So it appears that EA/DICE has no intentions of releasing anything else for BF2142. That’s fine because Northern Strike wasn’t that successful (in terms of player numbers vs. the original) and they continue to try to build on other ideas rather than what’s tried and true as in conquest. Development of maps isn’t cheap and people forget that they are paying someone to do this work just as you’re paid for your job. So enough with sentiment for EA.

What I don’t get, and I’ve attempted posts at the EA forums since 1942, is why they refuse to find user maps that work well with the game. I understand they want to charge for what they release but there would be a lot less money involved in doing some research of maps that work well (or having gamers vote) to release as a new map or 2 monthly that would be included in ranked servers. They’ve built tools for people to use to build mods and maps and give them no further support for their efforts. Ask 10 players of the BF series how many servers they play on that aren’t ranked or how many custom maps they’ve downloaded. Before BF2, ask the admins how many maps they included in rotation that were home grown (or even with BF2/BF2142 running a standard non-ranked server). The answer is going to be extremely low. EA/DICE seems to promote the ability to do something with their environment and then not give a damn about what is really good and get it mass marketed to the players.

I played around and created a few maps on 1942 but honestly why spend the time doing something unless it’s going to be used. It takes gamers a lot of time to create great custom maps, just as it does EA but they get no props for their work. Honestly I’ve not even looked to see if there are custom maps being created for 2142. Last I checked EA/DICE still didn’t have a download engine (as UT/CoD) to even play maps on the fly…. you had to downloaded them prior to playing.

Their EA downloader releases have yet to do much stimulation and it’s because they refuse to do what people want. It’s apparent by the most heavily rotated maps in both BF2 and BF2142 that gamers prefer the close combat city environments and yet they continue to release xpacks for large scale vehicle battles. The exception was Road to Jalalabad, which ironically was a free release in a patch and is a good balance, at times, of both vehicle and ground battles. I’m not saying everyone likes close combat but on any given night, check to see what maps are up. In 2142 it’s Camp Gibraltar, Fall of Berlin and Cerbere Landing and BF2 it’s mostly Strike at Karkand. Titan mode has taken on some support but not even close to the conquest maps. I do the others occasionally to break up monotony the but I’d rather have more of the infantry maps.

The one thing EA embraced was Desert Combat by hiring Trauma Studios to work on BF2 and we saw how they treated them. Bought the company, used their resources, skills and ability to create BF2 and then killed off their branch. I hope that Frontlines (from Kaos Studios and formally Trauma) does great, good or bad, just to bring them down a notch on their mighty pedestal of firing some of their best resources.

Sorry, got off on a separate tangent but it remains that EA/DICE isn’t concerned about what gamers want and base their presence on mass marketing and their name.

This isn’t meant to bring anything against the vanilla BF2/BF2142 games, I have spent a lot of hours in both because I enjoyed the games but both have grown stale and the companies continue to go down the path of what “they” think we want rather than asking or working with the community that supports their games.