Battlefield Noobfest? Another Battlefield Game in the Works

Yessiree you heard right. A new game from developer D.I.C.E is just around the corner. And I know how excited you are about new games in the Battlefield franchise. Lets count the wonder: Codename: Eagle, Battlefield 1942, Road to Rome, Secret Weapons of WWII, Battlefield: Vietnam, Battlefield 2, BF2: Special Forces, Euro Force, Armored Fury, BF2142, Norther Strike, Battlefield: Bad Company, and now Battlefield Heroes. Yes, the fine tradition of the Battlefield Series, EA and DICE have devised a quick and painless way to rid you of your spare cash laying on hand. It will be a free to download and play, supposedly running on older systems. Reports from PHL and other gaming sites report that it may be close to that of BF1942 hardware requirments. It will be a cartoon style shooter, with fully customizable players. "What's the catch" you say? I know you know that there are no free lunches. The new painless way to rid you of your cash would be micro-transactions. Like that of the Nintendo Wii and Xbox Live, you don't have to pay for the game, but if you want new shirts or faces or whatever crap they allow for consumption, you are going to have to shell out some micro-transaction credit cards.

So lets recap really quick: The game requires less processing power, it's free to play and download, quicker access to play, you can customize every aspect of your soldier. As if the Battlefield Series wasn't already riddled with douches and 10 year olds who scream for chocolate milk. I think what's going on here is an attempt by EA/DICE to bank on the new Myspace Generation of kids, who require instant gratification, can't be away from their top 8, need total customization and some sort of ranking system to show their EMO buddies how much they don't suck at something.

It seems like poor Team Fortress 2 rip off. I think what gets me the most is DICE's inability to actually support a product once it has launched. So, like the rest of the franchise, we will see a spike in game play, and then slowly sputter out once DICE has moved on to create Battlefield Heroes 2: The Money You Hid Under Your Mattress.

Just as a side note: Check out gamespy.com, somewhere on the right hand of the page, if you scroll down far enough you can see how many folks are playing what games. Battlefield had close to 14,000 players where as BF2142 (the superior game by DICE standards) had a whopping 300 players. This was on the weekend around 9pm PST. Certainly the BF2 player base should have been absorbed into other games by now.