Return To Bad Company: What Dice's Forgotten Shooter Showed Me About Life
"Go see what's cooking in Battlefield: Bad Company 2," said the Voice in the Sky. "It could make for an interesting retrospective in the next issue. Have a nose round the multiplayer in particular. Work out once and for all whether Battlefield 3's really the quantum leap DICE told us it was."
So I dutifully laced up my boots, shouldered my kitbag and retraced my steps across the wilderness. The sounds of civilization - the ra-ta-tat of pop-up notifications, sweary asides through the headset - faded into the distance. A deep, stagnant calm set in. My Battlefield 3 Errors: Use The Famas And You Can Lose Progress's drive seemed unnaturally loud. What would I find, way out here in the badlands? Did anything still live among the dunes?
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I found three things, in the end: sorrow, evil and fellowship. Sorrow because there's nothing sadder than an abandoned multiplayer map, and especially a Battlefield map, built to accommodate wars rather than the meagre skirmishes which pass for multiplayer in other games. The cinematic trappings fizzle on, in a bizarre parody of rigor mortis: flaming car hulks and swaying trees, distant artillery reports. It's like boarding a Haunted House ride all by yourself. Only if something bothers you, you can always blow it to pieces.
Alongside the PC-swallowing Battlefield 3, Bad Company 2's maps feel decidedly cramped. I managed to get a match going on just two - Heavy Metal, where I spent an instructive 10 minutes trying to flip a tank onto its back, and the dusky smear of hillside and dockyard that is Arica Harbour. Nobody was around when I visited the latter. I captured all three Conquest points, bounced up some stairs and toggled the scoreboards.
Nothing doing. I unloaded a magazine skyward in a paramilitary's salute and scurried off into the rocks. Another poke at the boards. OXM ETboy is your current score leader.
Evidently, I was going to have to make my own entertainment, calling on the game's out-dated yet robust array of map dynamics. I began a technological experiment, firing RPGs at buildings to see how many I could level before DICE's first Frostbite engine refused to put out. Great contributions to knowledge were made: I learned, for instance, that mud huts in Battlefield disintegrate with the sound of wrenching iron girders, and that bullet holes are actually little pictures of bullet holes. Serious science was conducted, using bombs. And then, the Other Player arrived.
Battlefield 3 Issues: Utilise The Famas And You May Lose Progress
I know not his Gamertag. (Well, I do know his Gamertag but I'm not going to publish it, for reasons of ethics and drama.) He was a mere second ranker, armed with starting gear and a bad attitude. I've speculated at length about his identity, over the ensuing days and nights. Perhaps he was a child from a poor family, too hard up to afford a contemporary multiplayer experience - some victim of society, scraping together pennies for third or fourth-hand copies of blunted-edge shooters. Perhaps he was a journalist like me, on a mission to waste his and everybody else's time.
Whatever his private face, I came to know him by his distinctive combination of ineptitude and persistence. There he stood on the skyline towards the map's northern end, blinking at the equatorial sunlight and the unfamiliar weight of his light machinegun. I levelled my sniper rifle. Boom. OXM ETboy is your current score leader.
Isolation had made me vengeful, and unlike the Greenhorn I had a sizeable range of toys to call on. I hunched down among the boulders and waited. There - a head hesitantly bobbing in one of the lookout towers along the Russian perimeter. The poor fool was trying to Do A Stalingrad. So I dropped an airstrike on him - stabbing arcs of smoke and shrapnel which powderised his cubby hole and punched his limp body into the yard below. He respawned... and tried it again. Sorry old bean, but there's more where that came from. Bang, bang, bang. I was beginning to enjoy myself.