Download Battlegroup 44 mod HERE
One of my all time favourite first person shooters, Battlefield 2 has recently had another mod finally released after over 4 years of development. The modder was responsible for releasing the Korean mod that was closed down by the original modding group way back in 2010 (and if you have Battlefield 2 is highly recommended).
This new one released some weeks ago was originally called Battlefield 1944 and was the sequel to the modders previous release Battlefield 1943 which was a follow on to the original Battlefield 1942 released in 2002; but using Battlefield 2 as its base rather than Battlefield 1942. In both games you could choose between various playable classes such as Engineer that was able to fix vehicles that had been damaged during fire fights or the anti-tank class where the player had rocket launchers and explosives to destroy tanks, Medics that could heal other players when playing multiplayer; scouts that had sniper rifles and assault troops that were mainly involved in the actual warfare; all of these classes had different load outs. The original released Battlefield 1942 was also 'one of' the first FPS games where you could use a variety of vehicles, (tanks, armoured transport, jeeps, trucks) as well as WWII planes and in one of the add-ons (Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons of WWII), jet fighters and armoured vehicles that could shoot several rockets at a time etc.
In this new mod The modder had reskinned all of the vehicles to look like vehicles, tanks and planes that were used during WWII as well as all the weapons and other equipment used in that conflict. He has also reskinned many of the custom made maps, changing the modern buildings of Battlefield 2, which was set in modern warfare times, with buildings that would have fitted in with the 1930's/40's era (thanks to one of the WWII mods (PoE 2 mod) that had given the modder permission to use their custom WWII content. He's also added new custom maps as well as worked on the AI.
I volunteered to help with the mod some time ago and was struck by how much this mod improved on the original Battlefield 2 release (and for that matter Battlefield 1942), both in content and AI. He has included a graphic mod that can be disabled if your graphic card can't handle it (see the last two images below). You require ray mapping for the graphic mod to work; so require a card that can handle ray mapping. This graphic mod improves the look of the game significantly, bearing in mind the Battlefield 2 was released in 2006. Battlefield 2 was an upgrade on the two previous Battlefield games, Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield Vietnam. Both the latter games used the Refractor 1 game engine, whereas the former used an upgraded version of the refractor engine called Refractor 2, that included lots of improvements most notably the graphics looked crisper and more realistic.
My first experience at playing the beta version last year saw me working through over 200 custom and original vanilla maps; though the final release has pared down the number of maps to just over 100, which is enough to give you many months of original game play. The AI is the best I've ever seen in any of the early Battlefield games, with some maps I felt like I was playing against live players rather than playing solo against bots.
The Battlefield 1944 mod was renamed Battleground 44 and is now a free standing mod, which means you don't require the original Battlefield 2 game to play it. You can find all the required files to be able to play the game HERE and includes the core mod, the levels folder an objects archive folder and a hot fix. The modder had included instructions on how to install the game. The mod is still being worked on, and the first release is version 0.5, so we will see updates to the mod over the coming months. From what he said last time I messaged him, he was working on adding period buildings to many of the modern custom maps. This is a very time consuming job and, as mentioned above, only 50% of the maps that were included in the last beta I tested are included in the v0.5 release. I tested every one of the 200+ maps (which took weeks of work and found at least 25% would always crash, so those are probably discounted from the mod unless they can be bug fixed. I cannot say any more on the matter though as I haven't been in touch with the modder (Anthony) for several months as I had other projects to work on since my last beta testing on the mod. I'm hoping to create a manual for the mod to include all the maps that work, but it's a long time project that requires hundreds of hours of game time to complete and I'm only a fraction of the way through doing that; (I've taken around a thousand screen captures of in game footage, including an image of the map layout of each one. Trying to get this into a document requires me to reduce the size of the images as my last attempt at creating such a manual (for Battlefield 2) over a decade ago (that took over two years of preparation), ended up with me having a Word document (which was going to be converted to PDF) that was over 50GB in size due to the thousands of images I'd added to the manual. It would take upwards of 20 minutes to load on one of my older 2 core computers back in 2010.
Anyway, if you like the older FPS games; especially the Battlefield franchise I highly recommend Battleground 44. If you do get it, please do leave your impressions below. If you have any issues installing and then getting the mod to work, leave comments over on the ModDB pages for this mod as the modder will answer those himself. When I first installed the mod I was met with an error message that said the following:
mods/bf2/shaders/staticmesh.fx not found!!! _ Do_check your working directory,_ AND_sync your shaders folder before calling upon your local rendering programmer/GP. (really)
You should find instructions on how to sort this by reading all the read me's that are included with the mod files. Once you've installed the core mod, you'll find a folder inside the Battleground 44 folder that is located inside the mod folder called !IMPORTANT SHADERS FIX! Read!
within this folder is a text file called READ ME IMPORTANT SHADER FIX! that says the following:
IMPORTANT! If you have not already optimized shader cache, do so once, just so the proper folders are created! After you have at least optimized the Battlefield 2 shaders one time, you must then open the folder in the address below that has a lot of numbers and letters! Once you open this folder, then extract the contents of the zip inside this folder to that one, overwriting anything if needed.
If you use any other mod launcher or run from the bat files in the mod folder, go to this location.
Example! Documents/Battlefield 2/mods/bf2/cache/{D7B71EE2-249F-11CF-D677-B81453C2DB35}_3153_3
NOTE: It HAS to be extracted inside the folder with the numbers and letters!!!!!
Failure to do so will have an impact on the Japanese tank textures as well as the LVT's and various Aircrafts and Ships!
This MUST be done each and every time you change graphics settings or reoptimize the shaders... You might have more folders as well, copy the fix to ALL directories just to be safe if you still can't properly see some vehicle textures!
