PATCH 1.5 update

News about the latest 1.50 patch has just been reported by DICE, courtesy of TGN member Grasli; check it out:

Firstly, sorry I have been away for so long, its been a busy time. So here as per request in a number of threads here is an update to where we are with 1.50.

- Yes its still coming
- We have been working on a few things to do with DRM as old versions of Battlefield 2 use an old version of SafeDisc
- We have had a number of last minute hacks appear which we have made fixes for to help stabalise the servers.
- We have a minor issue to solve with the Chinese version of the game.

While I can't give an exact date, we are aiming to release our first Beta towards the end of April '09 as long as everything else goes well.

So, what is this about DRM? While DRM will still remain on Battlefield, the DICE team is looking to remove the requirement for the Battlefield DVD to be in the disk drive during game startup.

What we are looking at doing for Battlefield is removing the requirement for the DVD to be in the drive during boot up. Whether we can get this going is what we are checking. It won't limit your installs on other machines or limit how many times you can install though.

Additionally, Bazajaytee of DICE gave us a 1.50 change log:

FEATURES
- Additional support for Windows Vista.
- Added Highway Tampa as a required map.
- Added a new map called Operation Blue Pearl.
GAMEPLAY TWEAKS
- Changes made to both the J10 and F35B to make them more balanced. Please note that the J10 is a superior dogfighter to the F35B and as such these two aircraft will never be equally matched.
- AA targeting tweaked to make it more effective.
- Added checks to prevent "runway grieving".
- Various changes made to prevent cheating.
- Tweaked the hit detection, hits will be more accurate to the model.

However, it was stated that for legal reasons, one item is missing from the change log which will be present in the open beta release; it appears that the Battlefield community will need to wait on that front.