Tag Archives: Battlefield: Bad Company 2

The opposite of alt-itis

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Unlike my friend, Stargrace, who has problems completing games because she plays a huge assortment of them, my problem is the exact opposite – I have problems completing games because I can’t bring myself to play more than one game at a time.

Such is the recent case of my purchase of Cataclysm, and I’ve played less than 2 hours of it since. FEAR 2, which is I bought during the last (read 2009) Steam Christmas sales which I made a vain attempt to complete 3 weeks ago is sitting about 80% completion. I averaged maybe an hour a day or less in it per day. For Baldur’s Gate, started a month back, I clocked less than an hour. Let’s not even talk about StarCraft 2, which I was swooning over like a fangirl about to meet Justin Bieber before launch, but failed to even  complete the campaign, much less get into the competitive aspects.

Each time, I faithfully return to The One Game and spend copious amounts of time on it. For the moment being, it’s Battlefield Bad Company 2 and its recently released Vietnam DLC. Every minute spent in another game has me thinking “I’d rather be playing Battlefield”. It’s an issue of over-dedication and over-specialization. The normally latent achiever in me would rather I excel in one game (or one character within a specific game) than be a jack of all trades. If I can’t be good at something, I’d rather not play.

To those who can truly enjoy playing a variety of games simultaneously, I salute you.

Be a hero

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Men, I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die.

So said Mustafa Kemal Ataturk during the Battle of Gallipoli.

The outcome of many battles are often determined by various acts of heroism, either at an individual or group level.

All too often, I find myself in games where half my team is around an M-COM station, but no one is too willing to arm or disarm it because it is under fire. Why? Can’t be putting a stain on the KPD ratio, baby! Just as common, in an assault game, when the slightest hint appears that the match might be tilted against our favor, a good portion of the team start switching to recon so as to possibly minimize their own deaths. With no one to rush the objective, defeat, of course, follows soon enough. Had people be willing to risk their necks, the outcome might be different. If you die after arming the objective and it goes off, you’ve just done the whole team a huge favor.

Expanding this concept to include MMOs, the rogue that grabs aggro when the tank dies instead of feigning death right away might just giving the healer a chance to resurrect the tank and end up saving the group.

Ever since player stats were introduced to first person shooters, the stats itself have become such an obsession to some, so much that prettifying one’s stats screen takes precedence over the game itself. As for the game, well, that’s just a fancy UI for stats increment.

Be a hero. Rush the fucking objective. The M-COM station ain’t gonna arm itself.

On a side note, don’t be an hero. Don’t rush straight into enemy fire and suicide yourself on an objective when no one is nearby and it is going to be disarmed right after your face has been smashed into pulp by a dozen angry NVA-men. You wouldn’t attack an epic encounter while half your raid is still AFK and unbuffed, would you?

Losing can be fun too

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It was a game of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam. I was playing on the US side and we were being decimated by the NVA. Step out of the spawn point and one was immediately greeted with a blend of lead and explosives. Instead of defaulting to the usual whines and accusations of hacking, my teammates opted to express their distaste and defeatist feelings for the current match by drawing reference from feelings of the majority of American troops who were drafted to fight in Vietnam. Someone mentioned that “This must be how the Americans felt in ‘nam”, and others soon chimed in with the likes of “I just want to go home”, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”, “should have ran to Canada when I had the chance”, and of course, the obligatory “war is hell”. It was like relieving the turbulent 70’s again. With each death from our side, more references and homages to unpopularity of the Vietnam War back home* came pouring out.

Even though it was obvious that our side had no chance of winning and each of us were raking up a huge death count, it was a rare moment where everyone was able to make light of the situation and the fun was genuine.  I daresay that I never had such a fun moment in an FPS game before, and it was one of the best moments I’ve experienced in gaming.

*Home in this case would refer to the USA, rather than where I came from.

Shooter weekend

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For the entire weekend, starting Friday night until Sunday night, I did absolutely nothing but play Bad Company 2, and I feel great about it. No looking for group for hours, no putting up with people who make a nuisance of themselves, but pure fire fights from the moment I wake till my brain cells die on me, and my eyes and neck scream bloody murder.

I’ve not mindlessly lost myself in such intensive rounds of a game for perhaps more than two years, since the local Battlefield 2 community died out. I enjoyed every bit of this weekend, and I’m ready to do it all over again the next, and the one after.

Battlefield Bad Company and destructible environments – I’m sold

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I’ve been rather skeptical about modern shooters, ever since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 disappointed. Over dinner yesterday, I questioned a friend whom I have noticed been playing Battlefield: Bad Company lately on Steam on how the game was.

The predecessor, Battlefield 2, was a fantastic game, up until version 1.5 or so, where they added in air-dropped vehicles. That was a step in the wrong direction, and it made a mess out of my beloved game. Waning interest in the game saw the number of servers in my region vanish, and I was forced to quit.

Initially, I wasn’t too impressed. My friend then directed me to a number of gameplay videos on Youtube, one of which featured the destructive environment. A recon trooper went into the objective building, placed a number a C4 charges, and lured a number of enemy in. The recon trooper promptly ran out, and set off the C4, physically demolishing the entire building. This wasn’t just an explosion in the building, but rather, the entire building was brought down and collapsed on the enemy within.

I was sold. I had never envisioned the day where a game would feature such extensive, physics-driven destructible environment. There have been promises over the years, and destructible environment was first introduced and featured in the 2001 game, Red Faction. The implementation however, was very limited. You could fire enough rockets to blast a hole through a wall, but you couldn’t bring the wall down, much less an entire building.

In the next few years, destructible and interactive environments would slowly be featured in tech demo after tech demo, but no one was able to develop a fully marketable product out of it. Then came Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter in 2006 which allowed for physics driven explosions if you had a PhysX card. This was followed by Crysis and Far Cry 2 which included more destructible objections. Flora  shifted as you move through them, and you could mow down some.

Now, in Battlefield Bad Company, you can reduce an entire building to rubble. Realistic physics and destructible environment sure has come a long a way since 2001. It was a slow development process, but we’re there at last. You’re getting my $49.90 on this one, EA.