Written by Jeff Buckland, 1/31/2010
EA and DICE have launched a closed beta for Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and with the disappointment I felt in the back of my mind over Modern Warfare 2's online mode, I was excited to see what the first "response" to Infinity Ward's boondoggle would be. Don't get me wrong - I think MW2's gameplay is fine, but the cheaters can't be kicked from servers, the 18-player limit is, well, limiting, and the community that's playing it is only doing so because they're sick of two-plus years of Call of Duty 4 with no answer from anyone else.
Until now. Once the darling of online PC gaming, DICE at some point decided to leave the platform they started on for quite a while, taking years to try to bring Battlefield to consoles. They finally started to get it right with Bad Company a couple years back, and now they're ready to bring what they've learned back to the PC.
The first thing to note about Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is that this Frostbrite engine is the first technology rewrite in an online-enabled DICE game since, well, Codename: Eagle. For those of you who have never heard of that, well, it was the game DICE released before they started work on Battlefield 1942. Yep, it's been that long. The new Frostbite engine has been rewritten from the ground up for online play, but it keeps the open field idea of past games. The small-arms gunplay is much more reliable and predictable so you don't have those "How did I not hit him even one time?" moments, and the destructible trees and buildings will make a little village look like the war-torn environment it should.
It'll sound like it, too: Bad Company 2 continues the sound design of the first, and now it's on the PC. Simply put, this is a big change in sound design, one that's not afraid to make tanks loud as hell, machine gun fire loud as hell, rockets loud as hell, and, well, you get the point. If those year-end award lists had a prize for "Loudest Game of 2010", this would be the only nominee and the winner five times over. That's not to say that it's dangerous for your hearing or anything, nor is the sound distorted - on the contrary, the sound is great. It's also just constantly loud.
Online play uses a mode that has one team with infinite "tickets" or respawns for their side, while the attackers have a limited amount of tickets and must capture points on a linearly-designed map. To do this, the attackers have to place a bomb at the point, and the defenders must try and defuse it. Each area has two capture points, and when both are destroyed by the attackers, the attacker gets closer to winning the map and the objective slides forward. Overall, it's pretty similar to the Gold Rush mode from the first Bad Copmany. The whole system works nicely for keeping a solidly-defined front line, and it doesn't purposely try to spread players all across the map for maximum point-building.
The game's interface is decent enough and players can check progress on persistent rank increases and their unlocks for the four major classes: assault, recon, engineer, and medic. Poking through servers is a little awkward, but it works well enough.
One snowy map set on the coast of Alaska is included in the beta, and enemies will come in on foot and with tanks, lighter vehicles with a little less firepower, and quick-moving ATVs. The defenders have their own vehicles too, and there are also attack choppers along with stationary defenses for taking out vehicles. The whole thing plays out nicely where the choppers mostly do best when they're waging war against other vehicles. You won't often see them targeting soldiers that are on foot, so it reduces that feeling that the people in the air are playing a game that the people on the ground can't do anything about and must suffer through as they're targeted repeatedly and indiscriminately.
The beta started off really rough, with server lists not working properly, tons of lag on the 32-player servers, and plenty of annoying little issues. After a very quick patch, things improved significantly, and now there are still, well, quite a few issues and bugs left. DICE has always played fast and loose with their games, often letting obvious problems and strange design decisions (like a years-long hate of widescreen monitors) just sit there for far too long, so it should be interesting to see how they behave here. Patching the PC version won't include the same slow certification process that the consoles have, so there should be no excuse for game-breaking bugs to last long if DICE is on top of it.
I went into the Bad Company 2 beta expecting little, and the first impression was pretty bad, but after the patch I have to say I am very impressed. The Frostbite engine works great on PC, and the action feels like classic Battlefield but just more precise, more focused, and now it's even got the Bad Company-branded humor with soldiers talking more often and casually cussing at each other. I think that things like semi-open betas and demos are doing a good job when they turn apathetic gamers into excited ones, and now I'm excited to see what Bad Company 2 has in store for us in the full game.
