I play Battlefield 2 once or twice a week. I’m not particularly good, but it’s fun to play with a squad of friends.
The latest patch introduced the “Infantry Only” option. This loads a map without vehicles. This can be fun if everyone on the server squads up. However, it’s really only appropriate for smaller city maps. Large maps like Wake Island are just too big to traverse on foot, as I discovered last night.
Many servers are running Infantry Only these days. Almost every server running Karkand (at least servers with players logged in) is in Infantry Only mode. In fact, last night I decided I wanted to play with vehicles for a while, but I simply couldn’t find a server that had players logged in, and was not infantry only. This was quite a bummer.
Since the introduction of Battlefield 2142, it seems that most players have abandoned Battlefield 2. This is probably a good thing overall, since the people left playing Battlefield 2 regularly tend to be better and more polite players. There also tends to be less rude namecalling, teamkilling, and other shenanigans since most of the asshole kids are, presumably, playing 2142.
However, this smaller cadre of players seem to prefer Infantry Only. And, the smaller number of players overall leads to a lot of empty servers. (You’d think that with the smaller number of players, the account servers would run faster. Nope, they take FOREVER.)
With Team Fortress 2 and Quakewars on the horizon, I suspect that our little clan will move on from Battlefield 2 pretty soon.
Tags: battlefield, computer games, software