I won't deny it; I talk about Bad Company 2 a lot. Too much, perhaps. Whether this is a result of the game actually being incredible or me being a lovestruck little fanboy is up to you, but I've decided to bring all the talk to a close with a final summary of what I think Bad Company 2 has cracked up to be, what it is in terms of multiplayer today and as a sequel to the original Bad Company.
There are two main aspects I can think of when I think about DICE's Bad Company 2. Firstly, it's a departure. A departure from its predecessor into what is a much more serious game centred around an authentic battlefield experience. Sure, we all know real warfare today isn't nearly as intense, and is based more on small urban skirmishes and the odd airstrike, but what we've been given here is a multiplayer game in which, unlike Call of Duty or other competing titles, there are things happening all over the map at the same time; people fighting their own skirmishes, tanks assaulting strongholds, helicopters raining lead from above. It's brilliantly cinematic stuff but, while I don't think Bad Company 1 beat its sequel in this sense, it brought something different instead. The light-hearted feel of the game was something completely new, something we simply don't have in shooters today, and it did it without being disrespectful to any of today's war heroes. I'll never forget losing a match as the American team, and hearing the classic comedy failure noise of 'wah wah waaahhh' played on a blues guitar, and having command say 'You lost our retirement fund, dammit!' or, when we won, hearing an upbeat bluegrass lick and getting the voice in the ear saying 'Yes! The gold is mine- I, I mean ours!'. It never wore off, even when the lack of polish in the game showed up.
The campaign is perhaps another issue. It's complained about a lot in reviews for Bad Company 2, for being too boring usually. I think it should be taken with a pinch of salt as the multiplayer is clearly the focus of any Battlefield game but, I can't help thinking that it is a letdown in what it was trying to do. I don't like to think about it but I know that the reason DICE made the characters and the storyline serious and related to 'saving the world' is because they were competing. They tried to step up the intensity of the storyline to be seen on the same level as Modern Warfare. But this was entirely unnecessary. The only reason it's taken so badly by the players is because this intention is clear and, when they look back to Modern Warfare's campaign, they remember it being better (for the record, I don't think it was, but it's the general consensus). This wouldn't be the case if they kept it like Bad Company 1's campaign. Going AWOL and accidentally starting a war with a neutral country to get some gold? Flying in a gold-plated helicopter? Driving golf carts and hearing Sweetwater desperately fail at flirting with 'Miss July'? Get another story as amusing as that, give it the amped-up gameplay of Bad Company 2, and it could have been a blast, and wouldn't have been so heavily compared to Call of Duty.
However, I also have to think about Bad Company 2 as an arrival. What it has essentially brought is, in my opinion and many others', the best multiplayer experience possible of this generation. The improved class customisation, destruction, big maps and everything that I mentioned early put together works seamlessly and DICE have truly achieved something, despite its few minor problems that I'm sure are being worked on. I feel that I know for sure DICE won't go back to Bad Company 1's style, in the same way I know Epic won't make Gears of War 3 as dark and not over-the-top like Gears of War 1, ditto for whatever lies ahead for the Modern Warfare series. They'll keep going in the direction they've gone in with the sequel because going backwards is considered too hard to do without making an oddly patterned franchise. Perhaps then, the answer is to simply enjoy Bad Company 2 and the fact that it has achieved what it wanted to do; get Battlefield's crown back and get it back in the public's eye. Players are already peeling away from Modern Warfare 2, naming it the 'disappointment' and 'hacker and bug-fest' that it is, and migrating right into DICE's welcoming arms. It's what the developers deserve and I, maybe, as a Battlefield player, should want.
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