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! →

This was just posted to PlanetBattlefield. On second look, this is just pulling data from BFHQ. You still have to play on laggy servers. BLAH!

The programmer KuranesGrey has been working on some Python Code that will allow stats to be displayed on a website. This is still early on but worth mentioning!
This CGI is a proof of concept showing how to make BFHQ data visible
on the web. My hope is that others will pick this code up and develop
cool community tools. For more information and the code, please download
bf2python.zip or read
README.txt. See also
bf2-xml_parser.zip, someone
elses PHP implementation. Includes extra notes on meanings of data items.
You can see it in action in an early state on PlanetBattlefield.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/831992485

The current implimentation of the Battlefield 2 (BF2) ranking
feature is of great concern to those of us looking forward to
participating in the BF2 gaming community. It has been stated by
EA representatives that the BF2 ranking feature will point to a
global database which only official EA servers are able to contribute
data. If EA follows through with this implimentation it will have a
negative impact on the BF2 gaming community, the BF2 game server
hosting market, and very likely the overall success of BF2. Continue reading Stop The 2 Tier Server System for BF2 →

Look at the top of the main page for the info on our Battlefield 2 server. For now we have the time limit on and bonus weapons locked, but that could change depending on how rebellious we are feeling. With BF2 is out in just a few days, we may hang tight within the limitations that EA/DICE (a.ka. Rat Bastards) would like us to accept.

By the way, if you are too lazy to scroll back to the top of the page the IP is: 67.18.226.34

I finally got the BF2 Demo downlaoded and I was trying to figure out how to get the Linux Server up and running. Strange, I couldnt find anything. I hit Google and this the first thing I find…..

A quick note to all of our community leaders and file partners. We
inadvertently released an out-dated Linux version for todays
Battlefield 2 Demo Server. It is imperative that you not make this
available on your web sites and that you let people from your media
outlets know not to host it for download or run demo servers with it.
We will follow up early next week with a version that works.

Yep, Linux server admins get the short end of the stick again……

Good luck getting in….

If you have linux and know how to use wget, use this url. ftp://largedownloads.ea.com/pub/demos/battlefield2demo.exe

I tried it via firefox and I get a no such directory found error. I tried going direct to the FTP and I cant see the file, but I am grabbing it direct to our game server via wget. Good Luck!

Its official. The Battlefield 2 Demo is right around the corner and you can get it here. Heres the rough details from the field….

When the Battlefield 2 demo is released, it will make its world premiere on GameSpot, and will be initially available not only to GameSpot registered users, but also to unregistered visitors as well.