Thursday, April 23, 2009

Battlefield 1943: Wake Island Trailer

So apparently this game is coming to Xbox Live Arcade, which was news to me, as I thought it was PC only. Well, thats good news and bad news. The good news is, Ill be able to play the game with all my XBL friends, if any of them decide to pony up the $15 this will go for when its released. Knowing none of my friends are big Battlefield fans, this is kind of a mixed blessing. The downside to buying the game on XBLA rather than PC, is A) there will not be deciated servers and B) there wont be more than 12 people per team, which feels more like "BF lite."

Battlefield 1943 is built on the framework of DICE's 2002 epic masterpiece, Battlefield 1942. This was the first massively multiplayer military game that really captured all the elements of WWII combat and blended them all together in a seamless online package. You had 64 person dedicated servers, tanks, jeeps, attack planes, bombers, AA guns, parachutes, submarines, destroyers, battleships, planes launching off aircraft carriers - everything. It was, and still is to this day, amazing. It blew us away and we were never, ever the same.

Can Battlefield 1943 have this paradigm shifting effect on the gaming landscape? It seems highly unlikely. The scope of the game seems to have been toned down, the maps are smaller and there wont be as many people running around, not as many mid air collisions which fall on top of the enemy jeep which was about to run you over (yes that actually happened to me in 1942). OK, so we know it wont be as epic. But will it be fun? I think its highly likely, barring some design catastrophe, it will be great fun, and I will almost certainly be buying it. See you on Wake Island this summer.

No comments: