Dragon Age: Origins was a massive game, and it's about to get even bigger. Though there have been bits and pieces of downloadable content released so far, the upcoming Awakening is the largest yet. It's billed by BioWare as a full-on expansion and continues on after the events of the base game. It seems the darkspawn from Origins are still a threat, though BioWare isn't commenting on the reasons behind their presence for obvious reasons. Nobody wants to spoil the story before the content is event out, right?

I have to admit, I used to be a bona fide Battlefield junkie. In fact, IGN played so much Battlefield 1942 that some of the editors took to living in the office. I honestly wasn't as big a fan of most of the sequels until Bad Company came around. So when DICE announced the PC beta for Bad Company 2 yesterday, I was first in line to download it and, consequently, the first to endure the pre-release connectivity issues. Things have smoothed out since then and I've been able to play through a few rounds of the PC demo. If this is a sign of things to come, we might have to think about breaking out the IGN sleeping bags again.
The new beta map is Port Valdez, the harbor at the southernmost end of the Trans Alaskan Pipeline. The Russians are dropping in to take the port from the Americans and neither side is willing to give up. From the initial plane drops, the Russians will advance through snow-covered hills and industrial urban areas as they seek out US M-COM stations. Port Valdez supports the Rush game mode, so the US will have to defend their stations until the Russians run out of respawn tickets.
The map has a great flow to it and plays out in three waves. In the first, the Russians drop in by air, which is pretty thrilling to see no matter which side of the battle you're on. Pathfinders have already set a few vehicles in place for the Russians to use, and it's no trouble to jump on the armored vehicle or one of the new quads and get right into the action. The first line of M-COM stations is at a construction site on the outskirts of the US defenses, so a coordinated attack can usually get things progressing nicely.

The quads are a great new addition to the game for a number of reasons. First, they give the attacking players a lot of added mobility without necessarily making those players particularly threatening to the defenders. After all, it's not much trouble to take one of these out with a quick grenade shot. On the other hand, it does give fast and sneaky players a chance to get around behind the defenders and attack them from the rear while their attention is being held by the frontal assaults. Of course, thanks to the rough terrain, it can be hard for the quads to get anywhere without being out in the open, so they'll have to rely on speed rather than stealth to avoid danger. The second wave progresses into the port itself where there are more opportunities for close cover and more changes to appreciate the game's destructible environments. It seems like things can quickly get out of hand here and the collapsing cover opens up some dangerous lines of sight for the recon players. From there, you'll pass on to the final set of M-COM stations, which the US will defend with some pretty serious hardware. I've played a couple of games that just sort of hung at this point with the defenders waiting as the attackers' tickets just withered away.
All this action takes place in a narrow corridor between the ocean and the mountains. It focuses the action nicely and offers a nice bit of variation with lots of building cover for close-in fighting and a few open streets and tall hills for the sniping crowd. Fortunately, the attackers are given a bit of a safe zone where they can gather without being spawn camped.

Overall, the beta has a good feel, despite the sometimes laggy servers and as-yet unoptimized visuals and performance. Some of the lag issues seem less of a problem today, even in the larger PC matches with a full complement of 32 players. The physics for the vehicles and the destructible environments feel right, with the sort of dramatized realism that the series has been known for. Hit detection seems fairly solid and I rarely felt the annoying separation you seomtimes get between the weapons and targets. It's a bit of an indefinable characteristic but there's a credible sense of weight and connection to the firefights here, so you really get a sense that you're hitting your targets, especially at short ranges. Add in the fact that it only takes a couple of hits to kill someone, and it makes it even more intense.
Of course, there are the usual Battlefield concessions, like rockets not really feeling lethal enough in enclosed spaces, and vehicles getting strangely hung up on the environments, and soldiers who haven't been trained to lie down, but all those issues don't seem to matter once the action begins to heat up.
If you're curious about the game, which is due out in March, you can grab the demo now on Xbox Live or get a code for IGN's Fileplanet beta by pre-ordering the game.

Author by: Steve Butts