Battlefield: Bad Company First Impressions

First, an anectote: One time I rented Fuzion Frenzy 2 for the 360, long after the initial release.  One achievement was for playing an online match so I picked "Join a quick match" to which the game responded "There are no matches available."  That's what happens to a bad multiplayer game.  It dies online very soon after release.  On the other hand I played Battlefield 2 on the PC, which came out in 2005 and there are still scores of people playing in online battles.  Battlefield has multiplayer down.

So with that in mind I will review my early impressions of Battlefield: Bad Company, the newest Battlefield game, released on the 360 to a fair amount of praise (Metascore 83).  DICE has tried before to include a single player campaign into their games, and they've done so poorly.  Most excuse it because they want the multiplayer fun.  Battlefield: Bad Company is yet another attempt at a single player campaign, and clearly they put more thought into the story, but ultimately they still failed because they incorporate so many elements of their multiplayer success into their single player campaign.

It might seem strange that successful elements in multiplayer can be failures in single player but I'll explain.  In multiplayer, you die, you have to wait through a punishment pause, and then you respawn at some base.  There is no attempt to suspend belief that you are actually one soldier fighting a battle.  If multiplayer had people die and not come back till the end of the round do you realize how slow and careful everyone would be for fear of waiting the next 5-10 minutes without playing?  So all multiplayer games have respawning.  Now what if a single player campaign tried to introduce this?  In Bad Company if you die, you wake up at a respawn point (usually the last marker where you accomplished some task) but all the damage that you did has still been done.  You're now good as new, even freshly full of ammo, and the 3 people on your virtual squad are back by your side, even if they were 2 miles away before you died.  This just doesn't make sense for a single player campaign and it doesn't make you believe in the characters or story.

Next, in multiplayer Battlefield one of the key elements is segregation of duties of characters.  If you choose to be a sniper you will be equipped as a sniper.  You can't have a sniper rifle and a rocket launcher (just in case) and so there is a segregation of responsibilities that encourages everybody to play their part in the battle.  In the single player campaign you are similarly teamed up with 3 characters that would each seem to have their own responsibilities (especially the big guy who always carries a rocket launcher.)  So I'm left wondering why in every situation where a tank is coming at me I have to be the one throwing grenades to kill it when there's a guy with a rocket launcher on my team.  Apparently the only reason to have a team is for funny comments during the cut scenes because they sure don't seem to do much good during the actual missions.

Massive Levels!  They make sense when fighting 12 on 12 because they leave you room to maneuver.  In single player it just means more walking/driving and since they hid gold in far corners of the map it means you should probably explore it all if you want to get an achievement.

My other small complaints are with the controls, which use the bumpers and have an accelerated and twitchy mechanic with the aiming controls (you have to try it to understand how it's not like COD4).  I also think the enemy AI is a little too good at targeting you after your first shot is fired, even if I'm in excellent cover in a patch of trees with a sniper rifle from far away.  Not too realistic.  And enemies in the brush seem unusually hard to target.  Somehow they stood out a little more in COD4 and just blend in with Bad Company.  That's all for the single player.

Multiplayer is fun.  There's no two ways about it, if you like big battles and a good skill progression (very similar to COD4) then you will probably like Bad Company.  They didn't mess with the formula, and it creates more of a teamwork atmosphere than COD4.  In COD4 I felt like every confrontation was a who-saw-who first match because health was similar, damage was similar, so the person shooting first won.  As long as you don't come across someone else really soon you'll heal and be ready for the next confrontation.  In Bad Company you don't heal.  Some characters can take med kits that heal themselves but others like the sniper will just be hurting until they die.  It means even if you survive the first confrontation you can't just hide and recuperate, you may have to fight it out or be more cunning.  I like the overall feel of multiplayer and that's mostly because they didn't mess with the Battlefield formula too much.  My only issue with the Battlefield formula is that vehicles seem too powerful and take some of the fun out of not being in a tank/helicopter.  Maybe I should just suck it up and jump in a tank but I want to be a sniper sometimes!