Santa

I kinda hope there isnt. When i commanded for some of the big bf2 scrims, I had no problem managing 6 or 7 people. Itll only become bungled if they put one person at the top, a few in the middle, and then the squad leaders. I could see this being useful if you were in charge 15+ 6 man squads, but youll at most have 5 full squads in BF.

What they should do is allow SLs to talk to eachother directly, and to have friendly squad leaders attack/defense markers show up on everyones radar.

Beatnik

Yep. Allow the SLs to talk and self-organize and you take away the issue of the absent or shitty CO.

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icky

Yes, and you could also take it to another level by allowing support requests. For example, have a jet squad's leader say "air support available", which opens up the ability for other squad leaders to put an icon on the map for "airstrike needed here".

I just wish we could go back to WWII and get it right. I know people are tired of WWII, but the technology level is a perfect fit for games like this. The balance between air and ground is sane with WWII tech. Air battles can be epic, rather than missile spam from hell.

Ah well, maybe a new super game will sneak up on us and make me happy.

Santa

Something else i hope they change from 2142 to BF3 is the mapping. I found the large 2142 games boring as hell as there were hardly any strategy decisions to make. Nearly every map was a clusterfuck of silly chokepoints that played out the same way every single time. The only need for a commander was to make sure the idiots running the squads would cover each chokepoint, and that was just about it. Hardly any room for creativity.

What they did do well was make squad level tactics funner (reason why competitive was much more fun than the big games), but i think that was mostly due to the fact that everyone had shock paddles and you could really keep eachother going together with teamwork. I dont know if theyre going to be able to make everyone in a modern BF3 setting have shockpaddles because it wouldnt make much sense.

Arf

I expect they'll remove playable jets in a new BF game and probably give Squad Leaders the ability to call in Air Strikes either in the same way CO assets work or by earning them like you do Field Unlocks. Personally I think the squad system of 2142 is exactly where it needs to be and I have no idea what another level of Command could possibly be since the CO was really just an asset clerk.

What they really need to improve on is the map mechanics. I'd like to see spawn points turned off by enemy players and turned back on until a defending player reactivated them. That way if you were defending you couldn't be spawn camped as that spawn would be off and attackers wouldn't have defenders coming out of holes they just cleared. Also if you were attacking you could clear all the spawn points (basically overrunning the flag) before trying to capture. Now if you were on the defending side and lost the flag you'd at least be able to control part of the flag (even if you can't spawn there) and cause the new owners lots of pain. It would help on a lot of tactical levels and cut down on some of the more random chaos.

Personally I thought the 2142 maps were pretty good. The complete lack of choke points on BF2 just made a lot of dead space, if you tried to fight in any of it the enemy would just drive around you and take the flag. So you just ended up sitting on the flag, waiting for the enemy and all that extra space was never fought on, it just increased the time it took to get around. There's only so much you can do with actual map design to keep the game varied, if you really want to create more re-playability you need to add more elements. A good example of this would be checkers and chess; same map but chess has much greater replay value because you have rooks, bishops, knights, etc all being varied elements as opposed to simply checkers.

BHack

I wish they would improve upon the scoring system. In the ranked 2142 environment bleed didn't seem to do much. I never felt it was all that important to hold and take flags. The game depended too much on team deathmatch.

If they could tweak things to make it more objective oriented I think that would go a long way to improving the overrall game.

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Secretary of Keepin it Real

jepzilla

I don't think the solution to the problems in BF2 is to impose the chokefest that was 2142. The Battlefield series has always been about combined arms and the tendency to progressively move more and more towards just a pure infantry shooter takes away from some of the fun. I don't think the problem with the BF2 games was the maps being too big... I think it was the maps being too small and the compromises that the devs had to make to maintain balance. Make the maps huge. Make the armor and the aircraft and the AA deadly. But then give lots of cover around CPs and give the infantry lots of deadly short range anti-tank weapons.

I want tanks that are good enough that a buggy has no chance in hell at zipping past it and surviving. I want jets that are good enough to waste a tank with a single bomb. I want AA that will annihilate jets that get too close. I want infantry that can waste armor that gets trapped and armor that will absolutely decimate infantry on open ground. And I want maps that are big enough that you can move around and survive despite all this because there's good cover and the whole thing isn't a cramped knife fight.

And make maps where you can create almost perfect defenses which you have no chance of breaking through... but don't give defenders enough resources to perfectly defend everything. Make people think about tactics and strategy instead of just blindly charging in and relying on uber-twitch.

And a shrubbery.

Relmar

One that looks nice.


And not too expensive.