First of all, this post is based on unsubstantiated rumors and my personal speculation.
Battlefield 3
Battlefield 3 was supposedly announced in June 2009, by John Pleasants, EA's chief operating officer at the time.
I've had the luxury of looking at Battlefield 3 over at DICE in Sweden and was highly impressed by the way the team is working on that product," he said. "Of course, that's not [coming out] in the fiscal year, but that is a product that is looking very good.
Now, I am not totally convinced by this comment, and I still think he might have mistaken Bad Company 2 with Battlefield 3. Although since EA never publicly corrected the comment, maybe the comment was accurate.
So, assuming Battlefield 3 was in development in June 2009, and is "looking very good", it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to assume we will hear some news at E3. Although I am not sure how DICE will balance Bad Company and Battlefield. Bad Company 2 was well received on the PC, but it wasn't Battlefield 3.
Will DICE release Battlefield 3 for the consoles? If they do, it would have to be a Modern Combat type of situation, where the console game is pretty different from the PC version. Unless DICE can really optimize the code for Frostbite, I doubt we will be seeing large-scale conquest maps like in BF2, especially if you add in destruction.
Ideally, DICE would announce Battlefield 3 with a trailer at E3, for PC only. But let's be honest, after the huge success of BC2 and 1943 on the consoles, EA isn't going to divert all of the resources towards BF3, and will surely have some future Battlefield plans for consoles.
Bad Company 2
A few week ago, Onslaught Mode was announced, essentially a horde mode but with objectives and vehicles. It will allow four people to squad up and compete on the leaderboards for the fastest times. It seems to be only for consoles for now, and has been confirmed to be paid DLC. I have no idea how well they expect this to sell, but I hope they aren't expecting MW2 Stimulus Package kind of sales.
Multiplayer maps clearly sell well for games that have a dedicated following. While a map pack for Bad Company 2 won't sell as many digital copies as MW2, I have a feeling they would certainly sell more than the Onslaught gamemode.
However, senior producer Patrick Bach stated that DICE never wants to charge for new BC2 maps. A representative for DICE said "Unless they aren't standard maps we won't charge [for them]."
EA, however wasn't able to promise that, saying "We can't comment on the future, but we'll have more details on our DLC plans shortly." Those "DLC plans" seem to be the Onslaught gamemode.
So we can't rule out a map pack just yet, and hopefully DICE will finish unlocking the maps for all gamemodes with the VIP system. The Bad Company 1 maps are great, and I know a lot of hardcore Battlefield fans would be more than willing to pay a few bucks for them. Harvest Day and Oasis are great maps, and the close-quarters ones will be a nice change of pace as well.
Battlefield: 1943
Battlefield; 1943 was very successful, selling over 1 million copies on the Xbox alone. Again, knowing EA, it seems silly that they failed to capitalize on 1943's success by not releasing any DLC maps or other content, and never releasing it on the PC. (Although DICE has said there still are plans to release it, I tried suggesting that they just integrate it into Bad Company 2 on the PC, but no dice. (hah, see what I did there?)
I personally believe it is too late for new maps for 1943: Pacific, but there are a number of other themes for a future $15 game. Battlefield: Europe is an obvious choice, but there is Battlefield Vietnam and Battlefield 2142 that could benefit from some Frostbite action and renewed life.
But is there still room for another, smaller-scale shooter? When 1943 was released, there were very little new multiplayer games at the time, and it was summertime after all and the idea of fighting on the lush islands of the Pacific appealed to many people. And it was World War II, and despite World at War, it seemed like all of the shooters were heading towards the "modern warfare" genre. Additionally, 1943 was able to capitlize on the immense success of Battlefield: 1942, which won numerous awards and whose multiplayer was popular with many video game publications and gamers.
1943: Europe would be able to have similar success, providing the destruction was brought to BC2's level (even refined a bit more) and the class customization was expanded a bit past the "Pick One of These Three Classes" way of 1943.
Different eras would also do a bit to change it up, Vietnam might seem a bit strange if it was released after Black Ops, and the game on PC wasn't as popular as 1942 or BF2, but if they add all of the music and and vehicles from Battlefield: Vietnam into a downloadable game, I could see that being a lot of fun. Battlefield: 2143 seems like a great idea for me, imagine having titans, mechs and helicopters all for only $15! I would assume it would require a lot more resources than 1943, but it would be worth it.
Maybe we will see some sort of downloadable Battlefield announcement at E3... hey, I can dream, can't I?
Giantbomb doesn't have the staff to cover all of the small news stories that are relevant to very certain games or franchises, it also can't do quicklooks of a lot of smaller, indy games.
Wouldn't it be great if you could go to a game page, and see green "News" stories that were written by the community and attached to that game? You could also subscribe to that game and see those news stories in the newsfeed.
Now, deciding who would write those stories, and filtering out quality articles seems like a pretty big task with no fair way to do that. That obstacle is the main thing preventing this from happening. Any ideas? I was thinking of a submission process where duplicate stories (or stories that are of inadequate quality) would be removed, and not posted.
Now for Quicklooks, you and and your friends could set-up screen/voice cap and try out a game for 20 minutes, these would have to be submitted to GB staff/moderators for approval and processing into the site.
Events: Giantbomb TNT is great, and a lot of fun, but only 5% of the people watching get to participate. (total BS stat)
Now, imagine community tournaments that are advertised on the game-page of the site, and in other areas. The winners could also be mentioned on the podcasts (similar to how Beyond! does it). A calendar interface could be made to see upcoming tournaments or events for games, and you could sign-up there.
Giantbomb already has an extensive wiki, which is unique to this site, adding more features like these would further expand the community, and make Giantbomb.com even more unique.
If you haven't seen the most recent Medal of Honor trailer, Leave a Message, you should. It's worth a watch.
Anyways, I enjoyed the trailer. It was well paced and felt very authentic.
But apparently there were some parts of the game that were cut because of how emotional they were.
There was a moment that we had in the game that was touching a little too close to home for them... like I said we do a lot of research and we hear a lot of stories, and it didn't really sit well, and so we pulled it. We cut it from the game.
That is a quote from Medal of Honor's executive producer Greg Goodrich.
The idea of something being too emotional, especially in a first person shooter (besides Portal, of course. RIP Companion Cube) seems kind of far fetched. The fact that they had something deep, and decided to take it out seems like a pretty big negative.
However, he did go on to state that them removing the scene or whatever it was increased their trust with their military contacts and people who were working on the game with them, so hopefully in the end it will be worth it.
IGN has an interesting article about how Medal of Honor is trying to be as true to the experience, and fun, as possible.
Clearly R* put a lot of time into the Singleplayer campaign, I haven't finished it, but it is a lot of fun with a great story and voice acting.
However, I know that once I am done with the story, I will mostly switch over to multiplayer. I am level 16, but already I feel like I have done everything there is to do.
Gang Hideouts:
The Gang missions are fun, the one with the mine cart is my favorite, as it is the most unique one there is. But, there are only 7 missions, which is kind of disappointing. Also, when multiple posses are fighting in mission areas, they spawn in the exact same spot as the other posses, this leads to a large amount of spawn killing. (Spawn killing is a problem throughout freeroam)
Hunting:
I remember hunting being a big advertising point for the freeroam. There are challenges that encourage you to hunt certain animals, but that is where the problem starts.
The world is incredibly underpopulated. When I first entered the singleplayer, I was witnessed an entire herd of buffalo, there had to have been 15 or more. In Freeroam, I have yet to see one single buffalo.
Finding certain animals for the challenges is equally as frustrating. What about the waves of animals attacking you? Me and my friends found one spot where 6 bears would spawn, which was kind of cool, but pretty underwhelming. I wish those spots were marked and gave exp, instead of something that seemed to have been thrown in at the last minute.
What else?
Besides from joining competitive multiplayer matches, Freeroam does little else to encourage activities besides spawn camping and doing gang-hideouts.
Hope:
Yesterday, me and my friends formed up a posse of 8 people. We happened across a fort in Mexico (El Presido). We saw 4 yellow dots in the fort, and we had the brilliant idea of taking it over. We rode along the main rode to the gate at top speed, but then I remembered something: The cannon!
Anyways, the cannon blew most of us up, so this time we spread out and attacked along the two entrances. We stormed the fort and cleared it out. Now, we took up positions on the gattling guns and cannons, and waited for them to attack.
Well, they tried, they did. But mostly they were just sniping. We decided to switch servers and tell everyone to try to take the fort from us. Eventually we were able to gather quite a large number of opponents, and had fun defending the fort.
During that time, I was thinking "Really R*? No gamemodes or anything to encourage this type of stuff?"
I know it is supposed to be FREE-roam, but there needs to be some structure to it.
The spawning issue needs to be looked at, there needs to be an option to spawn on the posse leader when you die (squad spawning a la Bad Company 2)
Thanks for reading my rant.
--Jayross
Glu Moblile, developer of games like Glyder, is working with Activision to release a Call of Duty game on the iPhone in conjunction with Black Ops' release.
From the sounds of it, the game will not bear the Black Ops subtitle, but will be a completely separate game.
I thought Nazi Zombies worked okay, are you guys looking forward to playing Call of Duty on your iPhone? What kind of features would you want? Multiplayer, co-op?
Many users have experienced problems with the Red Dead Redemption multiplayer, specifically in the free-roam portion of the game. The main problems seems to be models not loading (including player, horse and weapon models) in addition to various connection issues and dropped connections.
Rockstar is aware of these issues and say they are apparently working on a fix.
Rockstar also put out this e-mail address to contact for support. RDRSupportteam@rockstargames.com
Log in to comment