Rumor: Battlefield 1943: Pacific Appearing At NY Comic Con

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http://kotaku.com/5146703/rumor-battlef ... -comic-con

Looks like EA may be bringing the Battlefield series back to World War II, as listings — and a supposed announcement — for Battlefield 1943: Pacific indicate a New York Comic Con showing.

Talk of another Battlefield title due in 2009 has been swirling on the on the official EA forums, with users rooting out details of the unannounced game on a pair of sites, one being the official New York Comic Con schedule.

According to Electronic Arts' schedule at the official NYCC web site, Battlefield 1943: Pacific post cards will be handed out at the show. Yes, post cards. That listing has recently been removed, but is available via Google Cache here. Whether it was removed because someone at EA or DICE had a fit over its stealth reveal or whether the publisher has decided to push the game's official announcement back, we frankly don't know.

Alongside that, French gaming site JeuxActu writes that the game has already officially been announced, listing the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 as release platforms. As far as we can tell, EA has yet to announce the game, though it did confirm the existence of Battlefield Bad Company 2 for a 2010 release and DICE was rumored to have one of its announcements spoiled this week.

ERRR.....WTF.....WHY !

[[SCUM] McPhil]

Didn't they do this with BF2 1942 mod patch??? Can you keep us updated on this? I suppose it depends on the game engine. New or the same wank one?

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Think i just saw wake island...

Its using the frostbite engine which i think was the same one used in Bad Company ,so destructible environments...could be good ??

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some pics

lower res vid


Press release

As predicted, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 1943 have both just been announced by DICE.

Battlefield 1943 is out for PC, PS3 and 360 this “summer”. Bad Company 2 will follow this “winter” for the same formats.

A multiplayer-only effort, 1943 features 24-player action over three locations; Wake Island, Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. It will be seen at Comic Con this weekend, as rumoured.

Bad Company 2, as with the original, will feature a single-player component.

“Bad Company 2 takes everything that players liked in the original and ups the ante – more vehicles, more destruction and more team play,” said DICE’s Karl Magnus Troedsson.

“Battlefield 1943 is a new take on a blast from the past classic coming to life with brand new technology that we’re eager to get into players hands.”

Press release after the break.

DICE Announces Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Thursday February 5, 9:00 am ET
Before Rejoining the B Company, Players Go Back to WWII in Battlefield 1943

STOCKHOLM–(BUSINESS WIRE)–DICE, an Electronic Arts Inc. studio (NASDAQ:ERTS - News), today announced Battlefield: Bad Company 2™, the sequel to last year’s blockbuster title. In this installment, the Bad Company crew again find themselves in the heart of the action, where they must use every weapon and vehicle at their disposal to survive. The action unfolds with unprecedented intensity, introducing a level of fervor to vehicular warfare never before experienced in a modern warfare action game. To get ready for the assault this winter, players can prepare for action in Battlefield 1943™, an all-new multiplayer game available this summer via PlayStation®Store, Xbox LIVE™ Marketplace and on the PC.

Source: Electronic Arts Inc.

· Battlefield: Bad Company 2 screen shot (Photo: Business Wire). View Multimedia Gallery

In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the ‘B’ company fight their way through snowy mountaintops, dense jungles and dusty villages. With a heavy arsenal of deadly weapons and a slew of vehicles to aid them, the crew set off on their mission and they are ready to blow up, shoot down, blast through, wipe out and utterly destroy anything that gets in their way. Total destruction is the name of the game, delivered as only the DICE next generation Frostbite™ engine can. Either online or offline, enemies will soon learn there is nowhere to hide. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 will be available for the Xbox 360® videogame and entertainment system, the PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system and the PC.

Using the same Frostbite™ engine, Battlefield 1943 takes players back to WWII. The game offers endless hours of 24 player multiplayer action over three classic and tropic locations; Wake Island, Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. Delivering the award-winning through-the-gun and vehicle warfare online experience DICE is best recognized for, Battlefield 1943 will have players battling in ruthless aerial dog fights and intense trench combat. Players can see the game in action at New York Comic Con (Booth #1441) from February 6th-8th.

“Bad Company 2 takes everything that players liked in the original and ups the ante – more vehicles, more destruction and more team play,” said Karl Magnus Troedsson, Executive Producer Battlefield Franchise, DICE. “Battlefield 1943 is a new take on a blast from the past classic coming to life with brand new technology that we’re eager to get into players hands.”

To sign-up for the Battlefield Heroes™ beta, players can visit http://www.battlefield-heroes.com. For more information on DICE, please visit http://www.dice.se or http://www.ea.com. For more information on the Battlefield franchise please visit: http://www.battlefield.com.

[[SCUM] Speedy]

looks cool. Whether they cock it up like the last ones... Did you know they have internet in the airport now?

[CurriedCat]

I think I just did a little sex wee.

[[SCUM] McPhil]

So is it true they are only putting this out with 3 maps and all the maps are from the original BF 1942 ???? Didn't take 'em long to cock it up eah?

E.A. - Hardly working since 1998.

[[SCUM] OUTLAW]

yes it is true,i think they are going the console route with DLC and having to pay for map packs...they may even not release the dedicated server and keep it a closed system i.e BF Heroes.

[[SCUM] McPhil]

correct me if I'm wrong but the popularity of the console is solely based on hardly if any compatibility issues??? Not the wank gaming format? or am I wrong? EA seems to be looking at this the wrong way or is it just me?

[[SCUM] OUTLAW]

correct me if I'm wrong but the popularity of the console is solely based on hardly if any compatibility issues??? Not the wank gaming format? or am I wrong? EA seems to be looking at this the wrong way or is it just me?

I keep telling you this....its because there are less and less exclusive pc games which in EA's eye's mean the market is shrinking ,so if the pc (Games)market is shrinking the console market must be growing.

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The character screen looks very BF:Heroes....i am startingto think that they wont be releasing the dedicated server for this game...


[gt]45234[/gt]

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Preview.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/battl ... iew?page=1

"The grass is a brilliant green, the sky a perfect blue, and down towards the sandy beaches, with their artfully ragged lines of gently swaying palms, I can just make out a hint of bleached white rock. Looking around, this could be the Greenhill Zone, were it not for a few important distinctions, the first of which is the thick plume of black smoke rising ominously from the distant jungle. And the second? The second is the fact that I'm currently under fairly heavy gunfire. Who knows? Maybe Shadow's knocking about nearby.

And so I return to Wake Island, a balmy South Pacific hell-hole where visitors can spend the day relaxing inside scarred concrete bunkers, dine at dusk on the scrubbed decks of an ever-circling battleship, and then, when night falls, wander out for a gentle stroll along the golden sands, taking in the view and shrugging off the odd headshot. As long as there have been Battlefield games, there's been this particular battlefield - it debuted with the demo for 1942, and has been cropping up ever since, even making a surprise appearance in the hit-and-miss 2142 instalment. It's familiar territory, but not unpleasantly so, and spawning there in the forthcoming Battlefield 1943 feels like coming home. The years have apparently been kind, too: DICE's latest sees Wake Island tweaked, rebalanced, and raring to soak up even more of your blood.

A spiritual reworking of the first Battlefield, 1943 is a title that's been heavily shaped by its new platforms: alongside the PC version, the game will be appearing on XBLA and PSN this summer. Launching an exclusively multiplayer title on these services is a risk few developers have chosen to take so far, but if any franchise could pull it off, it's probably this one, particularly since its attempts at single-player campaigns have almost always underwhelmed.

The most obvious change with the new game is just how much weight it has shed in the transition to digital distribution. When you load up 1943 this summer, you'll find yourself with just three maps, three classes, and one game mode - multiplayer Conquest, the classic Battlefield standard-bearer in which teams compete for capture points in order to cripple their enemy's ability to respawn.


Playing as the Japanese, hitting the Wake Island shore, and then fighting up the beach and into a nearby airfield, it quickly becomes clear that, if 1943 is less than a full port, it's also often more. The game has been rebuilt from the ground up, using Bad Company's Frostbite engine, and that means that, as well as looking significantly prettier than it used to, its buildings and trees are now destructible. Within seconds I'm racing through the underbrush, putting huge holes in corrugated iron huts and bringing slatted wooden walls down with a reassuring splintering sound, before DICE's own QA department logs in to spoil such innocent fun with their insane headshot skills.

In fact, 1943's environments actually go one better than Bad Company's, with the developer using the opportunity to respond to criticism by allowing you to now take out the frame of a building as well as the walls and ceilings. This time, if you see a shack and you have the right tools with you, you can utterly level it - a move which adds a new tactical concern to classic Battlefield encounters, while also leading DICE to subtly rebalance 1942's maps, giving Wake Island a fair share of rocky, non-destructible outcrops to serve as cover options once the buildings are all gone.
The 360 controller is more than up to the task at hand, allowing for smooth strafing and pin-point targeting, and, elsewhere, while the traditional range of classes has been pared down, the trio that remains seem tailored to the game's scenarios. Alongside the close-combat Infantryman, you can also choose from a mid-range Rifleman, and the sniper-like Scout class. All three come with a load-out of familiar weapons, ranging from the M1, to the Thompson SMG, and the guns are typically vicious, firing with a weighty kick, before chewing through wood, plaster, and bone.

But it's further inland that I get a reminder of what truly makes the series so special: in this case, it takes the form of an opportunity to be comically mown down by an American tank. Battlefield's vehicles are entirely present and correct in 1943, with jeeps, transport boats and airplanes all adding to your tactical options. Taking to the skies, lining up a gun turret, or racing over the ocean in a six-seater, are all flawlessly handled, and the game hops between different scales of combat with the same easy skill it's always possessed, crouching behind a rock one minute, and then, a mere respawn later, soaring out of the horizon to strafe the beach from above. This time, there's also a new air-raid option, accessed via capturing an airfield, which allows you to briefly hop out of the action and pilot a formation of bombers on a fly-past, gently steering them towards their target before loosing the cargo. Played at just the right time, it's a trump card, capable of confidently turning the tide of a battle, so there's a significant cool-off period after each attack to balance it out.

The risk for DICE is that, in paring Battlefield 1943 down so tightly, an audience might look at the numbers alone and feel slightly cheated. And yet even a half hour of play is enough to suggest that this is a strategy borne of focus rather than cheapness. It remains to be seen whether three maps and one mode are enough to keep an audience satisfied over any real length of time, but it suggests that DICE at least is entirely confident in its abilities to create explosive, replayable sandboxes from the barest of bones.

And there's a real sense of equality to 1943, too: although there will be a levelling system of some sort, it will be largely used for bragging rights, since every weapon and vehicle is available from the start, with no ponderous chain of unlocks, and we've already been told that future DLC, if there is any, will take the form of new maps rather than ruin the careful balance by allowing you to purchase better guns. As for the maps available on day one, Wake Island, along with Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, may ground the game firmly in one combat theatre, but DICE is promising strong visual distinctions between all three.

So 1943 may end up being too slight, but it's already got that classic Battlefield feeling nailed. This is a sport as much as a game, and long term success may eventually lie with the players rather than the choice of courts. Whatever you decide, the fact remains that, on XBLA or PSN, there's simply nothing else quite like Battlefield."

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HANDS ON.


http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/battl ... -on?page=1

Never mind Bad Company - welcome to Dimwit Company. Nobody's talking to one another - hardly surprising, since the guys to either side of me are Italian, French and Spanish - and once the landing craft hit the beach, we've all regressed by about seven years. Italy's landed a biplane upside down on an anti-aircraft gun, and I'm stuck fast in a trench. In a tank.

Battlefield 1943 may be simplified - three maps, three classes, one objective - but the key word is accessibility, not casual. There's a tutorial this time - the first in the series, rather unbelievably - that introduces you to the concepts offline and then lets you practice in planes and tanks unmolested by hostiles. There are facilities for private matches, clans and squads, and there are levelling and reward systems (Achievements/Trophies and a broader range of honours beyond that, although no unlocks), but for the majority of people approaching the game from scratch, it's a one-click process to start playing, and it's not difficult to understand what's going on. You pick an infantryman, rifleman or scout class and then choose where to spawn. But it's still Battlefield, and it still punishes you for pratting around.

There are five control points on each map, like the one we're seeing today - Iwo Jima, after last month's reintroduction to Wake Island - and the European press gathered at DICE's wind-battered Stockholm headquarters have more difficulty negotiating the keycard door to the balcony than they do contesting the territory on the second map's thin, turbulent sliver of Ogasawara. Fighting seesaws between an airstrip at one end through trenches and over grassy hills past a lighthouse to higher ground at the other, and while all the vehicles are present and correct, it's an infantry war; automatic weapons, bazookas, sniper rifles, pistols and - gloriously - katanas doing the best of the killing.
[imglink]http://images.eurogamer.net/assets/articles//a/4/9/2/8/0/7/ss_preview_BF1943_Screens_010.jpg.jpg[/imglink]

"We have designed the levels now with 24 in mind, but that's not hard-coded. You can always squeeze in more players," Liu says when we ask about the PC version.

Yet there really is a lot to it, just as there should be, and it's been tweaked smartly. Snipers blink - a well-judged stab of disorientation - into their telescopic sights and trace anyone daft enough to wander around out of cover; bazookas eviscerate the arrogant tanks; and the new bomber wings are repelled by anti-aircraft fire (another clever bit of balancing - rather than an unavoidable artillery strike, when a bombing run is called in from a special shack the team in the crosshairs now has a slim chance of repelling the onslaught).

DICE has played around with these maps, despite their heritage, and the results appeal to old and new. Senior producer Patrick Liu tells me that the small team deliberately reorganised them symmetrically. "Wake Island used to be one team defending the island and the other team attacking it. Now we've made it so there are two carriers and both teams are attacking the island, just to make things fair. Otherwise, for a total newb, it's extremely hard to get into asymmetric gameplay."

There's also a squad command system, similar to Battlefield: Bad Company. Commands are context-sensitive, so if you're staring at an enemy flag and issue an instruction, your comrades are told to attack; if you're staring at your own flag, they're told to defend. You can also spawn next to anyone else in the squad, rather than just the squad leader, so if he's a sniper hiding out in the distance, you can pick someone closer to the action and materialise there.

One big tweak came only very recently, in response to feedback on the Wake Island trailer. Apparently you all thought it looked too much like Battlefield Heroes, DICE's toonified third-person PC spin-off. Iwo Jima is considerably darker. Presumably if you pipe up again, Guadalcanal - the third of the maps, which no one has seen in its 1943 form yet - will be set at night under clouds inside Tim Burton's head, wearing a blindfold made of dried blood and mucus. "Guadalcanal is also a good blend of vehicles and infantry, but it's such a huge map and also has a lot of hills. There's a lot of sniping in that level," Liu says of it.

Another distinctive facet is the technology itself. 1943 may be a download-only multiplayer shooter built for an impulse purchase, but as we noted last time it's also built on Bad Company's proprietary Frostbite engine, which means fully destructible environments - more so even than last year's physics-heavy console shooter. Propane blows holes in buildings, towers fall, and fences buckle under tank-tread - Christian was much more poetic. Despite this, and the 24 players running around the Xbox 360 version we're playing on devkits, the frame-rate ping-pongs between 30 and 60fps.

It's enormous fun, but it still has me worried. There are sceptics among the Battlefield hardcore, but they should be converted when the demo versions hit around the time of the game's summer release on PC, Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. The bigger problem is going to be finding a look-in audience, because whatever price DICE ends up going with - and after discussing it with Liu, and the series' executive producer Karl-Magnus Troedsson, I'd be surprised if it wasn't 1200 Microsoft Points, although they won't commit just yet - people are going to say it's 'only got three maps', even though they represent hours of potential gameplay.
[imglink]http://images.eurogamer.net/assets/articles//a/4/9/2/8/0/7/ss_preview_BF1943_Screens_006.jpg.jpg[/imglink]

Killing someone with a katana is a mark of honour - so much so that it's recognised by a specific mark of honour.

"We are considering how we can communicate that," Liu says. "For fans that are familiar with Battlefield, they know how deep it is and how many hours you can get out of just one level. For new players, it is difficult to communicate how much playtime you get out of these few levels. We know from experience that the Wake Island demo for 1942 was played a lot. Some people never stopped playing it. So I don't have any answer to how we can solve that, but yes, it is an issue."

For Liu though, the most important thing about Battlefield 1943 - a project that span off from his own experiments with Frostbite after Bad Company was locked down at the start of 2008 - is that it captures "the spirit of Battlefield 1942". When I speak to him after his presentation, he tries to sum it up.

"I don't want to downplay the seriousness of war, but at the same time it's a lot of fun - just pure fun of being able to do basically everything in the game. One classic is to arm your jeep with C4 or dynamite and drive into the enemy base and just blow up everything. And it's not a mechanic that we built in just for that thing - it's just a result of the sandbox experience, and that together with more down-to-earth vehicles and weapons, because they're older, that makes the experience of Battlefield."

Even though it's undoubtedly more accessible, it's hard to argue that Battlefield 1943 is anything but an extension of that, and the things it's doing differently sit very comfortably alongside the equally classic, headlong rush for the nearest helicopter. It's just a shame none of us appears to know what to do with one.

Battlefield 1943 is due out for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC this summer.

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DICE advances World War II by a year in June, announcing the release date and pricing details for their downloadable online multiplayer shooter Battlefield 1943.

A small slice of World War II is coming to the PlayStation network and Xbox Live Arcade on June 15th in DICE's Frostbyte-driven update to Battlefield 1942. It's the US Marines against the Imperial Japanese Navy as gamers participate in 24-player battles across Wake Island, Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. Utilizing the Frostbyte Engine for the game means that all of the wonderful destruction from Battlefield: Bad Company is taking a trip back in time, meaning if you can't kill an opponent who is hiding you can more than likely kill his hiding place.

All of this for a mere $15, or 1200 Microsoft points. Sounds like a bargain to me. Look for the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network versions in June, with the PC version coming in September for some odd reason.



Still now word on dedicated server hosting but EA have changed things is saying BF:Heroes will have dedicated servers,so as soon as i know ,you will

[[SCUM]-Tommee Gunn]

might even get me off EvE for a blast