Tweet
QI-type question for you: What enduring PC game, first unleashed upon the world in 2002, links this here Eternal Crusade and the recently Death Star-augmented Star Wars Battlefront? Why yes, dear reader, your host does display a mischievous glint suggestive of a trap being laid, but too late - the quick-to-the-buzzer types among you have already blurted out an answer, which is of course wrong.Well, not entirely. It would be foolish to deny how deeply DICE's Battlefield series has influenced the design of every combined arms shooter of the last 15 years, with the original entrenched into the genre's foundations and its successors' largely unchallenged occupation of the centre ground. However, akin to fractious allies encamped on either side, while Battlefront and Eternal Crusade have more in common than will ever divide them, in many ways the games are quite different.
How different you ask? Well, leaving aside the obvious contrast in their respective sci-fi IPs (which, incidentally, both games display great affection for), one is accessible, evocative and insubstantial, while the other is oblique, ungainly and compelling. If they were generals fighting on the same side, they would be forever bickering over the best way forward. You can probably work out which is which, but the point is that they both get the job done, by playing to the strengths of the source material. In this case by referencing codices rather than iconic movie scenes.
Read more…
More...