If you’ve downloaded the game at all, you’ll know that there are some problems with Battlefield 1943. Mainly, the servers have reached their maximum capacity. EA & DICE hope to have this sorted by tomorrow morning (UK Time). Gordan Van Dyke (A DICE employee) has created a forum thread with regular updates on the situation here.
Another problem that people seem to be encountering is an error message that states that you cannot connect to EA Online. The fix for this is a little bothersome, but it works.
First of all, download the Fight Night Round 4 demo. Once you’ve downloaded it, play it. Once you start to play it, skip the cutscene. After that, skip the tutorial. Unless you actually want to play this.
After you skip/play through the tutorial, you should get to the main menu. On the main menu there should be an option about an EA Account. Select this and enter your account details Save them and exit the demo. Once you start up Battlefield 1943, it should work.
Bungie day was yesterday and we got a few new things. However, what was my take on the event?
First of all, lets start off with the “Bungie vs The World” playlist. This playlist introduced us to a load of community created maps, many of which I enjoyed. Here’s hoping that some of them get in to the regular Matchmaking playlists in August.
That said, the main selling point for the Bungie vs The World playlist was the chance to play against Bungie employees, kick their collective arses, and earn yourself Recon armour. That said, the total playlist population was often at about 170,000+ players at any one time. Finding a team of four people in that is unlikely. Bungie should have put more teams out there. They could have even got RoosterTeeth or HBO to join the playlist to dish out Recon as well.
Next up there were screenshots of the next map pack. Screenshots are nice, but I feel rather disappointed at what’s there. Heretic is a remake of Midship, which was an okay map in Halo 2 (Would have much preferred to see other maps remade though). Citadel looks… dull and boring, and the same goes for Longshore. That said, Longshore looks like some kind of re-imagining of Headlong from Halo 2, so hopefully it should be a fun map.
Bungies Render-to-Video service also went live, which allows you to render your film clips from Halo 3 in to video files so that you can play them on your computer, edit them, or upload them to websites like YouTube. This is something fans have been after since Halo 3 was launched, so it’s good to see Bungie deliver something that fans wanted.
Finally, Bungie also released a Podcast on Bungie Day. The podcast contained a snippet of music from Halo 3: ODST, and also Nathan Fillion appeared as a guest. Nathan Fillion does the voice acting for Reynolds in Halo 3, and he also voices Buck in Halo 3: ODST.
Overall? This Bungie Day wasn’t bad. Last years was certainly better though, when we got a free map to play with. It also would have been nice to get some Gamerpictures like we usually do. That said, everything that we got here was free, so I guess we can’t really complain. Still would have been nice to have more Bungie employees in the Bungie vs The World playlist though.
I’m a day late on this one, but nonetheless, Bungies Render-to-Video service went live yesterday as part of the Bungie Day “festivities” (For lack of a better word). Bungie’s Render to Video service has finally gone live, after being in Beta for quite some time.
Currently, only Bungie Pro subscribers can take advantage of this feature. Each month, a Bungie Pro subscriber gets five render minutes alloted to them. These render minutes do not roll over to the next month. With these render minutes, it’s a case of “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. However, you can buy additional minutes if you need to (10 Render minutes for 100 Microsoft Points, which is just a few pence). These render minutes that you purchase DO roll over. You can check out Bungies explanation of the system here.
Below is a test of the Render to Video service. You can watch it in the embeddable player below, or you can watch it in HD here. I have to say that the quality is pretty amazing. Just to clarify, this is not a video that I have rendered. This is a clip by somebody else:
This is certainly a useful service, and is something that fans have been asking for since Halo 3 was released. That said, it may be cheaper to just buy a Capture Card, which would be more versatile than Bungies service. That said, however, you would need a pretty decent PC to encode those videos as well.
If you just want to share clips of some awesome gameplay footage on the Internet, this is certainly a useful service. It’s pretty cheap as well when you consider how much technical horsepower is required for this. Certainly a good incentive to get Bungie Pro if you don’t already.
The final maps for Halo 3, Heretic, Citadel and Longshore, have been revealed earlier today. These are the three maps that will ship with Halo 3: ODST later on this year.
Heretic is a straight-up remake of Midship from Halo 2, and is by far the most visually appealing out of the three. This is a small arena style map with two bases. Good for 4v4 games, CTF and Slayer in particular were fun on this map if memory serves. Of course, this map being remade means that I can finally remake Death Trap. What is Death Trap you ask? Oh, you’ll see.
I have to say that Cidadel doesn’t particularly excite me right now. It literally looks like they’ve copy & pasted one of the rooms from the campaign level “The Covenant” here. It’s difficult to tell how this map will play, though I presume it’ll be a smaller map.
Finally we have Longshore. Bungie have stated that this is a Big Team map, and it kind of looks like Headlong from Halo 2 (Though I should mention that it’s certainly not a direct remake from what I can see in the above picture), which can only mean good things. Graphics on this map don’t excite me much though.
Click here for the official Bungie post, which includes links to high-res images of the maps.
As it stands, I give this a “Meh” considering that this is the last ever map pack for Halo 3, I feel sort of underwhelmed. What does everyone else think?
Today is the 7th July (7/7), which means that it’s Bungie Day! In case you haven’t been on Halo 3 yet, there is a playlist called “Bungie vs The World”, which contains some user created maps that have never been in Matchmaking before. And, having played in the playlist for a bit, a lot of them are pretty awesome. It’s certainly worth checking it out if you have the time.
But there’s more, should you encounter some Bungie employees in the playlist and defeat them, you will earn the coveted Recon armour permutation to use. It’s worth mentioning that your chances of encountering Bungie are slim. There’s only one team of four players and the Bungie vs The World playlist has several thousands of people playing it. Feeling lucky?
On their website, Bungie also said that they’re going to be releasing screenshots of Longshore, Citadel, and Heretic later on in the day. These are the final three maps that are to be shipped with Halo 3: ODST. In addition to this, Bungies Render-to-Video feature will be coming out of beta some time today.
So as you may or may not have read earlier, Major Nelson has told us that advertisements on the Xbox 360 Dashboard are going to be “enhanced” (Marketing buzzword ahoy!) using Microsoft Silverlight (Basically Microsofts version of Adobe Flash). Now for me, this has bad implications. Why? Because Flash-based (And lets face it, Silverlight is very similar from the end users point of view) advertisements on the web are usually intrusive and, not to mention, fucking annoying. Like the one below:
Lets face it, these pop-out ads are the new Pop-Up.
Similar advertisements already exist on the Xbox 360 Dashboard. For example, there are movie trailer advertisements that, when you scroll over them, start to play a movie trailer. I don’t want that. That kind of crap is bullshit.
I wouldn’t mind these advertisements so much if Xbox Live was free, but it isn’t. I mean okay, fair enough, give the Silver members ads, but do Microsoft seriously have the cheek to give Gold members, who pay £40 a year advertisements?
Now I know what the fanboys are thinking, “But you pay for your Cable TV service and you don’t complain about the ads on that!” This is different. When you subscribe to a Cable TV service, you are subscribing for access to additional TV Channels. I doubt that the actual channels themselves (Like, I dunno, MTV or something) actually receive much, or any of that subscription money at all.
The same applies to Internet Service Providers. I pay them a monthly fee for access to the Internet, but websites on the Internet don’t receive any of this money. They have to find their own way to make cash, such as with ad revenue.
Lets give an analogy. Lets say that my blog had advertisements on it, but my blog was free to read. But say I also offered a subscription model in which you could receive additional features or something. Would you be impressed if the ads were still there? I sure as fucking hell wouldn’t.
Basically what i’m saying is that Gold members shouldn’t have to see advertisements. I mean, when you sign in to XBL you’re immediately shown advertisements on the Spotlight channel for fucks sake. I give you £40 a year and you still shove ads in my face? Not cool. If these “enhancements”, as Major Nelson puts it, involves these ads somehow being more intrusive, then I simply don’t know what I will do, but i’ll certainly be a very dissatisfied customer. Microsoft already make money from Xbox Live and everything that sells on the Xbox Live Marketplace.
So the tl;dr is this:
Silver Members: Go ahead and give them ads. I recognise that Microsoft are a business and that they have to make money some way. Ad revenue for free accounts? Go for it.
Gold members: No. People who pay a subscription fee shouldn’t have to face ads. Especially those ghastly movie advertisements that play a trailer when you scroll over them. Some people view the ads as “useful”, so I dunno, give people the option to opt-out of them or something.
I also find it irritating that Microsoft have been wastiung their time on this when there are bigger problems that need to be sorted out. The Xbox Live Marketplace can be sluggish some times and at times my games library doesn’t even load up because my 360 is too busy trying to fetch ads from Xbox Live.
Well actually, there are several things i’d like to see ISPs do. For example, i’d like to see them stop misusing the word “unlimited” for a start, but that’s not what this blog post is about. Rather, this is about upload and download speeds.
As it is now, you will probably purchase a subscription to a certain ISPs broadband package. Usually packages are seperated from the download speeds tha they offer, e.g – 2Mb, 10Mb, 20Mb, the list goes on.
But what about instead of selling a package as “10 Megabit Download”, what about something along the lines of “10 Megabits of Bandwidth”? With this allocated 10Mb/s of Bandwidth, you could divide it in to what suited you best. With online video sites such as YouTube becoming more and more popular, people are going to start needing faster upload speeds. Why? So that they don’t have to spend half an hour uploading a video.
I mean imagine it, if you were a heavy YouTube user, wouldn’t it be great to allocate your bandwidth accordingly? Instead of having an incredably fast download speed with a pitiful upload speed, you could divide it 50/50. For example, if you had 10Mb/s of bandwidth, you could allocate 5Mb/s of bandwidth for uploads and 5Mb/s for downloads. Wouldn’t it be great to upload a video just as quickly as you could download one?
So what does everyone think? This was just a quick idea, but would anyone (Techies in particular) like to have the option of where to allocate your bandwidth in terms of upload/download speeds?
Now I have debated this at, well, length with the people on the Bungie Forums (Forum link). As you can see, that didn’t exactly end well, but then again, debating with Bungie Fanboys never does. Many of them didn’t even read the thread. If you look, I suggested replacing the Laser with a Gauss Rifle, which would mean that you would have to lead your shot in order to hit an enemy with it. And yet even near the end pages of the thread people are like “BUT LASERS TRAVEL AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT LOL”. Yeah, read the fucking thread, moron. I even updated the original post to include that detail and people still gave the “Lasers travel at the speed of light” argument when I was basically saying “”Replace it with something similar”.
The funny thing is that Bungie could actually adpot my idea and remove the Spartan Laser from the Halo Sandbox and suddenly everyone would change their minds on the matter.
So, deciding that arguing with idiots is, well, idiotic, i’ve decided to create this blog post. Feel free to make comments in the box below because i’d like to see what informed opinions people could make for/against this without mindlessly accepting everything that Bungie does. But anyway, on to my point. Though it’s worth mentioning that what i’m about to type is pretty much the same as what’s been discussed in the forum thread.
First of all, lets take a look at some typical Spartan Laser usage, this isn’t the best example in the world, just some gameplay footage from a game that I played earlier this morning. I missed a shot, but still, lets take a look at how many kills I rack up using this one weapon, which is pretty much given to me for free at the beginning of the game:
So that’s a total of six kills, right off the bat. Two Choppers and Two Warthogs, which, on this particular map, is every single vehicle that a team spawns with, with the exception of a Mongoose, which is pretty much worthless in Slayer games because it hasn’t got any offensive capabilities. So great, a map that is supposed to focus on the use of vehicles does exactly the opposite because this weapon spawns right next to each team’s base right at the beginning of the game. Also it’s worth remembering that this map has other anti-vehicle weapons as well, such as the Missile Pod. So if the Laser wasn’t enough to deal with, you’ve got that too.
Of course, if the Spartan Laser was actually somewhat difficult to use, this wouldn’t be an issue, but the problem is that this thing is hoprrifically easy to use. When you’re not zoomed in, the crosshair is enourmous, and when you are zoomed in, there’s so much sticky-aim that it pretty much aims itself. Vehicles only really stand at chance evading it if they’re out of the weapons range (Like with the Banshee in the above video), which the majority of the time, is not the case.
So what constructive criticism can I provide here? Make the crosshair smaller. It’s supposed to be a Sniper Rifle for Vehicles for christ sake, that crosshair is far too big for that. Additionally, remove/reduce the sticky aim that you get when you zoom in. Or alternatively, like I mentioned, replace the Spartan Laser with a Gauss Rifle that would mean that you would have to lead your shot, making the weapon harder to use.I haven’t read the book, but I have heard that Sergeant Johnson used a Gauss Rifle in Halo: Contact Harvest. This Gauss Rifle would have the same power as the Spartan Laser, but would be more difficult to use. Thus, preventing vehicles being complete death traps.
My next point relates to lag. As you all probably know, the Fuel Rod Gun and Fire Bombs have been excluded from Halo 3’s matchmaking (I would have included the Flamethrower in there too, but that’s not strictly true as it’s on Construct).
Why aren’t these weapons used in Matchmaking? Because the visual effects cause the game to lag (Yeah, I guess Bungie didn’t learn from Halo 2). While the Spartan Laser isn’t as bad as the aforementioned weapons, it can still lag pretty badly. Now before you all say “Your Internet connection sucks”, i’m on a 20Mb/s Fibre Optic connection, and this happens in most games in which I get Lasered. In these games, nothing else lags, just the effects on the Spartan Laser. Take a look at the below video:
As you can see, the game isn’t lagging. Shots register, nobody is suddenly jumping from one place to another. I don’t know why, but the Laser just lags. It’s irritating just driving a vehicle and suddenly exploding out of nowhere. If the Firebomb and Fuel Rod Gun are removed from Matchmaking due to lag, then shouldn’t the Laser be as well?
Now do I completely hate the Spartan Laser? No, I honestly think that it’s a brilliant step forward from the Rocket Launcher in Halo 2, which homed in on Vehicles. Certainly, in comparison to that, the Laser is a Godsend. As you can see, the Rockets from Halo 2 pretty much aim themselves (This is in a campaign level as finding multiplayer games on Halo 2 right now is difficult, and even if I found a match, there would be no guarantee of me getting the Rocket Launcher):
The Spartan Laser was certainly a step in the right direction, but in my opinion, it could use a little bit of improvement. What does everyone else think? Obviously I don’t expect anything to change in Halo 3, but what about for Halo Reach?
So it’s recently been said, by the Studio Head at Bungie (Harold Ryan) that Halo Reach could use Project Natal. Now to some people, this might sound pretty cool. After all, imagine if you could go in to hand-to-hand Combat with a Grunt, or an Elite, or maybe you could even do a William. Well actually, none of that appealed to me, but whatever, just throwing out some examples of what some people might have thought.
So first of all, what is Halo Reach? This seems to be a question that a lot of people are asking, and here’s the answer: It’s a First Person shooter. Just like every other Halo game (Except for Halo Wars). As Urk put it in a weekly update, “Halo: Reach will be a First Person Shooter. You will shoot stuff from a first person perspective. It will be awesome.”
So yeah, if you play Halo, you’re probably familiar with what a First Person Shooter is. You walk around, shoot things, and occasionally throw Grenades. If we’re talking specifially about Halo, you also fly certain vehicles, drive certain vehicles, and man turrets. But for the most part, Halo is an FPS.
So here’s one of my problems with Halo Reach using Project Natal. Movement: To move, would you have to do some kind of jogging-on-the-spot movement? What about to turn? Would you have to actually physically turn your body? But if you do that, you wouldn’t be able to see the screen! How would you Fire? Pretend that you’ve got a gun in your hand? A First Person Shooter simply would not work with this.
Thankfully, I don’t think Bungie are this stupid. At least, I don’t think that they’re stupid enough to change the game this dramatically, especially given the economy. Halo 3 is a very successful game, often being the most played game on Xbox Live. There’s not really any reason to change things dramatically. People like what they have.
Now on to a more logical reason about why Halo Reach won’t require Natal, and the main reason why i’m not worried about Natal being a mandatory add-on to play this game, is the Halo Reach Beta. While an official release date for the Beta has yet to be announced, i’ll place my money on it being released in the Spring of 2010, just like the Halo 3 Beta was released in the spring of 2007. My guess is that Natal won’t even be out until the second half of 2010. With this knowledge in mind, I think it’s fairly logical to assume that Natal won’t be mandatory to play the game with.
Whichs brings the question: What will Natal be used for in Halo Reach? An alternative control scheme? To be honest I can’t really think of many things that Natal would be good for in a Halo game. But i’m 99% certain that this game won’t require it, which can only be good news.
