Interface

What is zee word… atrocious?

Battlefield 1942 has one of the most mixed-up interfaces known to man. It starts well enough, but quickly gets brought down by a multitude of minor issues. Still, let’s go over what it does right before we highlight some of the problems that nagged at us during play.

For starters the front-end is relatively simple and requires little adjustment from other titles. Anyone who has used menus in Windows Explorer should be able to figure out how to adjust his settings, start a game or change his character name. Once in the game, the actual controls are brilliant. The ease with which a player controls infantry, ground vehicles, air units and ships is almost beyond belief. We suspect more time was spent thinking out the controls than the actual gameplay. Even the world’s freshest gaming newbie should be able to figure out all four styles of play within a few hours of play.

Tiger died after about 10 minutes, no joke

So shooting the back is against the Geneve Convention

Big deal

Things aren’t quite as rosy when we get to various voice commands, requests and notifications. Obviously, no one listens to them – that’s a given. But they could be designed more clearly. Using the function keys isn’t a bad idea but then again it’s not the cleanest solution either. A Counter-Strike/Tribes/Allegiance type of voice communication, spawning from a single key would work better particularly since gamers are already acquainted with that. What is nice about the voice commands is that it highlights the person talking. In certain situations, such as when a carrier spots a submarine and requires assistance, this is vital information.

Zee Nasty

So that’s what is good about the interface. Here’s the bad. It is marked with inconsistencies and has a serious performance problem. Take the map for example. One would think that as a destroyer captain, one would see his friendly carrier on the map if they get out of visual range, so they might get back together. Except that “one” is wrong. Naval and air units don’t appear on the map to friendly units unless those units see them. More inconsistencies appear in the teams. The Axis players are always read, Allied are always blue. That makes things more confusing than necessary. It would be easier to just label enemies always red.

The map is also used to select spawn points. There is a spawn timer like in Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which counts down the time until a player reappears in the game. Unlike RtCW, he needs to have a spawn point selected to respawn, or the timer resets. In singleplayer when the game first starts, it’s a race to load the map and click the first spawn point one would see before the billionth of a second a gamer is initially given expires and the timer resets. At the very least we’d like a longer period to choose the spawn, but this won’t address the second problem. In either multi- or singleplayer, after you choose a spawn point but it gets captured, the game defaults to “no spawn area selected.” Wonderful, how many gamers might react to pick a spawn with only a second left when theirs gets captured? There are many solutions to this problem, from assigning a spawn point automatically to not resetting the timer once it has expired.

Stalingrad

Laggy server, I swear!

My l33tness comes through

The last problem we experienced ties in to the general biggest problem of the game – performance. Specifically, load times are horrendously long. To make matters worse, when a map is done, it takes almost as long to unload. This isn’t as irritating between maps, where break helps calm the nerves, but when trying to select a game. See, the internal GameSpy browser tells you a server has one slot open. Like any other game then, it’s a race between you and a dozen other players for that spot. Oh, looks like you got lucky, it’s loading. At about fifteen seconds through it tells you the server is full. Fifteen seconds! That’s how long it takes the game to tell you whether or not you got the last space or not. There is clearly a better way to handle that.