Where does Bad Company 2 fit in your "Best of 2010" list?
By Jayross 52 Comments
People who love Bad Company 2, love Bad Company 2.
So when I was sorting through my irrelevant "Best of 2010" list, I had to contemplate where I would place it. I haven't reviewed Bad Company 2 on Giant Bomb mostly because I have been so busy playing it, so I have a lot of opinions about the game.
Singleplayer
There has never been a singleplayer in any of the previous Battlefield games, so DICE took quite a risk with the original Bad Company. If they had stumbled and failed miserably, I would have been fine saying "Those guys should never try to make a singleplayer game again. Stick to multiplayer". However, the original Bad Company had such a creative story with great characters and writing that is set the bar pretty high for Bad Company 2.
The early marketing for the game made it clear that DICE was moving away from what the original Bad Company was in favor of a more "serious" game. But considering how humor was the strong point of the BC1 campaign, and after playing BC2 through a couple of times, I can say that moving away from the original Bad Company was a terrible mistake.
The humor that lightened the first game and that was always present in cut-scenes now had to be discovered by setting your controller down for a few minutes. The wide-open levels and player-choice from BC1 were swapped out with linear levels and scripting a la COD. The story from the first game was never even acknowledged to have existed.
I spoke to the lead-writer for Bad Company 2 (different than the one from BC1), and asked him why there was such a shift in tone between the two games. Unfortunately, he said he "couldn't go into it"
Is this the type of game someone can consider to be their "Game of the Year"?
Yes.
I have spent... *checks 360*... 216 hours playing Bad Company 2 online. Yes, I have a lot of free-time resulting from a relaxed highschool workload... and let's face it, I'm not getting panda every weekend. Anyways...
Despite having some very linear maps with annoying choke-points, the Bad Company 2 multiplayer experience is the best I have ever had on a console. (I still value BF2 as the "true Battlefield game")
Tight infantry combat, something the Battlefield series was never known for, was coupled with refined vehicle combat and large maps. The Rush gamemode that was originally introduced with BC1, is one of the best gamemodes in a multiplayer shooter ever. The way the balance can shift as the combat takes place in different environments is amazing, and I hope Rush is something that is elaborated on in future Battlefield games.
The unlockables are great, and while not as varied or as deep as in Call of Duty, still offer a great incentive to keep on playing without unbalancing things too much. Again, I hope this is expanded on in Battlefield 3.
Okay, so let's take a look at how the game has been supported.
VIP Maps: Disappointing. The game should have been sold with all of the modes unlocked for all of the maps (although even to this day there are modes that are not playable on certain maps). It was nice to have new maps, like with Map Pack 7, but the majority of previous VIP maps were pretty underwhelming.
The summer was a time when a lot of my friends stopped playing Battlefield, instead opting to play Starcraft 2 or Halo: Reach; the support was not there when it was needed most.
However, just this month, VIP Map Pack 7 was released, featuring two BC1 maps remade, as well as two ported maps from the BC2 singleplayer. Those maps were great, providing so much content for the price of: free!
While it would have been nice to have those maps during the start of the summer, at least they got to the community eventually.
Finally, Vietnam! I am stuck in Canada at the moment, away from my Xbox, so I have been unable to play Vietnam. However, Screened.com's Matthew Rorie has given his opinion on the expansion here.
Overall, I feel pretty good calling Bad Company 2 my overall Game of the Year for 2010 (full list). What about you?