Hands on with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 – First Impressions

Alright, well, in a fit of ‘Holy crap that looks cool’ I’ve gone and preordered the new installment in the Battlefield series, Bad Company 2.
Now, Bad company 1 was never released for PC Gamers, leading a lot of players to wonder if they were going to leave the PC market to Call of Duty. Dice has teamed up with EA to make this happen, most likely so that battlefield doesnt lose too much ground to the behemoth that COD: Modern Warfare 2 has become. Essentially, COD and BF have been similar games, but seem to appeal to different demographics of the player base. COD has a distinctly first person feel to it. The maps are smaller, and people don’t seem to work towards goals as a team so much. There’s no such thing as healing, or revives, no airdrops (unless you kill enough people, then they’re just plain effing irritating), and no drivable vehicles, let alone aircraft.
Battlefield has filled this gap remarkably well since their debut with Battlefield 1942. 1942 revolutionised multiplayer shooters, bringing the ticket system, as well as drivable vehicles and realistic weapon performance to the online world. Many games have heavily borrowed from this system, but none do it quite as well as Battlefield seem to be able to do. Following 1942, Vietnam was the next big release, bringing people the M60′s and river boats they wanted. Throw in some AFV’s and a few aircraft, and you have another popular seller. Dice reinvented the franchise somewhat with Battlefield 2, set in a recent desert-storm like campaign, this was the first major appearance of expansion content for a multiplayer game such as the special forces addon. Battlefield 2 remains very popular to this day, allowing players to live out battles with what is essentially todays technology.
Moving forward again, the next game in the line was Battlefield 2142. Coming a full century from the first game isnt easy, but this transition was pulled off with a remarkable degree of flair and polish. A few new game modes complemented an already solid base, allowing veterans of previous games to get fighting right away, and only requiring a little lead-in for new players.
Skip forward four years, and the next PC game to come out of EA/Dice is Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

Battlefield: Bad Company reinvented the storyline yet again. Bringing back our old friends, the MEC, the Russian Federation and some mercenaries for good taste, the environmental, physics and game engines were overhauled, bringing a whole new dimension of gameplay to the series. Destroyable environments led to new tactics being formulated, and old ones being scrapped entirely. No longer can you hide behind the wall, or in the house, and take potshots from cover. That cover aint as hard as it looks, and that tank cannon is more destructive than ever.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 adds to this, bringing it to the PC and allowing the refinement of this system. Previously, in the BF:BC engine, only the shell of the structure was destroyable, walls and ceilings, floors and doors. BC2 has blown the top off this (pun intended), and now you can level the entire building if you’re not a big fan of the decor. Nearly every structure in the game can take a hit and show the appropriate amount of damage according to exactly what sort of brutalisation you inflicted on it.

This leads to the next point. The vehicle combat has always been a pivotal and important role in the BF series, and they’re not going to stop now. Of course, the system has changed to fit the environment. Overall, vehicles take less damage, but deal a little more. The operation isnt exactly childs play, but destroying one sort of is. This is to compensate for the impolite fact that with any small amount of determination, you can quickly rob your enemy of any cover they would otherwise rely on to destroy you by normal means. So, to keep it fair, now all you have to do is shoot them before they shoot you. Tanks are no longer the juggernauts we saw in 2142 and BF2, however they are still the most potent force in the vehicle lineup. Helicopter fans be damned, have you ever run over someone in a helicopter? I thought not.
My newest favourite addition to the garage is the quadbikes, currently only usable by the attacking team in the beta level. Small, nimble  but not exactly hardy, these little beasts go from zero to holy shit in about two seconds flat. Great for flanking maneuvers they hold two players each, and are impressively hard to roll or flip.
Finally, the UAV makes a triumphant return in the game, now taking the form of a small helicopter. Flown from a first person view via an on-board camera, it is stocked with hellfire missiles, allowing the controlling player to, once every thirty or so seconds, make the enemy shit themselves as they try and find shelter from the death raining from above. Again, not especially hardy, so hovering at low levels while flipping the bird at the guy on the mounted MG is rather hazardous to your health. Also, if the opposing team is very sneaky, you are also liable to be shanked while you’re engrossed playing the in-game equivalent of a flight sim.

Next up is the class system. Lots of online games offer customisable ‘loadouts’ for your various playstyles. I happen to be a fan of the COD way of doing things, with custom kits unlocked after a reasonably brief period of time, allowing unlimited options with regards to your toolkit for doing nasty things to your enemies. However, this has never been overly realistic, and sometimes its plain silly. You have snipers with a shotgun as a secondary weapon, Special ops players kitted with silenced pistols and an RPG.
The Battlefield way of doing it, mirrors the real world version of the process – you have a specialisation, you get a little choice within that realm with regards to your weapon and such, thats about it. No more heavy machine gunners with little silenced pistols.
The other change is that yet another class has been dropped. In BF2, there were about twelve hundred classes, whereas BC2 has just four. Your standard assault, run and gun with a grenade launcher, an engineer kit, with a SMG, Rocket launcher and repair drill, the Medic class, who now doubles duty as the heavy weapons class, with an LMG, revive kit and health packs, and finally the Sniper class, now also doing the special ops rounds, with a rifle, motion tracking grenades, and remote detonated explosives.
I feel this works remarkably well, and with a little time, each class is easy to master and fun to play. Unfortunately, both the sniper and the medic need some balance.. there are almost always more medics than assault players, and the snipers just duke it out with the other teams snipers. This is because the sniper rifle has such a slow reload that by time you have re-zeroed your aim, the player you critically wounded has found better cover, or returned fire, and you’re now missing large portions of your body. The medic class, with an impressive lineup of weaponry (so far the SAW seems to be a favourite amongst players, due to its early unlock and rate of fire), and ability to revive and heal teammates offers far more than the base Assault kit seems to.

The beta now deserves some attention. This is the first such beta that I have participated in, and overall I am impressed with the quality of the game as it stands right now, but also excited for the immense possibilities that will come from the full game. As a beta, there are of course plenty of bugs, but these seem to be ironed out remarkably quickly, with new patches being released very often. There are a number of gameplay fixes I would like them to fix, namely the power of a sniper rifle, the system used to highlight (spot) a target, and the reimplementation of the prone position that seems to have been removed to speed the game up for console players. There are a number of wall glitches, and falling through stairways is irritatingly common. There is no latency meter included in the server list yet, although the place where it will be is there. Server names are not sortable by any means yet, but again, all in good time.

Currently GameArena seem to be the best servers for .au players, I refrain from using the ‘Play now’ button, simply because it always lands me on a server in the US or EU and I get slaughtered because of the lag.

I’ll write a little more on the subject once more of the game is released, including a few comments about the tactics that seem to be growing in popularity at the present.
If you feel so obliged, add me as a friend, my gametag is Makazaru.

Regards

Pip