BF1 - The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. My 1 month of game play

For a lot of us, Battlefield 1 has been out for a month now. There is certainly a lot that can be said about the newest installment into the battlefield genre. While not all of it has been good, it has not been all bad either. Yet there is still some ugly in the game. DICE threw every off when they announced that the game would be set in World War 1. Even EA was caught off guard and the even rejected the idea when it was first proposed to the giant video game producer.

There was so many way to right this. Give a list of the good then a list of the bad or just cover it section by section. So if I get off on a tangent then pay it no never mind and just keep reading. It will all come full circle. So here goes

A brief history

Dice first created BF1942 in 2002. It was a WW2 shooter made solely for the PC. The gaming community fell in love with it. It was really the first game out the that you could play big maps with vehicles and infantry. Usually it was one or the other and certainly not 64 players. Battlefield 1942 received awards for Online Gameplay, Innovation in PC Gaming, PC Game of the Year, and Game of the Year. Even back then there were still players not happy. Some felt vehicles and infantry have no place together in a game. One comapany decided to listen and started the COD series in 2003. Game with no vehicles or very limited usage of them.

Following up with that huge success was Battlefield Viet Nam in 2004. This was actually one of the expansions packs for BF1942.  This as a stand alone game did not do as well due to the popularity of 1942 and players just not wanting to give it up. It was also made clear that there would be a new title in 2005.

That 2005 would be Battleield 2 Modern Combat. Have just finish a real war up in the middle east, this game to off for a lot of generation Xrs. Modern weapons, Modern Vehicles and again huge maps. Players loved this game and even today, this is still considered the bench mark to beat in the FPS multiplayer. Another high standard was the expasion market. Players could not wait to spend another $25 for the expansions and there were 4 of them. DICE made a lot of friends with this game. They listened to players and added or changed features based on what the gaming community wanted. In fact even the consoles players screamed and eventuallly even they for the first time game to play battlefield.

Well next was Battlefield 2142. The future version of war. While it was popular, it was hit with lots of problems. PC's were starting to change to dual core and 64 bit was being introduced. Servers had a habit a crashing constanly. Titan Mode cause lots of lag. This game just came out to soon for most players hardware that was on the market and the server companies too. Still if you played it, you got to drive a mech and fight over the titans which is still one of my favorites modes ever.

Changes in tides

With the success they had with the PC market DICE decided to take on the consoles and get a piece of that action. So they stepped away from the PC market for a bit to produce Battlefield Bad Company. This was a console exclusive and really help to usher in the console players who up to this point were an after thought to DICE and the battlefield series. This game was a huge success for DICE and they then reallize console is the wave of the future and consoles would be considered for every game they make there after.

With that success now dice had to bring a game out for the masses. A game for both console and PC players. So they went back to the drawing board and created a whole new game engine called frostbite. Then in 2010 DICE released Battlefield Bad Company 2. While this game was a huge success it lacked the traditional battlefield size and scale. This was a 32 player game and not 64 player. It was a much faster paced game and was a relief for most battlefield PC players to have another battlefield title out.

Almost immediately with the release of BFBC2, DICE started production of Battlefield 3. This was released in 2010. Battlefield was back for the PC market. Well sort of. It's actually a console game ported to the PC. 64 players and big maps, well bigger then BFBC2 maps. This is where dice really introduced close quarters combat and the usage of multi levels. The destructible environments was more pronounced. Not just trees falling over like in the previous game. Players could not get enough of it and this game helped to bring back some of the original gamers who were still playing BF2 or BF2142.

Dice kept the momentum going with Battlefield 4. No more Wake island remastered. The did bring us Dragon Valley from BF2 though. The game was a lot of fun. The improvements in the DICE engine and listening to the community really helped. We even got to have a couple night maps which were frustratingly fun to play. Maps were bigger. Frames were better. Players overall were happy unless you were a COD fan. Players would actually preorder the premium addition before the game came out because they knew it would be great. 33 large conquest 64 players maps were available. Did I mention the maps were getting bigger too?

Well 2015 came and could not get finished fast enough for DICE. Not only did DICE produce server none battlefield games that failed in the market place but the had one in the battlefield name sake as well. I have to put it that was because this game could have been called so many other names. Most just call it Hardline. Dice tried to make changes that made out to be as improvements. Those changes, especially in the hardcore mode doomed it for failure. DICe did actually fix the game back to battlefield gamer standards but it took several months and by that time other games came out. The lack of a "battlefield" and all cops and robbers did not help either. 

Now to today. 2016. DICE decided to really change things up. I don't mean a little I mean a lot. No I mean change everything. A new frostbite version and a game set in a time frame that almost no other company has touched. World War 1. One of the ugliest wars of all time. A stalemate for most of it in terms a land taken. Financially this war lead to the great depression for the world. 

Now here is where we get to the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of battlefield 1.

Where to start where to start. I will start with logging in. Battlelog is gone. WHY???? I loved how I did not need to be in the game to make changes. They did give us a clunky app for our phones but if DICE treats it like they did the apps in BF4, we wont have them long before DICE throws in their virtual towel. The old way of of right now still works better but this just seems like a step backwards in gaming if you ask me. Going back to the in game browser doesn't hurt. It is just in this day and age of running multiple monitors what is the point in having it in game when you can not see or use it unless you stop gaming. Who wants that right?

Fiends list if much better. With battlelog I was only ever able to keep 100 friends. In my world of 300 plus friends this was frustrating as hell. Now we have to use the origin friends list which I have yet to max it out. Now this is the good. The bad, if my friends look at their friends list, they will see that I am Playing BF1. They have no idea what server i am in. Very bad idea there. What is ugly is if you are playing with 4 of your friends and are all in a squad of 5, your friend can not join on you unless you go through some trouble of working it out. Even uglier, try getting out of a game while playing. Its a nightmare. It's even worse if there is a map change involved.

Servers

The good is well for PC they are all 60 hz servers. The bad is DICE go rid of third party server rentals. The Ugly is there are no servers you can rent at this time. Furthermore, DICE decided to leave out KEY features that most players wanted when they do release them. Features like Hardcore or non hardcore. The ability to kick or ban players. The ability to make customization. All of this should have been ready at launch. Certainly ready a month after launch which it still is not. Even uglier is that fact that DICE has been very tight lipped about most of this. Most questions were given a standard answer from DICE reps stating "SOON" I could go on and on about this subject for days. Instead of get my blood pressure up, I will just move on. 

Cheat System

DICE decided to retire the punkbuster system which is a good thing. I don't blame them because it only caught players changing code in the game. Most cheaters have gone to overlays which punkbuster is just to outdated to catch. The bad of this is now we are limited to fairfight only, which uses some magic algorithm to catch players cheating based on their stats. So blatant stat padders are gone and the obvious aimbotters but players using ESP/wallhacks will still be running around rampant. The ugly part is and I do mean ugly is there are no admins in the game to stop any of this. So no one can stop them and all you can do as a player is report the players and hope someone will do something. This has never worked in the past so I am not hopeful about the future. DICE says that after the release of rentable servers, they will add in features that we ask for like the ability to kick/ban players. Really, we have to ask for this? Shouldn't this be a given? I know, I already talked about this so I must move on but it is a very sore subject with me.

Online Game Play

The good is the visuals are awesome and the audio is outstanding. I am running a Nvidia 1080 card with an i7-920 processor (first gen baby) and 12 gigs of DDR3 tripple channels 1866mhz ram and the game runs really smooth on ultra. I have my game set up to run a straight 60 frames and it might fluctuate on occasion to to low 58 frames, the game is very stable for me. The bad, i5 & i3 chips need more then 8 gigs of ram and not the single core stuff. Ram is cheap and some people need to upgrade. AMD users seem to have a lot of issues as well. from what I can read, a 480 card is about as minimum as you want to go. The ugly of the game is players are forced to go for objectives and do not promote kills. Even in this softcore mode, 11 scout rifles are 1 shot kills in the "sweet spot" while all other classes can barely hit the guy at 100 yards. Pistols are become more and more the norma because they seem to be more accurate and more powerfull and faster firing then the machine guns. I like mine for killing snipers at 100 yards away. If anything needs changed it is definatly these 2 items.

This is not a run and gun game. You have to rely on your squad mates. If they are all at different objectives, the game will fall apart before your eyes. not to mention your KDR will plunge. You have to work together as a group. All classes can be important and most times needed. There is no spawn beacon so a scout is nice to have back to spawn on and to call out the enemy. Medics are a must. Support is a must. For the close quarters and tanks the assault class is a must. Double up where you need to. If you don't, you will get upset with how the game is going and wonder why your team is losing.

OMG its a tank. They are fairly easy to take down and are not that over powered. If you work as a squad you can make really short work of them. AA seems to take for ever now to take a plane down. I would not say they are weak but definitely not the AA that was in BF4. Field guns are OK to fire and then run. Takes a while to aim and shoot. I would like to see that sped up just a little bit. Stationary LMG are perfect. Aircraft is intersting. Totallly diferent then previous games. They can be usless or over powering depending on the pilot.

Campaign mode

While dice has not even been known for its campaign mode the good news is they put one in. The bad news is, its short and not much to do in it. The ugly of it is once you get something going its over and a new story line begins. It is more of a play this and learn how to play the game mode before you play online. It is short and sweet with almost half being cinematics.

Overall

The good is we get another 3 years of a different battlefield game

The bad is this game is far from being complete

the ugly is this game is so incomplete it should have been delayed by about 6 months with a lot more testing before being released to market. While it is playable and and a lot of time enjoyable, it can be equally frustrating as hell. DIce is known for patching and making fixes over the course of years so I would not throw the game away or get a refund yet. I think all will be fixed and to quote DICE executives it will be fixed "SOON".