With Bad Company, DICE are finally giving Battlefield a storyline driven single player mode, instead of focusing solely on online. Rated one of last years best games, how does it stand in today's gaming environment?
If you've played any of the other Battlefield games, you'll know that they are great fun, but tend to be pretty unstable. With BC though, this is not the case. Even in the middle of extremely intense battles, the game doesn't think about crashing, something DICE seemed incapable of doing before this game.
You play as Private Preston Marlow, or as you squad mates in B-Company refer to you as, 'The New Guy'. Your squad mates, Sarge, Haggard and the bizarrely named Sweetwater, have their own unique personality, and are all truly fun characters, odd for what is essentially a war game, but in context of the game, entirely normally.
You start off the game completing tasks too dangerous for anyone else to do, but you basically get abandoned by the army pretty early on. Its pretty clear right from the start that Bad Company is trying to be light hearted about war, the smiley face grenade pin says it all. And your team mates will often be joking around in the middle of an intense battle. Other people didn't like this, but I think it's a nice change.
The respawn system is very kind to say the least. When you die, instead of resetting everything back to your last save point, you are placed out of harms way, and everything that happened before you died will still have happened. It makes the game a bit easier, but I didn't mind as it suited the style of game.
If you have never played a game with a high level of destruction, you'd probably say that it wouldn’t change the game play that much. You couldn't be more wrong. There's no need to find the door any more, you just get to blast a hole in just about anything. This was such fun, and I didn't tire of it, even after 100 hours+ of online battles. The destruction is a bit unrealistic, but according to DICE, BC 2 will have much more realistic destruction, and its no big deal anyway, because blowing stuff up is so fun, you wont care.
The graphics are pretty dull, at least for the PS3 version, and annoyingly grainy even on a HD TV. The water was probably the worst seen in any game of late, but the rest is pretty standard, and good enough that they don't hurt the game. Audio is pretty impressive, although they can be a bit repetitive, and not unique enough. The classic BF theme music has been changed significantly, but it manages to sound better than ever.
It is a bit disappointing that in scenarios where your teammates have huge opportunities to help you out, they just sit there, lamely firing at something that doesn’t advantage you in any way.
The multiplayer on launch had only one mode, Gold Rush. A Conquest mode was later added but it failed to match the excellent Gold Rush. Gold Rush consists of two teams, an attacker and a defender. The attacker fights to destroy the gold crates help by the defender. Some maps are a bit biased to one team, and others are over far to quickly, but it’s still some of the most fun I’ve had this gen, and I've played this more online than any other game this gen.
The online is made so great by two things, destruction, and the fact that the maps are designed to make you change you game style as you progress through them. Some maps are very open ended at the start, offering ideal conditions for sniping, but close right up further on, forcing you to change to a shotgun or an assault rifle. The kits are all well balanced, and at the same time all are specialised for different scenarios.
Vehicles can take over some maps, but they've always played a big part in the Battlefield franchise, and so their omission would just not be right. Tanks are well balanced, in that they are very powerful, but are fairly easy to take down.
In conclusion, the addition of the single player makes this the best overall Battlefield ever. Other games in the series may have had better online, but this trumps them in every other aspect.
With the franchise’s mainline entries failing to find their footing in recent years, now is the perfect time for a Battlefield: Bad Company remake.
Of course there is no counter argument. This is what fans of the franchise have wanted for years. This and/or BF Bad Company 2.
When asked why there hasn't been another Bad Company:
“There's one thing that lingers with Bad Company that we've been asking ourselves: What is it that the people really liked about Bad Company?" DICE general manager Karl Magnus Troedsson told Eurogamer.
Troedsson says that he and his team can’t put their fingers on what it is that people loved about that branch of the brand. “It's hard for people to articulate what that is, which is actually hard for us,” he says. “It would be hard to remake something like that. Can we do it? Of course. We have our theories when it comes to the multiplayer."
(Source: Game Informer, June 24, 2014)
I always activate the Black Weapon on BFV Solomon Islands for all the BC2 fans who hear/recognize it, thus starting the events of BC2 on BF5 :)
Derrrunnn. Derrrunnn.
What is so hard to understand for them?
Bad Company 2 is one of the best and most memorable games in the series because:
- It was class-based (duh)
- Heavy focus on squads
- Substance over map size or gimmicks
- Fantastic and realistic gun play
- Well designed maps
- Destructible environments (why has this been minimised so hard in the series? You could demolish buildings in bad company 2 with some well placed C4
- Great progression system and variety in play
- No stupid CoD imitations or focus on the store over the game
- It was *drumroll* incredibly good fun?
- It was unmistakably BATTLEFIELD
EA: "As we close in on 15 years since the release of Battlefield 1943, and Bad Company™ 1 & 2, we are announcing that their journey is coming to an end."
This reminds me... I have ME on my PS3 hdd. Never really played it, but it was free.
And it still says nothing about being able to downloaded even when it's off the storefront, that's a huge ouchie for some who somehow still have it in their backlog...
Dont make it an issue when it's not. If you haven't played it in 15 years, chances are you'll never play it.
Online game servers shut off eventually all the time. Doesn’t matter if you have the disc or not. Even if you have the disc, it’ll be just paperweight unless the game lets you connect directly to a friend or LAN play.
Read the article bro. They are delisting the games, including mirrors edge which is an offline game. Online servers i can understand, not being able to buy/download the games anymore? Completely separate issue, especially seeing as how some these games had lengthy sp campaigns and not just mp.
Some brilliant minds created servers to keep these old online games alive. A lot of ps2 and ps3 games that had there servers shut down a long time ago have been restored by fans to keep it going. Warhawk, killzone 2, socom 2/ confrontation, resident evil outbreak series, etc.
The disc still exist. I don’t understand the issue. You guys are upset about that “all digital future” yet these games are not “digital only”. Hell digital only is a minority in the gaming world and so far we haven’t moved into it, the only digital only games are games as a service or online only games, which end up failing in the end.
This is no different than a store that stops selling old games, just go and buy a copy somewhere else. So which is it, you hate all digital or you like it? Make up your mind.
Talk about missing the point entirely. I'm not going to sit here and explain it to you, figure it out.
Talk about whining about something and not wanting to explain from an off handed sarcastic original comment.
I got the point just fine. You’re literally complaining about something that has an easy alternative to it.
@ManMarmalade
No I got it, it has to do with the push towards a future of all digital and reprocussions of losing games. Something I already stayed that hasn’t happened nor is it large enough right now to cause any issues as the games that are all digital are online only to begin with or make up the minority of games
So I’ll say it again, the disc still exists for these games that are over a decade old and can still be played easily. You guys are contradicting the whole “we don’t want a digital only future” crying when the dude I originally responded to stated:
“Read the article bro. They are delisting the games, including mirrors edge which is an offline game. Online servers i can understand, not being able to buy/download the games anymore? Completely separate issue, especially seeing as how some these games had lengthy sp campaigns and not just mp.“
So again, which is it? Do you hate all digital or do you want it?
On PC I don't think it's much of a problem but I'm sad to see BF43 being shut down. I haven't played it in a while since it's stuck on PS3, but i preferred it way more over BF3. It was the lack of invisible barriers which made it better for me.
Does anyone play the last BF anymore? I searched crossplay servers and it was 20 people the most on all the servers? Can never find a game
The last BC you mean? I was still able to find 10v10 on ps3 2 years ago on NA servers during the evenings. I have all the free and paid dlc installed, but there want any matches in the Vietnam dlc.
With this multiplayer experiment going every way but right, it's time for Battlefield to return to what made it so great - a fun single player mode coupled with classic multiplayer.
Yes, because there is no way they could screw up a BFBC 3 like they just did the last 2 Battlefield games, right?. /s
They're not the same DICE devs they used to be they're just EA puppets. You will just keep getting COD/APEX/SEIGE BF games now, because idiots keep throwing money at EA for this garbage.
BF is dead especially after this abysmal release.. what have EA done to this beloved franchise.. it’s really upsetting they are so far disconnected from what the actual fans want from this series.. such a same
If they would of made BC3 and stuck to the same formula as BC2 but gave it the next gen treatment it would of been a massive hit
Tbh, I think BF 2042 was a battle royale, and then they changed direction mid-development and didn't have enough time to finish it properly before EA's deadline. Specialists make more sense in a br, for example.
Like Halo Infinite before its delay, it needed at least an extra year of development. When you think about it, Infinite had 6 years and BF 2042 had just 3 years. It seems that's just not enough time to make a high quality AAA game anymore.
Here's evidence for BF 2042 originally being a battle royale game, heavily influenced by Apex Legends:
https://gamerant.com/battle...
Thing is i dont think they're capable of capturing what made those fun/different anymore.
They actually admitted that in an interview a while back. They quite openly said they had no idea what made those games so popular and how to recapture it.
Maybe if they actually went and played BC2 they would find out.
I mean, if they can bring back fun Star Wars single player games, anything's possible, yeah?
I think that says more about the people working on games nowadays. They have no idea what they are doing and aren't true gamers themselves. Because gaming is a billion money industry they follow the orders of the business men and investors who only look at making maximum profit of games.
Look at the beta and the launch of Battlefield 2042 alone; how can you not see the negative reactions of the community coming? That alone tells us enough of the people involved in making the game.
Really? They don't understand what made the Bad Company games popular, or they just don't want to admit what made them popular...That is most likely what the creatively bankrupt writers of the Disney made Star Wars films say about The original trilogy. They don't want to admit that the people before them were just better and that ALL the things that make the Bad company games great are the same things that they probably deem "problematic". Just think how they would destroy Haggard if they made a new game? Everything about his character makes modern game developers sob and run for the first safe space filled with teddys and the soothing voice if Anita Sarkeesian piped in from a speaker in the ceiling.
Like Ubisoft and the recent Splinter Cell rumors, I don’t trust EA/DICE in its current form anymore. They’d find a way to ruin Bad Company 3.
EA knows players want BC3 the same way Activision knows players want MW2 back. They will not make it because the goal is to make games built around MTX and Battle Royale.
Good review ! And i have to agree about the Fun factor for this game.I just got done playing a few matches with my friend actually, I don't think i'll ever understand why COD4 is considered the better MP game.
The only thing i don't like about BF: BC is how stiff the movements of the characters are, or, how you get stuck in doorways or stairs..
Well..Compared to BF2
I remember playing BF2 on the original Xbox..Man..that game was so incredible.It single handedly got me into Online gaming.
yeaah it is really fun. You say the destruction isnt very realistic but its some of the best on consoles. I can not wait until Bad company 2, gonna get it instead of MW2 I think. I hope they improve the campaign a bit though.