Humbling of Battlefield [reblog]
By Raycevick
2021
I've theorized for the past three years that the only way DICE could rekindle hype for a new Battlefield title was announce Bad Company 3. Battlefield V's a game whose reputation seems to change with every rotation of the Earth, but one thing's for certain, it was the most controversial title in the series to date.
I've stick by this belief with the assumption that Bad Company 2's had enough time to pass for it to become nostalgic. It's a game before microtransactions were the norm; before Kinect & PlayStation Move, let alone Discord.
It's a game so attached to what the game's have become and yet, is different in so many ways. It's graphics are ever so slightly cartoony, compared to the franchise's push for photo-realism, and boundary pushing technology.
It's gameplay and level-design was built around Rush rather than the long standing Conquest, relegated to five control points tops on the largest map released months after launch. Matches were designed for 24 players, 32 on PC as a bonus.
Simply put, Bad Company 2 is unique even to this day, rather than fundamentally dated like many earlier entries are in a franchise.
However, I've got a personal bias.
Bad Company 2's one of my all time favorite games. I've got memories of its Beta, Demo, Launch, DLC, and Expansion. I remember buying a $3 PS3 Beta Code off of Ebay just to give it a try, and falling in love. I remember trying to convince my friends to give it ago who were unimpressed with Bad Company 1, only for us to play the Demo for a solid week consecutively.
I remember how upset we got whenever the servers would crash mid-session, because so many people were playing at once. I remember reviving a friend 20+ times as a Medic because an enemy sniper would kill him before he could move after I revived. I remember driving jeeps through the forests of Vietnam and crashing through the walls into an enemy base.
I'm certainly not alone in having memories like these, many will speak of Bad Company 2 with this sort of reverence and retrospect.
However, Battlefield 3 is only a year and a half older.
That group of friends I played with were disappointed by the comparative lack of a destruction, the heavier emphasis on infantry combat, the arguably inferior map design, etc.
However, Battlefield 3 was the Battlefield 2 of its generation for millions. It was the Crysis of its generation for millions. It was many people's first foray into online gaming, or at least, of large scale warfare.
I've got fond memories of Battlefield 3 as well, but not as many as Bad Company 2, due to playing it less overall, partly due to not having a great computer at the time. Thing is, those sorts of memories I described, people hold for Battlefield 3, perhaps even more so with its 15 million copies sold, and surprisingly, that kind of experience hasn't really been enhanced since...
Modern Warfare's Ground War might replicate the Battlefield experience, but I don't think many would argue it's built upon. People seemed to appreciate having a setting and gameplay with a similar backdrop, but it was a push for Call of Duty, not Battlefield.
Since Battlefield 3, the franchise hadn't really pushed itself either, more tweaked and fiddled with the formula. Battlefield 4 vastly expanded the sandbox, Battlefield 1 changed the setting, and Battlefield V attempted to reinvent how people navigated the core-gameplay, but player count, map-design, types of encounters, those had all remained relatively the same, even Battlefield: Hardline (which I enjoyed) was overly familiar.
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What I realize looking back upon the idea of a Bad Company 3, is while that may be what the franchise needs in the future, it's not what it needs now. DICE absolutely made the right call in striking people's nostalgia for Battlefield 3, and embracing all of the ridiculous gameplay that only it could provide, with the promise to build upon exactly that, with wingsuits, weather, and tomorrow's world technology.
If there was somebody in DICE's meetings echoing my original desires, I'm glad they lost.
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