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I had the good fortune to receive a beta key for the Battlefield Heroes second beta test phase. Seems like an interesting game. I don’t play Team Fortress but obviously BF Heroes has much of the same look and style I guess. It also seems the game is fairly close to completion and that it is running fairly well on my machine, aside from an initial “memory could not be read” issue. But I’ve been having those across the board.
The installer, which by the way loads from your browser, currently includes only three maps, and the entire game is about 315MB installed. Aside from the somewhat creepy experience of logging in and loading the game via the browser, it seems perfect in its simplicity. Good thing it isn’t actually running in the browser like Quake Live at least. And unlike Quake Live you can pick where you want the game to install. Also, unlike Quake Live, it is a lot easier to like and get into. The main question is whether people will stand for the micro transactions that allow you to customize your character. I found it rather daft at any rate. I think I would consider playing the game though if it isn’t too unbalanced in the end. But I’d never pay for anything inside the game and I hope they don’t make new maps or anything like that available at a cost.
Also, thankfully they disabled the punkbuster rootkit / malware during the beta testing. Though they promise it will be back soon. That was also a major contributing factor to why I quickly removed any trace of Quake Live from my computer. I’d rather live with the cheaters than having that piece of shit software installed at the highest level of my system. So, while I have so far spent about 24+ hours and 300+ games and really, really like the game I’d drop it at an instant if punkbuster were to be re-enabled.
Addendum: Suck on this heroes! I found this neat little tool (from Artificial Aiming) that enables an in-game overlayed “radar” feature that shows both friendly and enemy players across the map. Like a HUD feature. Even works with hidden commandos. Apparently works even with punkbuster. Though you have to take care not to be too obvious when using it … have to let those clever commandos tag your tank with TNT once in a while so they don’t whine. Now that they do ruin the game with anti-cheating technology I think it’s our duty to cheat.
