BF 2142 officially comes out tomorrow. I’ve already purchased and downloaded it through the EA Downloader. It won’t allow activation until tomorrow (Grrr!) Wednesday. Interesting idea. It saves me from being disappointed that Best Buy doesn’t have the game on release day, but I can’t resell it if I wanted to. Not that I’ve ever resold a game. Anyway, the game itself…I’ve been playing the demo. Titan mode is a neat idea, but the levels with Titans lag terribly…almost unplayable. One “feature” of the game is that it has more unlockables than any previous BF game. However, they cheated to do this. They just made every piece of equipment, like defibrillators, an unlockable. That was standard equipment in BF2. But the end verdict? Yeah, I love it. What’d you think? I’m a BF fanboy. Oh yeah, they finally added the most obvious and necessary feature of an online game in this day and age…a buddy list. It only took them four years to figure out how to do it. I also think some of the squad-only upgrades and scores will hopefully be incentive enough to get people to use teamwork…but I rate the chances of that at about 5%.
Check out the insane stuff they’re going to do with the in-game advertising:
Specifically, IGA’s software uses the IP address for geotargeting of in-game ads (so that European ads are not shown to those in the U.S., for example). It also creates a unique user number that’s generated locally, and is able to re-identify the gamer when he next appears online. In addition, IGA’s in-game ad solution does capture the time of day that the user started to play each gaming session – Townsend mentioned, as an example, that “if the brief says ‘Males 18 to 34′”, the ads may only be served between 6pm and 9pm on a weekday evening or similar, to replicate ‘primetime’ viewing. The time that each ad impression takes place is also recorded by IGA, alongside what type of ad content it was (billboard, megaboard, or video stream), the duration (how long was the ad seen for), the size of the ad relative to the player, and the angle of deflection (what angle the ad is viewed at).
Hmm, so in the game future of 2142, the earth is in crisis and half covered by ice, but companies will still bother to advertise their nifty graphics cards? I’ll sure be blocking the ads if I can. I hates me some advertising! Funny. BF2 seemed to have done fine without ads up to this point. Now we’ll have not only normal in-game lag, but animated commercial texture lag. Yay! Glad to see that server bandwidth will be used so efficiently. Of course, this would be EA’s first move after procuring DICE…that and firing a bunch of people.