If you’re active in our forums, you may remember a post of mine about the Battlefield: Bad Company demo. I got ripped into pretty bad because I didn’t enjoy myself, and also because many of my problems with the game were due to lag. Well, the full game has been released and I’ve gotten to spend some quality time blowing up buildings and shooting people in the face. I’ve got to say that there are many parts that are better than the demo, but there are also plenty of problems that are present in the retail version.
Take the jump and get your pitchforks ready, cause I’ve got a ton of problems with this game.
I was burned pretty badly when I complained about the sniping in the demo, and after playing the retail, I stand firmly on my position. The first sniper you get is so god awful that I can see people becoming frustrated with the mechanics and turning off the class completely. I was told by Ricochet V1 of the forums that “Snipers need to be patient and make every shot count, like a real one.” Well, sadly with the first sniper, it’s pretty difficult to hit your target due to the slow firing rate and accuracy of the gun. So, you have to make every shot count and hit your target perfectly, right? Well, hitting someone in the head with that sniper usually doesn’t kill them, then you’re taken into a long reload action which gives the target plenty of time to take cover and/or find you. Sure, when you get an unlock point to pick out another rifle, it gets better, but that just takes me to another problem I have with the game.
This game rewards players in a huge way for spending a lot of time in the game and spending money. You see, I didn’t put down the extra $10 for the Gold Edition and I wasn’t pre-ordering the game, so I didn’t get any of those special weapons. Now, those weapons aren’t anything to write home about, but considering the atrocity that is the first sniper rifle, I could see these people having some sort of an immediate edge on all the competition. There is a fine line between balance and marketing. I think EA smudged that line a little bit.
Finally, I’d like to tackle the quote that was used against me that the game is all about teamwork. Working together towards a goal and not being the Lone Wolf hero. Well, I’m not going to linger on the fact that when Lono and I tried to play together, the game didn’t let us join any games as a squad - that was a bug. Irritating, but I knew it would be fixed. What I’m going to linger on is that the actual design of the squad-based gameplay is so terribly broken, there is little-to-no chance of ever being able to work together with your teammates unless you’re in their squad at the time you start searching for games.
Dave wrote an article on this little problem, so I’m going to touch on some of the different things on the next page.
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11 responses so far ↓
1 mashedPenguin // Jun 26, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I think a lot of the problems with the squad system come from the PC games BF2 and 2142. In those games when you have 32 players a side it doesn’t make sense to be able to talk to the whole team. In BFBC though you only have four players on your squad instead of the 6 in the PC games. So only being able to communicate with 3 other people sucks.
Dice should implement at the least a proximity chat so you can yell at non squadmates that are near you (who are the ones who you probably want to talk to anyway). There is nothing more frustrating than jumping in a chopper with someone not on your squad and not being able to talk to each other.
I don’t know why you can’t manage your squads properly. In the PC games you could create a squad if there wern’t already too many of them. You could then invite other players into it. You were automatically kept in that squad as long as you stayed on the same server. I understand why they didn’t build this into BFBC. Fingers crossed they can do something in a patch to improve this.
So far I am having a blast with the game though. Its nice to have some new maps to play on
2 Mike // Jun 26, 2008 at 12:40 pm
At least theres the option for for that handy little program, teamspeak i think its called, it might help a bit, but not being able to create squads seems like a poor decision at best. I can’t imagine why they chose to do it like that, perhaps they thought it would make the gameplay a little fairer so that super l33t hax0rs squads wouldnt be able to destroy the n00bz0r begginers and make them annoyed and stuff.
However I wonder what updates to the old system they have created to get rid of those annoying hacker problems, my gfx card can only render so many vehicles falling from the sky before it starts to lag… hehe.
3 Truth N Justice // Jun 26, 2008 at 1:02 pm
great article ani. I agree with most of what you said with the issues with the game. One thing you did not mention is that there is a bug that when you do have a full four man squad, more times than not one person in the group cant be heard in the voice chat. It happened several time to us last night, with Lono and Cameroguy579 and Dave. But that said , I love this game it is a huge change from COD4, a game that I am burnt out on now that I have 55 gold Cross. I am enjoying this change and eagerly waiting from them to patch these issues.
oh by the way I cant fly the heli’s in this game for crap. anybody got any tips for me.
4 Animathias // Jun 26, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Yeah, Truth. I also met a little bug last night after the article was done. We were in a 4 man squad searching for a game. Well, it put 3 of us on one team, and me on the other. So instead of playing the game with my 3 buddies, I was on some random squad (not a single one of them were talking) on the opposite team. The other three from my original squad were working together, and it was painfully obvious when compared to my squad. I just quit out and played some CoD4.
5 piston11792 // Jun 26, 2008 at 2:00 pm
first off, yes i’m fanboy for this game. secondly, the sniping in this game is fantastic! thats as far as i got in this article cause as soon as i saw “god aweful snipers” i completely disreguarded the rest of it. NO Battlefield isn’t a perfect game, but the snipers are soooooo realistic and whenever i snipe someone in the head they die and the “red X headshot” icon appears next to my kill notification. You must not be hitting the head, cause ive been killed myself with 100 health by a headshot from a sniper multiple times. I hope the rest of your article isn’t this inaccurate, try to inform us with facts next time not lies.
6 ShagsterP // Jun 26, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Good luck on the wait. Dice is notorious for figuring out simple fixes to their Battlefield games. For BF 2142, it took them nearly two years to discover that people wanted to mute commanders that did nothing but constantly spot enemies over and over and over and…
Though with the last two Battlefield games having great squad management, I still can’t believe they neutered it so much for the console version.
7 Animathias // Jun 26, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Wow, piston. You should actually read the rest of my article. I was speaking of the sniper you start off with. Maybe I wasn’t hitting them in the head, but I could swear I was.
Secondly, it is NOT realistic for a sniper using a bolt-action sniper to take so long to get a second shot ready to go. I’ve seen this in plenty forms of media including reality shows. When a sniper fires off a shot, his first priorty is to get the next shot ready in as short a time as possible. Not in Battlefield, there is a pause allowing your target to escape if you didn’t kill them.
This article is opinion, stating what I’ve seen from spending hours with this game. It is not meant to be fact, nor is it lies meant to decieve the readers. It is my opinion of the game from my time with it.
8 Lono // Jun 26, 2008 at 3:13 pm
There’s a lot of merit to Animathias’ gripes… but for me, the sheer FUN factor of the game just shines through.
You really feel like you’re in a battle in the game, it’s just fantastic.
9 RICOCHET V1 // Jun 26, 2008 at 7:19 pm
The article was a good read. I’m humbled that you used a quote from a forum post from me in the article. I’m not going to pick up my pitch fork just yet, your complaints are well founded.
The standard (balanced) sniper-rifles do suck, but leveling up to the next level is very quick. This gives you a unlock credit, and I immediately unlocked the 50 cal. So I could kill enemies more efficiently.
I love the game, it’s just sheer Battlefield action. One of the best shooters of the year so far.
If you get to read this comment Animathias, I would like to play with you on B:BC someday.
10 Animathias // Jun 27, 2008 at 12:19 am
Will do, Ricochet. I’ll send you a PM in the forums to get your gamertag.
On a random note.. why is the ReCaptcha asking me to type in Grifenhagen? That’s a strange word.
11 Craig // Jun 27, 2008 at 3:44 am
Some fair points, although I have one major gripe - There’s no option to host local. I’m in South Africa so pings to anywhere are 400ms plus, I know the Aussies are complaining about it as well.
And yeah, what’s the advantage of being able to “create a squad” for a custom game when you don’t stick together?
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