Showing they haven't forgotten one of their old but still popular games, EA have released a new update for Battlefield 2. It's important to note that this is still a beta release, so you might want to hold off updating unless you only want to play on test servers for now.

Chief among the additions are a new map "Blue Pearl" and official support for widescreen resolutions (why did this take so long?). Here's a few of the included gameplay tweaks:

• 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.
  
• Increased the time to go prone after jumping from 0.3 seconds to 0.7 seconds

You can download the v1.50 beta 1 patch locally (1.25GB) from AusGamers. This is an incremental patch, so you'll also need 1.41 (550MB) installed.

It's not backwards compatible with 1.41 ranked servers, so unless you know what you're doing with the registry and backing up your 1.41 install, you might not want to stick this beta on.

Internode have beta servers though, and GameArena currently doesn't but they might soon.

a couple years too late I'm afraid.. played this game to death for 2 years, so over it now...

I quit this due to the large amount of data used per hour and the widespread cheating, anyone think it worth trying this? Has the cheating gotten worse?

"Increased the time to go prone after jumping from 0.3 seconds to 0.7 second"

Big big plus there. I ******* hated that ****, jump, prone, aimbot to the head... back to AA for me.

People are still playing this?????

Well 2142 sucked, so yea I guess.

Sooo true mate ... 2142 was so ridiculous that i think they actually had to offer money back to people cause it was so s***e.

theres still stacks of people playing this game. probably a few will come back when this patch is out of beta since it supposedly stops a lot of the more common cheating that was happening.

apparently people are still able to do some of the s*** things though

I used to play the s*** out of this game.

f***en hated it when half your team sat on the airstrip waiting for a jet to spawn while you got raped in the battlefield.

Widescreen support at last !!

They need a way to turn off that damn radio chatter, im sure there are people there that just spam that thing all the time:

'Enemy infantry spotted'
'Enemy infantry spotted'
'Enemy infantry spotted'
'Enemy infantry spotted'
'Enemy infantry spotted'
'Enemy infantry spotted'

arggghhh

Agreed yerolo. That s*** was so annoying. I'd still be playing this but i lost my CD :(.

jesus 1.25gig for a patch?

that'd wanna be a complete re-write!

People are still playing this?????

Second that.

So are there any australian servers floating around for this??

IN response to yerolo, (taken from bf2s forums - http://forums.bf2s.com/viewtopic.php?id=94727)

http://forums.bf2s.com/viewtopic.php?id=94727