With Battlefield 2 still in its teething stage EA has announced that they are working on an expansion pack titled Battlefield 2: Special Forces. IGN has posted an interview with some of the design team from DICE Canada and here is a brief snippet that gives a good overview of the what is in this expansion pack:

“AJ Marini: Well, what we did was take out experience with Battlefield 2 and set it into a different environment. How do we change the game without changing the game that much. We dont want to change the fundamentals of Conquest but we really wanted it to feel like something different. So we started brainstorming and this idea of Special Operations kept coming up, so we ran with that idea.

The idea of Special Forces is the idea of night vision and all the other neat little things that they can do put into the Battlefield environment. So where Battlefield 2 is a playground for your regular grunt soldier, you put Special Forces in there and they can do all of these wonderful things that have the player feel like a super soldier now.

The battlefield environment is still Battlefield gameplay, but everyone feels a bit more powerful. They have toys and abilities that they wouldnt normally have in the regular Battlefield.”

I am not sure whether I should be happy about this or cry. The concept sounds pretty cool and fun, but I am having flashbacks to BFV where critical issues where left unresolved as the developer had moved on to BF2…..

Directly from the EA BF2 site….

HOTFIX for Battlefield 2 v1.01 Coming Soon
First off, a HUGE thanks to all of you who emailed me in regards to the memory leak found in the update we released earlier this week (v1.01). Your emails found their way to our production team and they’re in the process of evaluating what needs to be done in order to get this fixed. In the meantime, and since the 1.01 update is causing memory leakage on some systems, we recommend that you reinstall the game and NOT the v1.01 update we released earlier this week.

Reinstalling Battlefield 2 will not affect your in-game medals or ranked server statistics. EA and DICE are committed to getting a fix for v1.01 as soon as we possibly can and will continue to keep you informed through this web space in the coming days.

NOTE: If you installed and are running the newer server files (Win and Linux versions) we made available earlier this week, please revert those as well. We found that those files had the same issues with memory leaks as did the v1.01 update. You can download the older versions
here.

Yes its been confirmed! EA has confirmed there is a major memory leak issue with BF2 Server software when patched with the 1.01 patch. Many hosting servers are now rebooting every few hours to try to keep the servers from crashing.
The good news is that EA claims they will be releasing a fix soon for Windows servers. But dont you worry, EA is giving it to the Linux servers in the cornhole again, they dont know when they will get around to releasing a fix for that. They just the first “working” Linux server a few hours before the 1.01 patch. Read more about it here Continue reading EA BF2 Server Patch 1.01 Memory Leak →

They are moving into the European Theatre of Operations and will be including the United States, Germany, Ukraine & Russia and moving away from the desert countryside of Africa. Continue reading Point of Existence moving away from BF_V and on to BF2 →

Reports are that the first patch for BF2 will be out today. The updated unranked server files have already been released,

Check the EA Battlefield 2 site for the download file.

Here is the change list (thank you PlanetBattlefield for the list)

* Fixed in issue that caused the Multiplayer Browser to become unresponsive.
* Fixed an issue where some game controls were not available to be rebound within the Options menu.
* Fixed an issue with increasing performance degradation on servers.
* Fixed a problem with shader caching on client/host : after the first map in a rotation, shaders would be loaded on the fly during gameplay.
* Fixed a crash with rebinding LMB
* Fixed a problem that caused environment mapping to not appear on reflective surfaces.
* Fixed a crash that happened when a client picks up a kit that doesnt exist anymore.
* Fixed a problem with AI when the game was paused for a long time: bots would become unresponsive and also shoot more accurately.
* LOD distances tweaked on certain objects.

EA announced in their 6/30 Community update that they will soon be releasing their BF2 1.01 patch. Part of this patch is a working Linux server, Only 2 weeks late, way to go champs! Other fixes include a fix to the in-game browser so it works too! But Duck, sorry they still dont plan to support the most popular video card in gaming history.

Get The Full Scoop Here.
Continue reading BF2 Patch to come soon! →