EA and Dice have announced that the long, long, long awaited Battlefield v1.50 patch is almost ready to be released and will be available next Wednesday (Australian time):

After nearly a year of development and three public beta tests Battlefield 2 v1.50 is ready for release. The update will be released on Tuesday 1st September at 5pm UK, 6pm Europe. Stay tuned for release announcement in the near future!

As part of Update 1.50 we are glad to announce that not only is Highway Tampa now a required install included in the update but Euro Forces (Great Wall, Taraba Quarry and Operation Smoke Screen) and Armored Fury (Midnight Sun, Operation Harvest and Operation Road Rage) is now FREE for all Battlefield 2 players. Including the brand new map, Operation Blue Pearl this brings EIGHT new maps that everyone can play and will be added to ranked Battlefield 2 servers world wide. The Booster Pack content is included in the update and has made the file just over 2Gb in size.

We will, of course, have the patch as soon as it is released.

Pay attention kiddies...

Euro Forces and Armored Fury is now FREE for all Battlefield 2 players

This is just another reason why paying for downloadable content is a crock of s***....

Euro forces is only two years old...good to see you hold out for so long. Especially as most people have moved on to many different games.

I didn't hold out.
I bought Armoured Fury and enjoyed it cept that the community hadn't and was hard to get a game going...
Haven't touched BF2 in almost as long because of it - that and no offical support for wide screen.

Paying for content that should be factored into original retail price segregates the community so badly and forces the game into an early grave.

Their business model should be reversed.
A game this old if you still want patches (read: expansions) etc, is when you should ask for a couple of bucks per patch. Not on content that should be part of initial purchase price and considered a patch.

I wrote this back in 2002 about why expansion packs in FPS games need to be handled better (or gamers need to wise up and not buy them). Community fragmentation is inevitable. They need to make them more like WoW/MMOs where the players can still play together. It'd be f***ing trivial too; just make sure if you buy the BF expansion pack you can still join regular servers, except you get access to the better weapons or whatever. It'll need balancing but the alternative is screwing the players.

I remember reading your take on it as well and agreed with you 100%
I just wanted to test the water and was, in the long term disappointed.

Yeh, I think that's what everyone does.. just get too tempted to try the juicy new goodness and levels and stuff offered in the expansion. We had non-stop problems with running servers for all the expansions since BF1942 days - we'd inevitably get hordes of people asking for servers, so we'd put them up and they'd sit there largely unused - so we'd shut them down and everyone would complain. Most people just ended up playing the base game eventually even if they had expansions because it was the only way they could get a reliable game.

Company of Heroes allows people with expansions to play those without and same with Dawn of War. That is how it should be done.

It's really a shame when people fork out their hard earned for something which is then released for free.

The cost of an expac isn't very much but people seem to believe that they are entitled to more than what they payed for. CoD5 is suffering from it with delays for fixes because they want it funded by someone. MMOs like WoW have monthly fees to cover content/fix patches, expansions like TBC and WotLK still cost extra.

Interestingly though, whilst 1.5 is giving away Euro and Armored it doesn't mention Spec Forces.

Episodic content for an original game that you can't play if your friends dont have the episode is really stupid.
All it does is fracture the existing game community in to smaller and smaller groups being only able to play only that specific module.

On the point of COD5, I am really disappointed with how much is still so very wrong with that game. Asus Xonar users still can't play with sound. :(