I recommend a 3 gmhz machine, with at least a gig of ram, a “very good” video card. 9600XT is the minimum I would recommend. a SATA drive with a rippin read speed would be nice… so would 800FSB, and the best sound you can get… cause it is amazing.
Graphics wise… I have 98% of the graphica and sound cranked on my machine, it makes playing the game incredible.
Sleepy - I dominated HL, and did very well in CS… and the FPS action in those games is much better than the FPS action in BF and BF2. You can dance, shoot, change weapons, get batterys… and so on in HL/CS… this is not the case in BF, BF is much more realistic. If you get shot 5 times in the chest with a machine gun, you will die. There isn’t as much face to face battles, its basically
find someone, shoot them first, if they don’t die, call for backup and throw a gernade, or hop into a vehicle.
Vehicles play a major role in this game. If you are in a tank, you are extremely deadly. If you don’t have any pilots on your team… consider yourself dead. If you can’t fly, don’t waste a chopper/jet by practicing in a full server, leave those to the people who can do the most damage in them.
SQUADS - There is squad play in this game that is incredible. The Squad Leader is a mobile spawn point, as long as he is alive, for only the members in his squad (up to 6 people). He can also send commands to the members of the squad : Attack here, defend, supplies are needed… and things like that. The better you can organize your squad, the more deadly your team becomes. Travel in a pack, heal eachother, recharge eachother, and so on. Also the more people at an enemy flag, or neutral flag, the faster you take that flag, and the easier it is to defend after its yours.
Commander - You can also be a commander, which I love to do. You can call an artillary strike to wipe out anything within a 200ft radius (great for taking ou fleets of enemy vehicles) or you can drop supplies for those needing ammo/health that are in a bind. or send out a UAV to spot enemies. you can scan the map with radar to spot them, then send their coordinates to your team so they are aware of enemies.
This game is so complete it could be used as a flight sim. The planes/choppers handle very well, though dumbed down from the BF/DC days… any amateur can pilot a chopper now… in BF/DC nobody but the most skilled pilots could get from A to B, and a select few could also do some damage with them.
There are 15+ vehicles I think starting from buggies and 5 person boats, to 8 person APCs and mobile Destroyers.
Even if you crank down the video, and play it on a crappy rig… it is worth playing i guess… but when you see a PC that can actually play it, you will def be upgrading.