps with infantry, tanks and planes? Are you kidding me, it's like looking up 'fun' in the dictionary. Notice that I didn't ask 'why hasn't anyone done this simulation before'. In fairness, someone did (WWII Online), but the definition of 'fun' is different when you charge a monthly fee for it. The key ingredient of BF1942 is that it steers well clear of simulation territory. It is not, repeat NOT, a combat simulation. It's a game, sidling up alongside the likes of UT and Serious Sam in the cafeteria lunch line, and garnering snooty looks from the 'cool' table where Op Flashpoint sits with Aces High and Ghost Recon.

So the rhetorical question remains, why hasn't anyone done a wide-open WWII mixed-mode combat game before? Certainly, there are technical prerequisites to pull off the design, but to have not even attempted it before now smacks of an industry that collectively can't see the forest for the trees. I can easily imagine playing a spiritual precursor to BF1942 back in the early 3D days (think Mechwarrior 2 era, 1995-ish). The purists among you will already be leaning back in your chairs and scowling disgustedly at me for not giving props to the likes of BZFlag or Scorched Earth. Well, stop scowling, because while I'll be the first to recognize those for championing ballistics-based combat, they aren't either of them mixed-mode WWII combat. Besides, Mr. Smartypants, what about Combat for the Atari 2600? No, no, the point I'm trying to make involves modern era, 3D gaming. We've seen roughly 1.2 hojillion first-person shooters, and by my calculations only 0.0027% of those have any resemblance to BF1942's gameplay. That doesn't make BF1942 wildly innovative, it makes the industry look stupid for not having done a better job at identifying low-hanging fruit on the fun tree. It's like when people in the 18th century were convinced that drinking cold water in hot weather was harmful. Do we attribute an innovative spirit to those who dispelled that myth, or do we wince at how wrong-headed everyone was? Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but I don't think there's anyone scratching their head in surprise at how popular is the notion of a wide-open WWII combat game with vehicles.

But let's get our Freud hats back on and try to tie this back into my negative feelings for the game. I think there are two main reasons why I'm so down on BF1942.

First, BF1942 feels like a first-generation title, and I think a great deal of my frustration with the game stems from the fact that it really has no excuse for feeling first-generation. We've been doing shooters for quite some time now, and team-based shooters at that. BF1942 has the stereotypical feel of a game that's undercooked, or rough around the edges, because it tried to do too many new things at once. Except, BF1942 doesn't really try much of anything new. Now you're probably thinking I'm schizophrenic, since I just spent multiple paragraphs wondering why nobody had done this game before. Yes, but we've been doing all the parts of this game for awhile now, which is why it's so surprising that nobody's bothered to combine them before. That the combination of those parts should come out feeling so slipshod reflects, I believe, poorly on DICE more than it represents any supposed uncharted waters by the game's design.

BF1942 came out of the chute buggy as hell and a complete performance hog. To this day, it's a HW pig, without the high poly count to justify it. It's network robustness was lacking and we really really should be taking fast network code for granted by now. I don't think DICE are particularly good engine developers. The short of it is that I think BF1942 would be a much improved game had DICE licensed a decent engine and then set about honing a tighter game design. As it is, I think the design and the core implementation both suffer from a lack of attention, each starving a bit at the hands of the developer. Note that this phenomenon isn't unique to BF1942. The shelves are filled with games whose root flaws can be traced to the fact that developers spend a large portion of their financial and schedule budgets reinventing the wheel. Imagine if every time an author went about writing a book he had to redesign the printing press.

When I play BF1942, I can't help feeling that what I really want to be playing is the third or fourth generation of BF1942's successors. Some games are tough to play when you go back to them years later, because the industry has evolved past (and thanks to) them, and their coarseness is hard on our more refined gaming palettes. For me, BF1942 felt like that right from day one, as though I was revisiting the state of team-based shooters before we'd developed decent bot AI, good network code, flexible multiplayer gamemodes, mod-friendly extensible engines, etc.. Looking at that list, you'd think that a big-budget game released in 2002 would score pretty well, and that's the problem I have with BF1942. It doesn't. It's like a throwback, but in a bad way, a la the Houston Astro jerseys from the late '70s.

The second, and actually primary, major reason that I'm hating on BF1942 is, ironically, because under just the right circumstances it can be precisely as much fun as you'd expect. I wasn't blowing smoke when I said that the summary description of BF1942 is akin to looking up 'fun' in the dictionary. On paper, the recipe looks delicious. The problem the game has is that it's fun is very fragile. Put simply, it requires *at least* 16 living, breathing, like-minded humans in the same way that sex requires at least two living, breathing, like-minded humans. Sure, technically you can play with less, but noone's going to claim it's the same experience. In BF1942, there's a precipitous drop in the enjoyment offered by the game when there aren't humans filling out the rosters of both teams.

Some would argue that's the case for any team-based multiplayer game, and I'll grant that humans nearly always trump AI for certain things. However, I can look back fondly on many years of enjoyable LAN and internet play with small groups of people, both with and without supplemental AI, in games that accommodate. I've been playing UT under a wide variety of player scenarios and never ever had a negative experience that was due to the game.

For BF1942, when I say 'precipitous', I mean it doesn't just go from fun to not fun, it plummets all the way down to torturous ulcer-fuel. This, probably more than anything else, is why I don't play BF1942 anymore. For the most part, I like to enjoy my multiplayer shooters on the LAN, and since I don't have a large group of hardcore gamer friends, my LAN sessions usually involve no more than 6-8 people. That simply isn't sufficient for BF1942. The choice becomes either to fill out the game with its utterly horrible AI, or to go online and suffer the insufferable smacktards inhabiting the public servers. That's the real curse of BF1942 - it's no fun without a full human roster, and it's nearly equally no fun with your average human roster. If you're lucky enough to find or gather the right group of people, then BF1942 delivers in spades.