In a lonely, tucked away corner of EA’s TGS ‘08 booth, delirious after our experience with Mirror’s Edge and unsure of where to go next, we ran into two PCs hooked up to the Battlefield: Heroes beta. All but ignored by TGS’s JRPG-happy demographic, they sat alone and desperate. We saw our chance and took it.
Heroes is EA’s attempt to jump on the casual gaming bandwagon by stripping down the online shooter, a genre that is typically anything but casual. Heroes will contain in some form all of the Battlefield series’ trademark un-casual features: take-and-hold gameplay, vehicular combat, sprawling geography, and class-based warfare.
This is not, however, a typical Battlefield game. First, and most importantly, it’s free! EA plans to make money through advertising and micropayments. This put us on guard—“advertising” and “micropayments” are perhaps two of the dirtiest words in the industry right now. The EA rep worked hard to assure us, however, that all advertising would only occur at the software's front end—in menu screens and loading—not in the actual game itself. And, as far as the micropayments go, we were told that all features directly related to gameplay—maps, weapons, and abilities—will be available to everyone. The only purchasable items will be cosmetic additions, like accessories for your player character. EA said that it expects 95 percent of players to spend absolutely nothing on the game. The title is fully playable as is, and will remain that way. “Then what, exactly, will the other five percent be buying?” we wondered.
“Good question!” said the EA rep. Battlefield: Heroes’s other major change is one of style. Players will no longer be represented by bland military men in various shades of camo. Instead, each player has several MMO-style character slots with which to craft a vicious (or, more likely, hilarious) band of warriors. Heroes is very personality-oriented. You can adjust your character’s appearance in detail, and customize his (there are no female models yet) look with ten different types of articles of clothing. The result is a battlefield with a very Team Fortress 2 look that, dare we say it, outdoes even TF2 itself.
We were more interested in the gameplay, however, so we threw on a pair of boxers, a white tee, and a rather wicked looking eyepatch, selected a cigar of adequate girth, and jumped in the fray. The camera shows the action from a third-person perspective in order to make your character a more obvious presence in the game. It plays like an FPS, however—we had a clear targeting reticule, and our bullets and grenades went exactly where we expected them to. There’s no longer a spawn interface. Instead, the game determines where the action is and places you accordingly. Additionally, we were told that players won’t have to wait around for vehicles to respawn—Heroes will detect when a player is present at a vehicle spawn point and provide the appropriate armor.
In general, Heroes appears to be a simpler game than its predecessors. Tanks and planes are much more vulnerable to foot soldiers, and players typically seem to be able to take a little more punishment, making firefights less immediately decisive and strategy less important. On the other hand, characters can through experience gain special powers that may affect the outcome of battle. It remains to be seen whether Heroes will catch on with the casual crowd at which EA is aiming. A ranking system will match up players of similar skill levels.
The content at launch will be relatively light: two maps and one game mode, to be exact. Our rep assured us that future maps will be free, however, and that the dev team plans to remain finely tuned to player sentiment: sea vehicles, a first-person perspective, multiple game modes, extra classes, and more have all been mentioned as future possibilities.
Battlefield: Heroes should be ready for public download later this year or in early 2009.
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