Gaming as an activity has always been two-faceted in my experience. There's the super-focused single player trek, best exemplified by something like Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics in my case. The other side of that coin is an engaging multiplayer experience. This latter side of gaming has become more important to me in the past few years, and one franchise in particular has been the centerpiece of my social gaming: DICE's Battlefield series.
Multiplayer gaming, at the beginning of my days of gaming anyway, used to be friends in front of a single console where a game like Contra or Tecmo Bowl provided a focal point for interaction. This shifted over to what could probably be considered a less healthy method of social interaction: multiplayer deathmatch-style games on PC. What was lost between the two different styles was any chance of building bonds with your fellow players. Getting someone out of the room usually meant your only interaction with them was via bullets, or the occasional profane in-game chat remark.
When a friend of mine invited me to join his usual weekly Battlefield 2 group, I was hesitant. I'd skipped Battlefield 1942 for no specific reason other than I was probably buried deep in Unreal Tournament at the time; locked into a different paradigm. I saw BF2 as a complex and potentially frustrating challenge, and didn't (at first) welcome taking on the difficult learning curve as part of a new social group where everyone was more experienced than I was.
As it turns out, I was right. I hated BF2 at first. I couldn't get a handle on the spawn-die-spawn-die pacing. I'd never encountered anything other than deathmatch or CTF, so it took a couple of rounds to grasp the idea of Conquest mode. Worst of all, I felt ineffective both as a player and as part of a team. Eventually I started having a better time with BF2, but I'd never actually play it without the group (who by then were slowly getting used to me, and I to them).
By the time Battlefield 2142 came around, I wasn't looking forward to starting that learning curve all over again. I was actually the first person in my group (we've never formally called ourselves a "clan", the concept is mutually hokey to all of us) to try the game out. I started it up, pointed my Level 1 assault rifle at another character, fired, and actually hit and killed him. That little bit of success gave just the slightest edge of positive feedback to BF2142 that I never, ever got playing BF2.
The Battlefield games to this day have a disproportionate share of jank. I don't get stuck on slight changes in ground geometry in BFBC2 like i used to in earlier games, but there are definite, noticeable differences from server to server and game to game. Sometimes you feel like you've got the touch of death and sometimes you feel like your gun is firing blanks. A player gets the impression (and this is true of every Battlefield game I've played) that what they're seeing is merely an interpretation of what's really happening in the game. Frustrations run the spectrum from inconsistent knifing distances (and other general hitbox weirdness) to bits of lag that manifest themselves as your character dropping dead after you've scrambled to safety. The earlier games suffered from a horrible user interface outside of gameplay, and the netcode never seemed quite right either.
When it's clicking, though, Battlefield is far and away one of the best gaming experiences I've ever encountered. It brings back and encourages the sorely-missed personal interaction with a team of friends. It's a case of not feeling alone against the enemy (even in a team-based environment) as well as an incomparable sense of accomplishment when you succeed at something larger than individual effort. I think it's amazing that this can be simulated so well in a video game. At a time of transition in my life, getting together to play Battlefield on Thursdays with my friends became an important social connection. I can't help but think that the game itself helped facilitate this (though I don't give it all the credit).
Which has me thinking about what I expect from Battlefield 3. The introduction of the Frostbite Engine did away with a lot of the glaring flaws of the earlier games. Hopefully the new engine has been polished even further. Battlefield's flaws have, in my opinion, always been tied directly to its ambitious goals and I'm optimistic that the technology and talent at DICE have finally grown into the vision of what they originally set out to achieve.
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