Battlefield 2 Balance 'Mini'-Mod Thread

Definitely a TL;DR type of thread, you've been warned!

Vanilla Battlefield 2 is already a great experience, it's provided many of us with years and years of fun. However, it definitely isn't a perfect game, Battlefield 2 most definitely has it's own share of problems. Amongst them, BF2 suffers from a number of balance-related problems, not only between classes, but between vehicles too, and so on.

I, and I'm sure many others, have been very disappointed with how Battlefield 3 has turned out. To say the least, there is a severe deficit in terms of teamwork, proper conquest maps, and most of all, there is a distinct lack of that 'sandbox' Battlefield feeling. The sad reality is that no matter how much we complain to DICE, Battlefield 3 will never become what many many of us were expecting (I suppose that's one of the reasons why modding exists). No number of patches will magically turn the game into the game we've yearned for, especially when the 'base' that BF3 has been built on is so incomplete and half-baked.

After recently going back to play BF2 for nostalgia's sake and seeing the plethora of mods for the game on ModDB, I've conceded that BF2 -- not BF3 -- is really where the gold lies. While Battlefield 3 might provide better gun-play, there is a lot that has been lost in favour of it. Battlefield 2 had, to name a few things, a proper team hierarchy and structure for teamwork (e.g. commander and squad leaders with VOIP, ability to actually lead/command with waypoints, etc.) and the capacity for some fun and huge (those aren't always mutually exclusive however) maps. Most of all, the game has MOD TOOLS for us, the community, to work with. There's an extremely good base here to work from, and the changes that need to be made are not all too significant.

There are some great and innovative mods for BF2, such as Project Reality (or PoE and so on), but I feel that mods such as PR sidestep the issues by pretty much creating a whole new game rather than tweaking and perfecting what's already there. I'm hoping to, somehow, gather a mod team for Battlefield 2 that will address these problems head-on while keeping the core of Battlefield intact with a good balance between arcade-style gameplay and "realism". With this 'mini-mod', I hope to retain most of the vanilla resources rather than make a 'total conversion' for the game. However, additional maps and improved skins will most likely be welcome, simply just to modernize the game a bit. Otherwise, I'm hoping to have the mini-mod keep the game within the BF2 lore (if there is such a thing) with USA/MEC/PLA forces duking it out in a manner very reminiscent of vanilla BF2.

Proposed Changes/Fixes:

• Balance Soldier Classes: We can do this by, firstly, modifying weapon/tool loadouts of each class. There is common issue of the Medic being the "jack-of-all-trades" class. Not only can the medic can heal himself by holding out his medicine pack, he also possesses some of the best weapons in the game. With unlocks, the medic receives a gun with a scope (allowing long distance engagement) and the extremely powerful and accurate G36E -- which renders a lot of other classes (such as the Assault) obsolete. This issue can be easily remedied by replacing these guns with a PDW weapon, likely an MP7 (which already exists in the game), and leaving the more powerful/accurate weapons for more appropriate, front-line classes.
• Add Tools for Less Popular Classes: After tweaking the Medic class, it might also be nice to make the 'less versatile' classes more useful. Perhaps, like Project Reality, give the Assault/Sniper/Engineer BF2:SF-style grappling hooks/ziplines to make those less-popular classes more helpful and versatile. Give more of a reason for squads to stick together and have a diverse set of soldier classes in their squad.
• Modify Supply/Health Pack Behaviour: This is another common issue in BF2, medic and support soldiers can throw down many supply/health packs right before (or even during a fight). Simply walking over the packs refills the users ammo/health to their maximum level. This problem is most evident when it is done during an actual firefight. While fighting an enemy, he walks over one of the many medic packs that are strewn about and he's back up to full health instantly after you've worked to whittle him down to a block of health.
• To remedy this, BF2 health/supply packs should be modified to be more like 2142/BC2/BF3's, where one is dropped at a time (dropping another one removes the previously dropped one) and the people standing in its radius will GRADUALLY regain ammo/health. If possible, when standing an ammo pack radius, different kinds of ammo should refill at different rates. For example, frag grenades and rockets should refill slower than regular ammo for rifles/pistols to prevent explosive spam.
• Furthermore, the resupplying/healing 'aura' when packs are held in a Medic/Support soldiers' hands should be tweaked/removed. We can perhaps have the option between dropping packs on the ground for a slower 'aura' heal/supply, or have medics/support individually 'fire' on someone (with the pack in their hands) to heal/resupply them quicker.

• Reduce Frag Grenade Spam: This is already half-fixed by the ammo pack tweak, soldiers cannot continue to throw frags into an area continuously by having their ammo instantly refilled. Of course, they can still be resupplied by a Support soldier physically 'firing' on them for a quicker resupply (as stated above). The number of grenades held by each person should be reduced, possibly down to 1 or 2 grenades max. Grenade spam is another common problem in BF2, especially in more close-quarter maps like Karkand. Infantry often throw all 4 of their grenades into an area to kill other players. Grenade damage can be reduced as well to reduce frustration. Doing this will make grenades more of an enemy 'flushing' tool (without being 'cheap'). Throw a grenade to get enemies to run out of cover, rather than an instant kill (better for gameplay, feels more 'fair'). Furthermore, reduce the distance that frags can be thrown. As of now, they can be thrown extraordinary distances.

• Improve Means of Cover: For some reason, cover via Smoke Grenades has always been pretty gimped in BF. Deployed smoke grenades should last longer and cover a wider area. This will help to reduce stalemates in certain map areas and promote strategy amongst players.

• Reduce Incidences of Instant/Cheap Deaths: This is a problem that is more evident with vehicles. Especially when inside a vehicle, there are oftentimes no chance to bail or for players to retaliate. Even if you do bail in time, you die from the vehicle corpse exploding. This is pretty 'Hollywood', but possibly removing the damage done by the corpse explosions would make gameplay less frustrating. A vehicle disabling mechanic could remedy this problem too, however this is kind of stretching it. As stated above, reducing damage done by frag grenades will reduce instant/cheap deaths as well. Claymores were also considered to be very annoying in BF2, often used for 'free kills' by putting them in random places rather than to cover someone's back. Replacing this with some kind of enemy detector would probably be more helpful and less inflammatory.

• Balance Anti-Air/Air Assets: Static AA-emplacements (nicknamed "death chairs") in maps were useless in destroying/deterring enemy air assets because they were extremely weak and, because of their static positions on each map, they are identified and destroyed pretty much instantly by enemies. Possibly changing 1 of the 7 classes to an anti-air class, or at least give one class anti-air capabilities in addition to their usual loadout would help to alleviate the situation. Make those 'death chair AA" mobile weapons instead, much like the rocket launcher the Anti-Tank class has.
• Re-introduce Laser Designation to prevent Jets from spamming unguided bombs. Typically, any map that has jets will have infantry dying very often from jets, often out of nowhere and with no way to retaliate (other than with another jet). It should be made so jets can only fire their bombs after infantry has lazed a target (using specialized binoculars given to squad leaders perhaps). After marking a location, jets must 'lock on' with their bombs, much like when locking onto another jet with air-to-air missiles (with an outlined square around the target), to fire.
• TV missiles in Helicopters were also often complained about because they were instant kills (to anything). To be fair though, they were difficult to aim/control. Still, instant kills are typically really no fun for anyone. Dunno how to fix this one other than just reducing the damage done.

• Reduce/Remove Random Deviation: At best, hopefully random deviation can be reduced. If it can be completely removed, adding in physical recoil model could be more rewarding and more sensible for players.

• Modify Stamina/Sprint/Jumping/Proning: Sprinting short distances and walking slowly time and time again can get quite annoying. Infantry movement can be improved by making sprint infinite (so that it doesn't have an effect on the stamina bar) and having different sprint speeds for each class. Furthermore, if it's possible, strafing should be allowed while sprinting in order to smoothen out the currently stiff infantry movement system. Fix bunny-hopping by having repeated jumping move players less distance forward with each jump -- see BC2/BF3 for a perfect example. With these fixes, there probably isn't going to be a need for a stamina bar. Proning should take longer to get into/get up from.

• Increase Threshold to Damage from Falling: As of now, you can hurt yourself even by stepping off a sidewalk ledge too fast. The same goes for vehicles, they get damaged by every little bump on the road. This may be a fault of the engine, so it might not be able to be fixed. We'll see.

• Reduced Respawn Time if Killed After Revive(s): Hopefully this needs no explanation.

• Commander Power Tweaks: Remedy the Commander's magic supply box so that he can no longer repair his own assets (e.g. artillery cannons, UAV satellite, etc.) by dropping a supply box beside them. However, this also creates a problem in that dropped supply boxes cannot repair adjacent vehicles. This could possibly by 'bypassed' by making the supply box '(re)charge' an Engineer's wrench/repair tool so it can repair quickly/without cool-down.

• Remove/Reduce Map Fog: Give the game a fresh look by editing maps to remove/reduce that god-awful fog. I believe that most, if not all, computers can handle BF2 at rather high settings now (even my crappy laptop can do it). If you've ever seen BF2 without fog (in the editor perhaps), the game actually looks pretty good.

• Modified, More 'Immersive' HUD: To be clear, I do not want to remove player imperative information -- I simply just want to reduce screen clutter. Players should still be able to see the map, tickets left, their exact health and how much ammo they have left (as there's no way to check how many rounds left you have in the current magazine in-game (other than counting), unlike in real life where you can manually check, visually or by weight, etc.). The main menus can also be graphically tweaked to differentiate from vanilla BF2. Low priority.

• Command Rose/Radio Tweaks: Possibly re-record lines for more variation in dialogue. More ways to say you've spotted an enemy boat! Very low priority.

So yeah, it took me a while to write that list. I also hadn't realized how long it would turn out... Nevertheless, fixes such as these will make Battlefield as it should have been. The intent of this mod is to keep the core gameplay of Battlefield intact and try to balance the game without adding too many new and/or unnecessary things. Sure, it might not be realistic for each and every soldier to, for example, have an infinite number of parachutes to use, but that's part of Battlefield's fun and charm, there's a good balance between arcade-ish fun and realism.

Here's the kicker though, unfortunately, I'm not a coder, but I've had quite a bit of experience making maps, 2D graphics, and models/skins (for the GoldSrc engine used for Half-Life and Counter-Strike), so I should be able to help in that field. Mainly, like many others, I have a bunch of game design ideas.

Anyways, I believe that with a community-oriented development team, we can turn vanilla BF2 into the ultimate version of Battlefield -- something that even the eventual BF4 can't hope to surpass. There has got to be at least a few talented coders/artists interested out there that want to work on improving BF2.

Let me know what you think.

Edited by: edisleado

very good idea's thanks for writing this. sadly i cannot help here but can you please send me a link to a place where i can learn?

Hey edisleado

I have not coded in 10 years but may be of some help < I am a tester so have experience there
I like your ideas and reckon you should visit clans that still play bf2 and ask around for people that are bf2 coders
Poe is now that that great but AIX2 was brilliant and you may be able to get hold of some coders there
If you wish I can advertise your quest in my websites I have a few
my main one being bf3.com.au
I also an so disappointed in bf3 I have a bf3 game server but its dying fast
I have a bf3 server which seems to be picking up with disgruntled gamers myself included
I cant see bf3 lasting to much longer than the failed bc2 lasted

If you need any help in any way let me know
thanks
Pahkiller...

Pahkiller wrote: Hey edisleado

I have not coded in 10 years but may be of some help < I am a tester so have experience there
I like your ideas and reckon you should visit clans that still play bf2 and ask around for people that are bf2 coders
Poe is now that that great but AIX2 was brilliant and you may be able to get hold of some coders there
If you wish I can advertise your quest in my websites I have a few
my main one being bf3.com.au
I also an so disappointed in bf3 I have a bf3 game server but its dying fast
I have a bf3 server which seems to be picking up with disgruntled gamers myself included
I cant see bf3 lasting to much longer than the failed bc2 lasted

If you need any help in any way let me know
thanks
Pahkiller...

If you can find any experienced coders or mod team members that are interested in this idea -- see if they'll be willing to start a project like this. I'll take whatever help I can get.

My friends and I also host a BF3 server, its population is also shrinking by the day. For many reasons, BF3's gameplay does not lend itself to a long-living game because every round plays out pretty much the same. Hopefully we can find enough people to get this BF2 mini-mod going....

Edited by: edisleado

Did you try sending this to the alpha project team? I think they will put it in there mod you should PM them.

scopedknife wrote: Did you try sending this to the alpha project team? I think they will put it in there mod you should PM them.

I did but they stated that they are not doing any active modding at the moment, unfortunately.

That's not a yes or a no.

scopedknife wrote: That's not a yes or a no.

I feel that it was a pretty firm no.