How Call of Duty killed any hopes for Battlefield: Bad Company three

David Goldfarb got here onto the challenge round six months into growth, beginning as the author, then taking up the lead designer function on high of writing duties when Salt moved on. However, Salt’s imaginative and prescient caught with him. “When the transition happened, the seed was already planted for me,” Goldfarb tells me “I wanted to make an adventure story/game with these characters, and then later, to improve the multiplayer from Bad Company and give it more character and quality.”

Bad Company 2 is bursting with character and memorable traces of dialogue. In the sport’s single-player, when certainly one of your squad suggests clearing a mission with the upper ups, one other squad member, Sweetwater, retorts, “No, no, no – he’ll just send some special ops douche bags with pussy-ass heartbeat monitors on their guns instead of us.” Later within the marketing campaign, certainly one of your squad says “snowmobiles are for sissies.” Both traces are pleasant jabs at Battlefield’s competitor, Call of Duty – realizing nods at that distinction in tone. Bad Company 2 was punk. If COD: Modern Warfare is a Tom Clancy novel, Bad Company 2 is Three Kings.  

“We just went for stuff that felt like it fit,” Goldfarb says. “It was a fun, ridiculous game. We did not take ourselves too seriously, we went for what would be the most fun, and we tried to keep both multiplayer and single-player in the same universe. Mostly, I think we succeeded. In terms of single-player, Bad Company 2 just built on the work done in Bad Company. We tried to make characters and settings people liked. The game is distinctive because it has that humorous element – hopefully – and it resonated for a lot of people tired of the deadpan grunts in most games, which, by the way, I wound up doing myself in Battlefield 3. Blarg.”

Fans of Bad Company 2’s much less critical strategy to warfare have been hankering for a sequel that has by no means arrived. Instead, we acquired the aforementioned Battlefield three, a superb shooter in its personal proper, albeit one with the persona of reconstituted ham. After that, Battlefield four got here and was a lot the identical, although it did have these much-lauded Levolutions – map-altering scripted sequences the place dams break and skyscrapers topple. Battlefield: Hardline took that template and turned it right into a stealth sport the place you play as a cop, but it surely additionally did it with a straight(ish) face – at one level, you QTE an alligator to dying. 

It isn’t simply Bad Company 2’s tone that the sequence has drifted away from. One of the issues that makes the sport so memorable for me, notably in its multiplayer, is its fragile structure – you may carve a path via any constructing with a grenade launcher. Battlefield three, four, and Hardline’s buildings characteristic indestructible parts, a restriction that funnels you into chokepoints and ensures that some cowl stays. While this makes a defender’s job simpler, it removes a few of the unpredictability from firefights. In Bad Company 2, it looks like an enemy may come from wherever: land, sea, air, or via a flipping wall.

It helps that this expressive motion befell on distinct maps, too. Some of them have been huge, however you possibly can nonetheless handle to be taught them and all of their quirks: the place the snipers are prone to be crouching, the perfect place from which to name in mortars, maybe a intelligent shortcut, or an advantageous flanking place when operating assault. Battles raged via sun-dappled fields, throughout arid deserts, and even in desolate, snowy ports.  

“We would talk about themes for maps a lot, and when we had a bunch we liked, designers would try blocking them out and get the flows set up,” Goldfarb explains. “If it was Rush, the crate placements, and if it was Conquest, cap areas. The Squad Rush and Squad Deathmatch maps have been little chunks of larger maps after which rejigged to work with the particulars of that mode. We would playtest every single day, generally a number of occasions. When the maps acquired mature sufficient, artwork would are available and lay waste to the designer blockouts and there would normally be some grumbling but it surely all the time got here collectively, and higher, in the long run.”

Another characteristic that offers Bad Company 2 an edge over newer Battlefield video games is the way it dealt with automobiles. It is such a small factor, however the act of manually getting right into a car parked in your base makes the motion extra tactile. Flying again to base in an assault helicopter after taking off, selecting up your buddies, dropping them off on a roof as they full an goal, flying again and scooping them up after an assault run – there’s a sense of course of that the present crop of Battlefield video games lose by having you spawn straight into an aerial car on the transfer. Sure, the brand new methodology is extra streamlined, however I miss that scrappiness. Even on the bottom, I miss ready for a quadbike to spawn, strapping C4 to it, and performing a kamikaze assault on an enemy place. 

“I think it is a transfer towards the mass market however, additionally, the constancy required to deal with the get into the car animations when the constancy is already uncontrolled in all probability made this a straightforward resolution,” Goldfarb explains of the shift. “It removes a step from the player intention to board a vehicle and streamlines stuff they no longer have to make… it also streamlines out some of the grit that made Bad Company 2 and other earlier Battlefields interesting.” 

You may even see this within the Star Wars Battlefront sequence, which makes use of an identical trick, turning automobiles into power-ups as a substitute of them being a bodily presence on a map. While video games have gotten increasingly lifelike in how they give the impression of being, the mechanics in fashionable first-person shooters are obsessive about on the spot motion, giving them an arcade-like high quality. That shift appeared to start out with Battlefield three, and it doesn’t appear like we will probably be transferring again to the Bad Company manner of doing issues any time quickly, both in tone or mechanics.

“Battlefield 3 was very much ‘compete with COD’,” Goldfarb explains. “And it did, very well. But it did so in a way that compromised a lot of the values we did better in Bad Company 2, at least in my opinion. There was so much money riding on Battlefield 3 that people were afraid to really buck convention in the way we did in Bad Company 2, which was honestly a sleeper hit. We knew it was amazing internally, but for a very long time no-one else did, not even some people at the studio. Being sort of underground let us do things without fear in ways that were frankly impossible with Battlefield 3. The truth is, things changed because of success, and because the powers that be deemed Battlefield 3 to be the game to take the studio forward, which it did. I think Bad Company 3 could have done the same, but that is a reality we will have to visit in some alternative universe.”