I have a bit of a fetish for first person shooters: first there was Wolfenstein, then there was Doom, but Quake was the game that truly hooked me. My gamertag is even an homage to those days: I was in a Quake clan of over thirties called The Gib Geezers, clan tag GEZR, and I was pretty good, too; I even played Thresh (the top Quake 1 player in the world) in a tournament, but got owned by him. On the plus side, I did way better against him than John Romero did in the previous round.

I used to be a PC FPS snob. Heck, until GoldenEye hit the N64, there really weren’t any FPSs for the consoles, and while I loved GoldenEye to death, it was sort of like steering a tank when compared to the precision control offered by mouse and keyboard. The first dual-analog controlled FPS that “felt right” was a PS2 game called Red Faction. That game was one of the first I played that got the response curve correct for the analog sticks, and although the game itself was a bit of a letdown, the controls were great. Half-Life for the PS2 did such a good job, between the response curves and the lock-on system it incorporated, that I actually preferred playing it on the console over the PC version! For quite a few years I knew that an FPS could be “as good” on a console as on the PC, but I still tended to do most of my shooting on the computer. It wasn’t until I got my first Xbox 360 and started playing the original Rainbow Six: Vegas on Xbox Live that I realized that I had hit the turning point: I now preferred playing my shooters on consoles. There was none of the hassles of setting up a game to work on a PC, and the Friend’s List on Live just made playing over the Internet too easy. Everyone was playing the same exact game on the same exact hardware; the playing field was level, and immaculately groomed. You put the disc in the drive and things just worked.

Prior to that epiphany, I had been playing a lot of Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142 on the PC. I enjoyed the sheer scale of these multiplayer games, which has always been the main attraction of the Battlefield series since its inception with Battlefield 1942. There’s nothing quite like the controlled chaos of multiple small firefights occurring all over a relatively large battlefield. With 64 players on the map at once, no two matches are ever exactly the same. The thing is, the console shooters never approached this same sense of scale, so although I had migrated my shooting over to “console-land”, I was still missing a piece of the puzzle. Yes, the various Rainbow Six, Halo, and Call of Duty games were, along with their multitude of brethren, filling most of my single-player and small-scale multiplayer needs, but I was still missing one of my favourite sub-classes of the genre. It was with some eager anticipation that I awaited Battlefield: Bad Company; here at last might be the final nail in my PC gaming coffin.

Being Canadian, I found it too difficult to get into the Beta test. I didn’t feel like lying about my country of origin just to get a Beta ticket, and I was worried about ruining the experience by overplaying one map in the demo, so I had to wait for the retail package to hit the shelves before I had the chance to check out the game. Before I even unwrapped the package, I knew there’d be a serious advantage of playing this game on the console; no SecureRom or driver woes. BF2 and 2142 were notoriously awful to get up and running; both of those games took me at least a full day of research and pain before I succeeded in actually playing them. Thankfully, EA hasn’t figured out a way of ruining my console gaming experience before it even starts…yet. Mind you, in my zeal to approach the game “untarnished by a demo”, I lost out on the chance to unlock the Uzi for my specialist class, and I lay the blame for that on EA and their bizarre scheme for unlocking various weapons with a marketing meta-game that forces you to pre-order, visit web sites, sign up for spam, and play the demo in order to get every unlock. In my case, by waiting and playing the demo after the product launch, I found it impossible to get into a multiplayer game: everyone was playing the retail game; and to make matters worse, EA took down “most” – all, as far as I can tell – of their demo servers. The multitude of ways to blow their toes off that EA manages to ferret out with each new release boggles the mind; aren’t these guys gamers? Why don’t they understand what we like and dislike? What we like are unlocks that are all achievable within the game; what we despise are unlocks that are not achievable by any means. I mean, here they are publishing a game that features lots of collectible guns; they have to assume that it will be played by people who enjoy collecting these guns. Collectors are completists; we feel the burning desire to collect all of something. We want to unlock all of the guns. Anything short of all of them is sacrilegious. We are on a holy quest to unlock every single gun, and any game design that prevents that from happening is going to cause us profound, deep, personal pain. This may be news to EA marketing morons, but pain is bad. When I load up the game and go to my unlock menu and see that Uzi grayed out, it is taunting me. Why they didn’t make it unlock at level 25, like the five “special edition” guns, I’ll never understand. I know there are thousands of folks who feel the same way about that pre-order only sniper rifle with the really sweet stats, or who can’t seem to get their newsletter sign-up code for the shotgun. I make my statement here; no game should, at launch, feature item unlocks that cannot be reasonably achieved in game. It should be a law, folks.

Maybe this is a good time to mention another issue I have with the unlock system. Many years ago, when OS/2 came out, I had the interesting good fortune to attend a private meeting of the VPs of Technology from the top ten game companies in the world. They were discussing OS/2 and MS Windows, and deciding what to do about them. The representative from EA explained that he couldn’t convince IBM’s engineers to make OS/2 handle changes in screen modes without it requiring a reboot, so everyone agreed that they didn’t need to worry about supporting OS/2. See, without changing modes, it would be difficult for games to run on OS/2, but the game companies reasoned that if they didn’t bother making games for it then the operating system wouldn’t ever attain enough market share for them to worry about it. They were right; despite its cool 32-bit multi-threading, OS/2 never caught on with the home market, and it died a quick death. Now, what does that have to do with the unlocks in BF:BC? Well, imagine an unlock system where you have to exit your current game in order to access each new unlock! Yup, BF:BC requires that you exit your current multiplayer game and party in order to unlock each new item. It is frustrating beyond belief, especially when you get multiple unlocks over an evening’s play. When I see game design like this, I just want to throttle the person responsible for it.

On the plus side (and a very big plus it is), BF:BC has something new for the franchise; a solid single-player story mode. It features funny characters and dialogue, and is very much a cartoon of a story compared to the harsh reality of Call of Duty 4 (and let’s face it, every modern shooter has to bear the comparisons to the almighty CoD4). BF:BC’s SP mode compares favourably to CoD4’s in my mind, even if the story is much more lighthearted in presentation, because the SP game mechanics are just so much better. The levels are large and open to many different approaches to play; you aren’t constantly forced to “go down this road”, or “up that alley”, and this is only augmented by the destructible terrain. The enemies stay dead when you kill them; there aren’t those silly unending waves of respawning bad guys that made CoD4 such a chore to slog through. Taken together, these factors give the player almost unlimited choices in how to play a level. Choice is good. I’m of the firm belief that choice beats out atmosphere any day; game play is more important than game presentation. BF:BC also features a slightly longer SP campaign than CoD4 or RB6:V2, and I like that. You get to operate several different vehicles, fly a helicopter, and fire artillery barrages, so there is a nice variety to the gameplay, and all of these activities are enjoyable; none feel like they were just “tacked on”. All vehicles offer the ability to switch seats on the fly and toggle between first person and third person views. The helicopter flying is dumbed down from what you experience in MP mode, which I thought was a shame, but given the difficulties many folks experience flying choppers online I guess it was a good design decision that stops the average player from hurling their controller through their expensive HDTV screen in sheer frustration. I would have liked to have had the option to turn on “advanced flight controls”, but I’ll live without it seeing as the helicopter piloting segment was only a single level’s worth of play. There are many weapons to find laying around, and all can be picked up and used; the game even keeps a checklist of all the ones you’ve found. There are several special pieces of equipment that you find, and often it is up to the player to decide whether they want to keep using that nifty mortar strike designator or swap for a rocket launcher. There is yet another collectible lying around as well in the form of gold bullion, just to keep the player looking under every rock. All in all, the SP mode stands on its own, which is a great thing in a series that is normally multiplayer-oriented only.

The game supports a maximum of 24 players in multiplayer, far short of those glorious 64 player matches that have become a mainstay of the PC BF games. This is a real shame. The console gaming world needs an option for large-scale FPS gaming; sadly, it looks like we may have to try that out on the PS3 with the upcoming Massive Action Game, or MAG. I say sadly, because Xbox Live is the natural home for such a beast; I’m not looking forward to dealing with the Playstation Network on such a scale. Mind you, Sony has some astounding pedigree in this area: Planetside; it was a fantastic game on the PC that allowed literally hundreds of players to engage in massive, continent-spanning battles; thousands of players fought simultaneously across multiple planets. It was unique and fun; the graphics may have been circa Quake 2, but the gameplay was exceptional. Maybe MAG will actually pull of the feat of making 256 player battles fun to get into and play. I know I’m drooling at the possibility, but I’d feel more assured of its success if it was on the king of online services at Live. For now, I’ll just have to pretend that 12-on12 battles are “big”; at least it’s better than the 9-on-9 team deathmatch allowed by CoD4 and Halo 3. Unfortunately, not only is the game smaller than I’d like, the squads are smaller as well, and there is no mechanic for getting more than three of your friends onto your team! Heck, most of the time those three won’t all actually wind up in the squad with you, and frequently one or two will even wind up on the opposing team for at least a match. On the PC the BF games were great for clan matches, but there is absolutely no way to set up a clan match on BF:BC. I expect any modern MP shooter to support team-sized parties, not just four players (unless the max team size is four). That is just weak; there’s no excuse for such poor game design.

The multiplayer game is where we expect to find the meat of a Battlefield game, and here there is something surprising: the main MP game mode of BF games has always been Conquest mode, but BF:BC shipped without that mode. It seems that it wasn’t finished in time to make the publishing deadline, so instead of holding back the game EA opted to ship “as-is” and offer Conquest mode as a free download after the fact. As of August seventh Conquest mode was available for download on Xbox Live; prior to that there was only one MP mode, “Gold Rush”. In Gold Rush, the two teams are assigned roles as either Attacker or Defender, and the attacking team guards pairs of crates containing gold. The attackers must destroy each pair of containers in sequence, which earns more reinforcements (lives) and advances them across the level with each success. The defending team tries to “bleed out” the attackers by killing them faster than the attacking team can earn reinforcements. Now, Gold Rush is a fine mode and all, but I have to question EA for shoving a BF game out the door without its trademark gameplay intact.

Luckily, Conquest mode eventually did become available. In Conquest mode, both teams must attack and defend simultaneously. They work to capture or defend five flags scattered over large maps, and for every flag they possess, the enemies’ reinforcements will be reduced over time. Players may spawn at their team’s flags or on a squad mate’s location. The dual roles of attack/defense that both teams must engage in requires tight teamwork, which normally gives this game mode an interesting balance of strategy and tactics, and is in large part why the franchise has been so successful in the past. Sadly the developers at DICE have failed to give the players the tools they need to achieve any semblance of strategy: squads are limited to four players in size, and you can only communicate with people in your squad. There are no commanders, no squad leaders, no lines of communication or map waypoint markers…none of the tools that the PC crowd used to great effect in other BF games, or in Planetside. It’s like DICE decided that console gamers were too dumb and disorganized to use these features, and unfortunately that comes dangerously close to being a self-fulfilling prophesy. Many of the matches I’ve competed in online have ended very quickly, as one team totally disintegrates because they all fight for the same flag and ignore the other four capture points. Large-scale maps and battles with multiple objectives require good communications systems to support them; maybe if EA had held onto the game until Conquest mode was actually finished they would have noticed this problem and fixed it. As it is, the mode can only be played properly if, by blind luck, the game dumps some PC BF vets onto the same team and they all play with one eye on the minimap and a good deal of telepathic messaging. This is a real shame as Conquest mode is otherwise the richer of the two MP modes in terms of strategic decisions and opportunities for different tactical approaches. Even Gold Rush mode suffers from a lack of communication: many times I’ve needed to talk to a team member who wasn’t in my squad, just to arrange simple things like who was going to pilot the helicopter and who was going to gun, or to set up a small flanking maneuver…all to no avail. Having all twelve members of a team chatter to each other all the time would be bad, but the answer is not to restrict communications to a group of four and exclude everyone else. It has been done successfully before, by this very franchise…who lost the thread this time? It would be too easy to designate the party hosts as Squad Leaders, and allow them to push right on the D-pad to talk to the other Squad Leaders. Add in proximity chat ala Halo3, or map the left D-pad to a lock-on chat for the player you are currently looking at, and BF:BC would fix all the communication issues.

The poor communication system also exasperates the problem that BF:BC has evinced with team-killing. See, sometimes idiots on your team decide to kill their own team-mates. Maybe they want to drive a certain vehicle and have no way to ask you for it, or maybe they’re just a hateful morons. In any case, this is a game that features team damage, but no system to stop team-killing. Oh, the offenders lose points within the round for each team kill, but this is zero deterrent. Now, this has been handled easily before; all you need is a way to vote off the offenders, or give them 3 strikes and they are out, or give the person who was team-killed the option of booting their killer. There are lots of easy fixes to this well-known problem, but for some reason BF:BC implemented none of them. All in all, I have to say that it’s like the MP game designer hadn’t played any games like this before, and no great amount of play-testing was done.

It is a testament to how good the SP is, and how much fun the basics of the MP are, that despite the aggravating flaws in the game I still consider it a 4 out of 5. The Frostbyte Engine does a great job on the destructible terrain and rendering the graphics, and the audio is extremely well done. With a little tender loving care, EA and DICE could have had a perfect game; as it is, I think BF:BC probably suffered by being “hurried out the door”.