Battlefield: Bad Company initial impressions

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 » gaming thought

I got into the Battlefield: Bad Company beta and just got to play my first few rounds, a couple each on the beta's Middle East and Russia maps. The Middle Eastern map was a pretty cool place to start, since the commander shouting out orders in Arabic immediately brought back memories BF2. (I even recognized some phrases, which was weird.) I'm not a huge console shooter player, so I spent the first round trying to get accustomed to the controls. It would be one thing if it were just trying to pick up Halo or something, but trying to mentally re-envision the familiar Battlefield controls in controller form made things extra weird.

Eventually I got the controls down, although without any formal manual, I'm still wondering where things like the radio have gone. I'd hear (quite often) allied voices calling for medical help, but I couldn't tell if they were wounded, had just been killed, or (in the case of the former) if the person talking was actually me or not. I imagine the communication aspect of the radio will be eliminated in the full version when everyone (at least on the 360 version) has headsets, but it still had its uses for spotting enemies and locating wounded allies on the radar.

Speaking of that, you now auto-spot enemies if you look at them long enough, which is sort of a mixed blessing. I appreciate not having to spend that extra split-second to bring up the radio and click spotted before opening fire, but it was really unreliable whether the guy would actually get spotted or not.

The new Gold Rush gametype was pretty fun, at least. It's sort of a mini-Titan mode from 2142, where instead of whittling down the enemy base's shields so you can run inside and blow it up, you go blow up two crates of gold, which unlocks a new part of the map with two more crates, and so on.

The other big new feature of the game is the Frostbite engine's promise of fully-destructable environments. Well, DICE already admitted in interviews that you can't blow the floors out from under people and are limited to just shooting out walls. But, at least the destruction demoed in all the trailers looked pretty dynamic and awesome, right?? I mean, look at this:

Except in practice it's more like this:

This is not surprising to me at all, but it's still irritating that destructible environments have progressed so little since Red Faction back in the day. (Also, since The Legend of Zelda.) Not even all walls are destructable, either. I spent a few seconds starting to navigate around to a gate, when I remembered I had a grenade launcher and fired off a round at the wall blocking my path. No effect whatsoever. It's also strange that there are a lot more actual doors on buildings now, whereas, in BF2, if you had a structure with an interior it would just have an open doorway. Except instead of being able to press the action button to, say, open it stealthily, you have to unload on it for a second or two with your assault rifle. It's a good way to show off the new engine, but still a bit silly.

Tomorrow I'll see how the buildings stand up to a tank.