Battlefield 2: Special Forces First Details

IGNPC: Your eyes get totally screwed up.

Yee: Yes, totally screwed up. The new flash-bang is also a counter to the night vision. With the day maps we also are going to try to include a mixture of areas that are dark so that the night vision is still useful. It's not just about night vision in night missions, but about night vision in dark and light areas.

AJ: We're playing on the light and the dark. If you're going into somewhere in the middle of the night, you're going to go into some areas that are there aren't any street lights and there aren't any lights on the buildings, and those areas are going to be very dark. But if you go into a parking lot of something, there's plenty of lights there to see very well so in those areas it's really not going to be to your advantage to wear night vision in there. Also it helps to balance things out with hiding in dark corners as hiding from night vision is going to be pretty tough.

IGNPC: You said that night vision was also going to be in commander mode, are there going to be any more additions in that part of the game?

AJ: No.

IGNPC: Are you planning any big changes to the classes or will they also pretty much remain the same aside from some new equipment?

AJ: We've decided to leave the classes alone, but your going to find that what we've added does change things up a bit. It's something we joke about now when we talk about making the player feel like a super soldier. We'll go ahead and test Special Forces and then go back and play BF2 for our own enjoyment and we're suddenly saying "damn I don't have that!" or "damn I can't do this!" and we miss those abilities that are in Special Forces.

Although we haven't really tweaked the classes at all, by adding in the new elements like the grappling hook and zip line that David mentioned, now the classes that carry these items play a little differently. They have a bit more versatility to them. So now you really want to have these guys as part of your squad. And the squad becomes more powerful as a whole now.

Yee: There's some additional equipment that makes those support classes a bit different. There's the flash-bang and the tear gas grenades. Those two really do change the way the game plays when it comes to infantry.

IGNPC: Those zip-lines and grappling hooks seem to make it a bit sneakier and easy to travel around a level.

AJ: Absolutely. You don't have to take the tried and true routes that most infantry have to travel along. Or even one that seemed more planned. For instance, in a city map you might find a building with a ladder. Well, it doesn't take very long for players to figure out that the building with the ladder gets used by snipers pretty often, so it's easy to find where to check. Now, with the grappling hook, you can climb up on any building you so choose. Actually, any static object in the world. All the sudden, you can attack from any direction. The zip-line will allow you to get down from that position, so you can have a guy with the grappling hook and a guy with a zip line in your squad. You can pretty much move anywhere.

Yee: The cool thing about the zip-line, too, is that it's not just a sneakier methods of attack, but you can really get around the map quickly with these things. In Battlefield, if you're at a point and there's no vehicles, you'll be hoofin' it the whole way. With these zip-lines and the way the maps are designed, you can really get across a map quickly. It's a high-intensity gameplay.

Steve Groll: All the kits complement each other just like the members of a squad would in a special forces group as well.

IGNPC: Just to clarify, each of these things like the zip-line goes to one of the particular classes, like the zip-line goes to the support class while the grappling hook goes to the sniper or something?

AJ: The final layout isn't set right now -- we're still balancing that out. But we're taking classes that have less features with them and pumping those guys up with these added abilities.