Battlefield:Heroes

[[SCUM] OUTLAW]

New trailer ,more info...looks ok for nothin !

[EDIT] LOOKS FOOKIN AMAZING !! ....for nothing !.....Happy !?





http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/

http://www.maxconsole.net/?mode=news&newsid=25710

[[SCUM]-Herbs]

lol, love the trailer!

[[SCUM] OUTLAW]

First things first: it is free to download, and it is free to play. We know you know this, but it's worth re-stating. Particularly since this is EA, so obviously we're suspicious. EA, of course, makes DVD cases out of murdered kittens, bathes in the blood of nuns, and squats inside a hollowed-out National Trust volcano, eating babies.

That was the theory anyway, but these days you can't really make that argument. FIFA's getting better, not worse; there's good new IP, like Skate, Spore, Mirror's Edge and Rock Band on EA's release schedule; there are fewer money-grubbing Sims releases; and Battlefield Heroes, despite its ad-driven business model, doesn't actually have in-game ads.

That bit surprised everyone. "We don't have any plans to put billboards or posters advertising products in the game itself," says executive producer Ben Cousins. Instead you'll see them on loading screens and on the website, which acts as a launcher for the game. "If you click on the banner it will open behind the game rather than interrupting your gameplay," he says, referring to the load-screen banner. "We want to get as many advertising hits as possible, but at the same time we don't want to disrupt your experience at all."
'Battlefield Heroes' Screenshot 1

Zey have vays of making you enjoy yourself.

The website's actually the first thing we're shown, following a comedy trailer ("You don't visit a store, you don't enter your credit card details, and you don't download it from BitTorrent"), and seems like a good place to start. Like Facebook or a web-forum, you enter a few details and sign up. Very few, actually - just your name, email address, date of birth and region, according to Cousins. Even we ask you for more. The website then tracks "stats and things" via login, and has leaderboards.

Once you're signed up, you build your character. "This is about creating your own unique war hero, so we need you to pick your faction from the start," says Cousins, as the man directing the demo wavers between Royal Army (they look like the Allies) and National Army (zey look like ze Nazis). You can also personalise your character - skin colour, face shape, facial hair, with clothing done later (with unlocks, and with micropayments to support other extras). There are three character classes - Commando, Soldier, and Gunner - which are fast-moving, medium and heavy, in FPS terms.
'Battlefield Heroes' Screenshot 2

You'll pay for bits like goggles on helmets, but moustaches are free.

Except this isn't actually an FPS - Battlefield Heroes is played from third-person, which is a departure Cousins acknowledges and defends. "You invest all of your time and energy in this guy, and it's really important to have this guy on-screen all the time," he says. "You can see him using special abilities, you can see him getting killed, and you can develop a connection with him." He also says that casual gamers have better spatial awareness in third-person, able to take advantage of cover and handle vehicles intuitively. For controls though, it's WASD and mouse, with crouch and jump buttons. World of Warcraft got away with it.

WOW was also cartoony, so let's pretend that's a good segue and talk about those graphics. Cousins doesn't say much about the fact it looks like Team Fortress 2, but he has previously stated that DICE decided to "ignore the possibility of these comparisons and go with the style we believed in". If anything, Heroes' simplicity means that it's more cartoon-like than TF2. It also means that it will run on a 1GHz processor with 512MB and integrated graphics. Like the third-person perspective, this is so Heroes can be played by as broad an audience as possible.

There's a lot of other stuff in there that will appeal to the FaceSpace generation: respawns occur every five seconds; there's no mini-map or friendly fire to worry about; holding "Q" brings up a 3x3 grid of emote shortcuts, so you can give someone a thumbs-up; weapons and abilities are lined up at the bottom of the screen so they sit above the number keys on your keyboard, making it obvious you need to hit "8" to heal; behind-the-scenes match-making offers "a fairly extensive way of matching up your skills and experience" with other players'; you can record and distribute videos of your bouts; and the basic game mode is simpler than ever.

"Capturing flags is obviously a key thing for the Battlefield franchise," says Cousins, before explaining why the team reduced its significance. "Our game mode is basically a team deathmatch," he says. "Each team has 50 lives, and the first time to have their lives reduced to zero loses. Every time you kill an enemy you reduce their lives by one." Flags do have an important role though. "If you capture the flags, you add a modifier to that amount of lives taken for each kill. So if you've captured all the flags on the map you may be taking two lives off for every kill."

Excellent - we'll capture some flags then. This still involves standing next to them. As this is demoed, the enemy closes in, and we're able to observe some encounters. The heaviest character, the Gunner, is slow-moving with big armour, and has a rapid-fire light machinegun and bazooka, so he's tough at close range. The Soldier is an all-rounder with a sub-machinegun. The Commando, meanwhile, is Heroes' spy and sniper; he can cloak himself - semi-transparent in close quarters, effectively invisible at long range - and perform knife kills and long-range snipes. DICE has counter-balanced the threat of the Commando, though, by forcing him to land two blows to kill, even with the sniper rifle.
'Battlefield Heroes' Screenshot 3

Planes are supposed to be easier to control than in past Battlefields.

Classes, which can't be changed once you're in-game, also have special abilities. The Soldier, for example, can get himself incendiary bullets, see hidden enemies ("a legitimised wallhack"), and buff his health. "Most special abilities have an area effect as well, so you can be buffing the people you play with," says Cousins. As you level up (an indicator in the top-left tracks your level and shows your progress in accumulating experience points), you get more of these.

At this stage fifteen minutes into the demo, we're wondering when we're going to see the vehicles. It's now. First there's a tank. "Vehicles are really important to the Battlefield franchise, but in Battlefield Heroes we've done the same thing to the vehicles that we've done to the characters," says Cousins. The tank's "influenced by the Sherman tank, but we've squashed it, it accelerates faster, it's easier to drive, it's more fun to drive." The shells that it fires also arc over time, a bit like they did in Battlefield 1942. "We've deliberately made the tank slightly less effective against infantry now though, so you don't get a tank spawning and completely owning the map," adds Cousins.
'Battlefield Heroes' Screenshot 4

Look closely and you'll spot one of the wing-sitters.

But screw the tank, because we're hanging out at the aeroplane spawn point. This one's propeller-driven, and fires cannons rather than dropping bombs. Best of all, you can use it to transport your friends around as they sit on the wings. "You can dogfight with these two guys," says Cousins, proudly. You can also hop onto the wing yourself, which cuts out the throttle and allows you to glide to the ground, jump off and start fighting.

It's all looking very polished. The game's due out this summer and will feature two maps, according to Cousins (the first, Seaside Skirmish, is bright and Mediterranean - the one from the screenshots), with more to be added. A 17-man team will support the game once it's live, updating the game and website regularly. It may be free to play, but EA and DICE have big plans for it, and despite the obvious push to try and make it appeal to casual gamers, we'd be surprised if it doesn't attract a lot of you as well. "In playing the game, we've kind of realised that is actually probably the deepest Battlefield game that's ever been produced, that we've ever created, just by the addition of these special abilities which have the buff effects," Cousins says, boldly, at one point. It's hard to tell if he's right, at this point, but one thing Heroes definitely can claim to be is not evil.



http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=93876

[[SCUM] OUTLAW]

Interview with DICE.
http://www.eurogamer.net/tv_video.php?p ... size=large
[gt]8074[/gt]

[[SCUM] McPhil]

broken link - doesn't work

[[SCUM] OUTLAW]

EA has revealed that Battlefield Heroes will begin beta testing on 6th May.

Sign-ups will be handled over on the official site once it's ready, and the full game is set to launch in the third-quarter of this year.

Battlefield Heroes is a free-to-play cartoon spin-off in the online shooter series. Ads fund the operation but will not appear in-game, only on the game website.

It has also been designed with the majority of desktop machines in mind, too, so your whole office should be able to enjoy it as either the Royals or the Nationals.


http://www.eurogamer.net/tv_video.php?playlist_id=8550




More Pics
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=93739


THATS NICE !!!!!!!!!!

[[SCUM] DeathWish]

lol I hope its as funny as it looks, reminds me of BF1918

[[SCUM] McPhil]

yeah looks like a big mix of 1918 and Team Fortress 2 ??

We going to try it on our server or will it have the usually EABS with it?

[[SCUM] McPhil]

BF Heroes Theme Music



Sort of a mix of classic BF anthem and Hogan's Heroes... Am I old that I know that??? :-(

[[SCUM]-Herbs]

So the Scum Battlefield Heroes server will be up soon then?

[[SCUM] McPhil]

YES!!! Get out yer Cartoon No.4!!

[[SCUM] OUTLAW]

You know that it's going to be free. You know that it's a stripped-down, knockabout deathmatch shooter built on Battlefield's sturdy chassis. You know that it looks terrific, like an animated propaganda poster for a war in a fancy-dress shop. You know that it's not evil. But did you know that Battlefield Heroes is secretly an MMO and almost an RPG?

No, really. Bear with us.

The first clue is the action bar at the bottom of the screen. As well as switching and deploying weapons, these buttons provide access to very RPG-like skills and buffs that do things like increase run speed, defence, or accuracy for a short period of time. They promote prolonged shoot-outs that blend twitch-gaming skill with an accelerated tactical see-saw. Not entirely dissimilar to the feel of player-versus-player combat in World of Warcraft, in fact.

But if that sounds off-putting, it shouldn't. Developer DICE made the decision for quite the opposite reason; to make the whole deathmatch experience less intimidating.

"We wanted to have it so you didn't die so much," says lead designer James Salt. "We looked at the Battlefield 2 experience where you spawn in and, as a new player, you're dead in a couple of seconds. And then there's fifteen seconds of waiting before you're in again. We wanted to clear this up. So we've made it so it's quite hard to shoot each other and kill each other."

Hence the skills, a delicate balance of cool-downs and effect cancellations that can be deployed against each other, taking the emphasis off raw headshot skill. "It adds like a different level of rock paper scissors," says Salt. "You've played this card, you've got this shield up, and I know you've got 30 seconds before you can use that again. I guess it's like how you have those combat situations in an MMO."

In a happy half-hour spent playing the game, we confirm what he says. And it's not merely about deploying skills. It simply takes a lot of bullets to make someone fall over. Make no mistake, this is much more than just a cut-and-shut respray of Battlefield - the game has been completely rethought and rebalanced for a new audience and a new playing style. DICE might be making light of war in Battlefield Heroes, but underneath the cartoon insouciance (the war between National and Royal Armies is a dispute over a sporting result), it's deadly serious.

Case in point: DICE stopped with the introduction of buff and debuff. Those abilities can be upgraded and modified using tokens earned by completing missions (achievements, in other words). "But there are less tokens than there are ways to spend them, so you have to decide, am I going to go wide, or am I going to go deep, which I think is going to be kind of interesting," says Salt. It's a talent tree by another name, permitting you to customise more than just your character's costume and load-out.

So far, so RPG. EA and DICE have clearly woken up to the fact that character persistence, advancement and customisation is the key to hooking players on online games - especially if you want to convince them into spending money on trinkets for those characters. They aren't alone - Infinity Ward took similar steps with Call of Duty 4, leading Rob to argue that it verged on MMOdom itself. Battlefield Heroes goes a few steps further down the road marked massive, but here's what makes it really distinctive; it doesn't do so in the games, restricted to 16 players at present. It does so on its website.


The Battlefield Heroes website doesn't just launch the game, and host the advertisements and item micropayments that will turn a profit from it. It's home to the character creation and customisation interface, and a profile page where you can view and manage your mission and friends lists. There's even an events feed that lets you know what's happening in the game universe, and the chance to browse other players' profiles and examine how they've specced their characters. And there's the metagame.

"It's kind of like cheap Risk," says Salt. You pick one of sixteen countries to fight over, and every match you play puts points in the pot to claim territory for your army. The map fills up with red and blue, and whichever side has more territory at the end of the week receives more "valor points" (in-game money). That's it - for now. "We've got a lot of other plans for it, but before we get really cute with it and add on loads more complexity, we just want to put it out there and see what people do."

The metagame ties the community together in one single, massively multiplayer war effort. It also sneakily gives you a way to play the game when you're not supposed to be playing the game. "We're always talking about this idea of people playing games that they can check in on at lunchtime, or the afternoon when you're supposed to be working," says Salt, noting that he was inspired by a Sony Online Entertainment massively multiplayer shooter. "Planetside did this really well. It kept you connected to the game world. That was what interested me from a design point of view."

It's a pretty ambitious web development, all told, something DICE had never had any experience of. "We were completely flying blind," admits Salt. "A lot of learning happened in the last eight months or so while we've been building it. But I think there's a lot to be gained by having more of your game experience on the website as well. I think you get a game you can come along and touch."

Let's get on with the touching, then. We played several rounds of Battlefield Heroes on the wide-open Seaside Skirmish map, a large rolling plain above white cliffs, with a couple of villages and a lighthouse to capture and defend. Designed for vehicle combat, the map features jeeps, tanks and fighter planes, and a variation of the Battlefield's famous Conquest mode - team deathmatch with a base-capture twist.

It's not very particularly fast-paced - at least, not with just four players per side - but as Salt says, that's intentional; with players staying alive longer, they tend to cluster more and play more recklessly, and concentrated slapstick scrums for the command points tend to develop. Battlefield Heroes doesn't just look like a cartoon, it plays like one. The vehicles handling is also somewhat exaggerated; our attempts to fly the extremely inertia-heavy and hilariously slow Spitfire were comically inept, but very entertaining, especially with other players sat on the wings, gunning away.

It's hard to explain how much difference the exuberant avatars make to the whole experience. For all the similarity in art style, this isn't Team Fortress 2's fundamentally sensible communication of class design through character appearance. This is fundamentally silly self-expression, a chance to splash your personality over the screen; it makes individuals instantly recognisable without a nametag, and promotes intense revenge rivalries between players. The shift to third-person makes perfect sense in this context, and indeed the slightly less accurate aiming fits with the slapdash fun.

It's also fantastically camp. As you customise them, the National Army develop from German World War II soldiers into Victorian voodoo pirates, and the Royals... well, Salt puts it best. "They're a little bit, ummm... to be honest, right now they're a little bit YMCA. Big, fat and round, lots of sailor outfits and stuff going on. You can also do - I don't know if you remember the Commando comics - guys in khaki shirts with the fronts undone and kind of ruffled hair. They definitely come out more camp, for some reason."

There aren't any female avatars yet. They're under consideration to be put in the game after release. So are more game modes, more vehicles, more maps (Seaside Skirmish is one of just two, the other being a tighter map for infantry only), more social features for the website, a more developed metagame. Any and all of these will be added depending on one thing: what the players want most.

Since it's a free game, DICE isn't under any pressure to give Battlefield Heroes a bulging feature list at launch, and can build it slowly, growing the game organically according to what players respond to. "Yeah, from a developer point of view, if you're making a game you're making a big gamble about what people want, you make enough stuff, you stick it on a disc and hope people like it," says Salt. "With this we make quite a small amount and put it out, and say where do you want to go now? We'll see how that grows, maybe we'll have more stuff on the website, like really extensive clan support, or maybe more game modes."

It's a world away from releasing a couple of map packs down the line; Battlefield Heroes will be a true, living online game. It's not just the business model that makes it different; expanded according player feedback, split almost half-and-half between the game itself and the website that plugs into it, Battlefield Heroes is certainly one of the most forward-thinking games to come out of a major publisher this year. Since it's yours for nothing more than the time to make a 250MB download, since it's fun, and since it's backed by the corporate might of EA, it's an easy call to make: this one will run and run.

Battlefield Heroes is due out this summer on PC.


http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=141291

[CurriedCat]

Makes me want to get my copy of BF1942 out again.


Oh those days.... What did happen to F&T?

[[SCUM] McPhil]

Selling stools...

[[SCUM] McPhil]

Still no update on this. I'm wondering if it's another theory?!