I would be lax in my responsibility as a respectable journalist if I didn't mention the vehicles at this point. Until Battlefield 1942 came along, that is. Obviously this model had worked very well for MMOs like EverQuest, but fans of the FPS genre just weren't buying it. Hardcore gamers are notorious for being individualistic, and EA released a multiplayer-only FPS that relied heavily on cooperative play.
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Obviously, mods like Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat paved the way for this new mentality, but EA still stuck their collective necks out.Īctually, when you think about it, EA took another incredibly big risk on Battlefield 1942. Battlefield 1942 was one of the first retail titles that assumed people would be purchasing the game to play online. Perhaps one of the most important innovations from Battlefield 1942 was the absence of any real single-player campaign. Other games, like Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, had desperately tried to force players into this new style of play, but none had truly been successful. This new style of play represented a dramatic shift from individualistic to cooperative. When a team captured a control point, vehicles and other players could spawn at that point, which meant that players could push forward to the next point or hunker down to defend the one they had just captured.
The "control point" focus on many of the popular BF 1942 maps forced formerly individualistic players to cooperate. The gameplay in Battlefield 1942 was the first thing that players would need to master. Because the interface was instantly familiar for anyone who had played a first-person shooter, players were able to start mastering the things that made Battlefield different right away. EA evidently put a lot of work into making sure that the keyboard and mouse controls in BF1942 didn't draw too much attention to themselves, a subtle art form that should be more readily recognized. Battlefield 1942, for example, felt familiar right out of the box, but that's because the controls were incredibly accurate and organic. It's not unusual for a developer to take a little flak because their game feels overly familiar, but if you think about it, this can't possibly be a bad thing. Though, lets not forget that the folks at EA obviously had a little help from the decades of games that came before. It's pretty safe to say that without Battlefield 1942, gamers wouldn't have the expansive arena-based gameplay that has become common across many FPS titles. While most developers were content to continuously rip off Counter-Strike in the early 2000's, Electronic Arts was redefining the first-person shooter genre with Battlefield 1942.