Battlefield 2142 – October 2006

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The immensely popular Battlefield family of games will soon be one more family member richer. Battlefield 2142 is scheduled to be released in the US and Europe this month, in the US slightly earlier as usual. The year is 2142 and you can pick either the Russian centered Pan Asian Coalition or the European Union to fight with. You’ll be able to play multiplayer games with up to 64 players. A GameSpot article reports that the artificial intelligence in Battlefield 2142 is improved, though don’t expect anything miraculous. Sound and music in Battlefield 2142 is of a high quality, with Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer creating fitting music.

The Cold War may be history, but EA and developer DICE have a new cold war up their sleeves in Battlefield 2142. As the next game in the acclaimed Battlefield saga, 2142 takes place approximately 150 years in the future, after a new ice age makes most of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable. Unfortunately, most of the world’s land is in the Northern Hemisphere, so war erupts between futuristic factions for the last remaining land on Earth. In Battlefield 2142, you’ll be able to participate in that war in multiplayer battles of up to 64 players, representing either the European Union or the Russian-centered Pan Asian Coalition. With Battlefield 2142 scheduled to arrive later this month, we got some last hands-on time with a nearly finished version of the game recently to see how well everything has come together.

We were able to play in single-player against the artificial intelligence. Actually, we were also playing alongside the AI bots, as the computer controls 15 of the 16 players in single-player. That’s right–it appears that single-player is still limited to 16 players and the 16-player maps. We suspect that it might have something to do with processing issues, since having the computer control and keep track of more characters might affect the performance of the AI. Speaking of which, you have some control over the AI’s behavior, as well–a sliding bar lets you adjust their difficulty from easy to hard. We played on the latter to see how smart these bots are.

CLICK HERE to read the full article at GameSpot.