History of Battlefield (2002 - 2022) | Documentary

so is [Music] defend this position we got company overhead [Music] keep falling down [Music] [Music] wow god welcome to duty commander battlefield is a first-person shooter franchise created by a swedish game development studio called dice and published by electronic arts in it players participate in massive team-oriented battles using a large arsenal of weapons and vehicles all inspired by various eras of warfare throughout history and beyond the series has grown exceptionally large throughout the course of its nearly 20-year run and has inspired a wide breadth of talented creators from around the world to share their passion for it and because this series relies so strongly on collaboration and teamwork i've asked several of those community members to join me today and share their thoughts on the series throughout the course of this video but before we get to that let's first take it way back and talk about the origin of dice itself [Music] when talking about the origin of any major first-person shooter franchise it's pretty much a given that there's at least some connection to id software's 1993 classic doom the first person shooter genre skyrocketed in popularity thanks to this game with dozens of imitations pouring onto the scene all trying to build off of id software's clever faux 3d visual design tight shooting mechanics and large variety of enemies to gun down but an often overlooked aspect of doom that also contributed largely to the genre was its land-based death match mode that pit real players against each other as opposed to just blasting away mindless ai controlled sprites this made the action more exciting and every victory more rewarding but as enjoyable as it was this early take on the competitive death match was ultimately limited in what it could actually do both in terms of its technical features and its gameplay design it wasn't truly 3d after all and while there were eventually mods to play the game online doom wasn't technically an online shooter either this all changed when id software brought the quake series onto the scene it was with this game's release and the fact that the tech used for the game was made to be open source that the first person shooter genre saw an even more rapid expansion culminating in a radical shift away from corridor sci-fi shoot-'em-ups to more grounded experiences most notably dreamworks interactive's medal of honor a world war ii series dreamed up by none other than the american filmmaker steven spielberg meanwhile over in sweden two rookie developers johan pearson and patrick soderland had their own ideas for where to take this rapidly evolving genre they were both fascinated with the idea of player immersion especially that offered by flight and racing simulators and sought to combine those elements into one seamless virtual experience but this ambitious dream of theirs took years to cultivate they were a small team of developers after all and money wasn't exactly readily available to them so to support their studio and gain some much needed experience they signed on to work on a few smaller scale projects including a children's horseback riding game and a racing simulator designed to promote volvo's v70 with the relative success of these two projects the studio could then justify bulking up their staff size and created their own proprietary game engine called the refractor engine its purpose was to allow for the rendering of large-scale outdoor environments with multiple vehicle simulations all working in tandem within a single game world but as the fps genre came into its own they then decided to mix in some combat mechanics as well effectively transforming their virtual world into a large-scale deathmatch arena complete with fully armed and pilotable vehicles a battlefield if you will development for the refactor engine took another six years to complete as the small stockholm based studio only had so many programmers and funding on hand but after striking a deal with the american publisher take two interactive they finally were given the chance to go all in on their passion project and greatly expanded upon their war-themed multiplayer sandbox the development team now having been formally established as refraction games saw this sandbox as the core of their gameplay experience they have no interest in pursuing any sort of scripted single player campaign as they felt the concept had been played out and competing against human players was infinitely more rewarding but take two didn't want to take that chance single player games were still considered the bread and butter of the industry so as part of the agreement refraction games were forced to piece together a loosely scripted campaign to accompany the project's final release the end result was 1999's codename eagle that while not technically a part of the battlefield series would serve a critical role in establishing the series's fundamental design codename eagle takes place in the early 20th century in an alternate version of world war one where the russian empire is under the control of the ruthless general pop-off hell-bent on world domination in this timeline germany is overwhelmed before they even have a chance to act and the last remaining free countries of europe band together to form the opposing shadow command in order to slow russia's rapid expansion it's a fairly creative backdrop to set a game around with a sort of cartoon-like aesthetic binding it all together but the missions themselves are very poorly constructed with lackluster scripting boring designs and weak encounters with enemies the real meat of the codename eagle experience is its online multiplayer that pits two teams against each other in large scale vehicle-centric battles they can for example hop into one of the heavily armored tanks and engage enemies across open ground sail across the open sea or take to the skies in one of the many aerial vehicles like biplanes bombers and even an airship and all this is coupled with a traditional quake style infantry combat design as well though while this may seem fairly simple by today's standards codename eagle was a game like no other upon its release it was a revolutionary step for the online shooter genre but one that went largely unnoticed the game generated decent sales numbers with a little over 300 thousand copies sold in the first couple of years and the dev team supported the project with occasional patches post launch but because of its lackluster single-player experience the game was met with an overall lukewarm reception from critics some reviewers did note that the true fun of the game could be found in its multiplayer as intended but in the late 1990s buying a game for the sole intent of playing it online was not at all a common practice and codename eagle would inevitably fade into obscurity only to be rediscovered years later thanks to the popularity of its developers later work following codename eagle refraction game set their sights even higher they saw huge potential in the sandbox war scenario they had created though at the same time they did recognize that they would need to broaden its appeal if they were going to reach a wider audience and what better way to do that than to alter the game's setting and portray the second world war a theme that many game developers around this time similarly watched onto due to the popularity of the 1998 film saving private ryan by 1999 development had begun on their next big project using their same refractor engine to sculpt unique level geometry and make tweaks to the vehicle physics systems but as work progressed throughout the year it became obvious that this would be too great of an undertaking for such a small development team as they lack the manpower and collective talent to deliver on the sort of large-scale battles that a setting like world war ii demanded to make matters worse take two refused to support the team this time around as they remained skeptical that a multiplayer-focused property would appeal to a market that seemed laser focused on scripted single-player campaigns with this news refraction games were at a standstill they had missed their planned 1999 e3 demonstration target and were now at risk of having to shut down the project for good but before that could happen another swedish development studio called digital illusions better known as dice stepped into the scene dice was founded way back in the early 1990s with the help of four college students from vequoi university they were colloquially known as the silence and spent their early years building pinball games for the amiga and various other platforms they saw significant success in its early days thanks to these games with their first title selling over half a million copies within its first year and after a few more successful game releases they looked for ways to expand and turn their sights to their swedish neighbors for fraction games acquiring their employees their engine and their overly ambitious world war ii sandbox while also making patrick soderlin into dice's chief executive officer with their latest passion project now seemingly back in business the veteran members of the codename eagle development team toiled away on an updated version of the refactor engine improving the quality of the lighting effects texture streaming draw distances and the realism of its many physics simulations however at the time dice didn't consider this niche world war ii sandbox to be nearly as important as some of their other projects and to prevent codename eagle's spiritual successor from falling through entirely members of the team like lead programmer matt dahl were forced to search for a publisher to help keep the dream alive this proved to be even more challenging publishers didn't want to take a chance on a strange sandbox hybrid deathmatch game there was no reason to believe it would ever take off and codename eagles performance provided more than enough evidence of that then when all seemed lost the american publisher electronic arts stepped onto the scene remarkably a small portion of ea's quality control team were big fans of codename eagle in fact they were engrossed in its multiplayer mode often playing their own private land matches after work with their help dal was able to convince ea to assist in publishing the troubled project drastically increasing its budget and its marketing potential adding to this was yet another acquisition by dice this time of the canadian-based developer called sandbox studios bumping up dice's total employee count from roughly 100 up to 150 and further expanding their market reach into western territories finally after nearly four years of trouble development the project finally went gold and battlefield 1942 went on to release for the pc platform in september of 2002. battlefield 1942 while fundamentally similar to codename eagle in some regards is a drastically different experience overall first off there's no true campaign or real story to be found here the campaign instead tasks players with completing a set playlist of bot-filled multiplayer matches all organized in a mostly chronological order effectively letting players fight their way through the entirety of world war ii to help explain this tumultuous time in human history battlefield 1942 includes detailed descriptions of each of the game's battles that helps to contextualize what the player is about to take part in though while it's certainly entertaining to dominate groups of brain dead ai soldiers with high impact explosives and commandeer any vehicle that the player wants the single player campaign and similarly its instant battle mode are more or less an appetizer for the main course that is 1942's online multiplayer here two teams of players clash in massive 64-player skirmishes using lots of error-appropriate weapons and vehicles all while attempting to occupy key strategic positions classic modes like death match and capture the flag do return but it's 1942's premiere of the conquest mode that had players hooked this mode provides players with plenty of freedom in how they approach the action they can for example play aggressively fighting on the front line to capture a critical map juncture or they can alternatively focus on capturing objectives on the outskirts and set up critical flanking opportunities for the main force as for the maps themselves 1942 has an impressive offering with iconic battles from nearly every theater of the war maps include the massive desert el alamein perfect for players that favor more vehicle-centric action the deadly beach landings at omaha beach challenging the attacking allies with scaling a massive fortified wall to overwhelm the defending german team and most iconic of all wake island wake island is definitely one of those special maps it's been recreated in so many the battlefield games since battlefield 1942 but it's what the game was first premiered on in the 1942 demo the map was designed really well it gave you all kinds of different combat opportunities there was aircraft carriers there was landing boats there was fighters there was dive bombing there was tanks you could do everything on that map and it looked awesome especially for the time when people were not used to playing games with 64 players including aircraft and tanks another reason why battlefields and map designs could be seen as a marked improvement over the old sandboxes of codename eagle is that they're representative of real-world locations delivering players into a semi-believable scenario with dynamic action that other competing titles just couldn't deliver probably the one that sticks out most in my mind and the one that i really enjoyed the the gameplay with was the liberation of khan it's it's a really famed battle right they they made movies about it and to to see it come to life in battlefield and then to be able to play that and experience that was just a fantastic uh fantastic experience for me but at the same time that sandbox charm that made code eagle such a big hit among its cult following was retained to some degree giving the action an almost comical light-hearted feel players were you know flinging themselves out of planes of parachutes you know they were taking on tanks like you know the game was already ridiculous it was already not really about the authenticity of the war people were parachuting and dropping mines onto aircraft carriers to blow up planes the absurdity of battlefield had very much already been shown and in many ways that was the fun of it that was what was unique about it to account for the game's rudimentary shooting mechanics battlefield 1942 incorporates a unique class system that aims to balance out the action among players by limiting them to specific weapons and gear when they spawn onto the map players can select between five classes in 1942 the first is the scout a sniper class capable of engaging targets from long distance with a fashion specific scoped bolt-action rifle the scout is also equipped with a handgun a few frag grenades and a pair of very special binoculars one of the most invaluable and underused assets in the entire game was the binoculars in the recon class because you could call in artillery and someone in an artillery would be able to line their shots up with what recon had scoped out and you could do some serious damage if coordinated properly next there's the assault class that's equipped with the game's various machine guns and assault rifles perfect for players that prefer intense frontline combat after that there's the anti-tank class that as the name suggests is crucial to balancing the action on the field that rocket launcher the anti-tank head felt fantastic just the velocity of it the screen shake the the violence of the whoosh that goes by and then of course the satisfaction you get when you shoot that at a target like a moving plane and it lands that type of exhilaration was so unique back then the fourth class and probably one of the more team play-oriented classes is the medic the medic is armed with the game's smgs perfect for clearing trench lines and getting up close and personal but his greatest asset is his med kit that can be used to replenish both his health and that of his nearby injured allies players can still alternatively seek out medical cabinets and ammo containers at set points throughout the map but the medic helps to keep the action as mobile as possible and cuts down on the need to backtrack the final class and arguably one of the most versatile is the engineer you had things like the number four rifle you of course had the m1 guaran k-98 type five we had some really iconic weapons there but for me uh it was all about the equipment so you had the wrench you were able to uh repair your team's vehicles i loved using uh the landmines uh because it was kind of a challenge to identify on maps you know like okay where is there a choke point where are the vehicles most likely to go and there was kind of a little bit of chess going on there and then of course you had the explosive packs which were just fun to use in general now aside from their loadouts all five of these classes control exactly the same as one another players can run forward crouch dive into a prone position aim and fire though it does all feel a bit clunky even when taking into consideration the time that the game was released there wasn't much encouragement for infantry players you were very much there to facilitate a match you weren't really there in terms of the core gameplay loop itself the movements the shooting the reloads the animations and sound effects all were pretty average back then which makes sense because the battlefield series back then really wasn't trying to be a competitive first-person shooter and it's for this reason that the vehicles in 1942 remain the star attraction players can pilot dozens of different vehicles in this game from simple transports like jeeps cars and half tracks to iconic armored tanks naval warships and aircraft it's remarkable how much dice was able to cram into this game from the robust lineup of classic world war ii battles to the seemingly endless list of pilotable vehicles and it didn't stop there soon after the game's initial launch dice continued to follow up their early success by working on massive expansions to the game the first expansion titled the road to rome delivers players yet another front of the war with six more maps all based around iconic scenarios like operation husky along with a few new vehicles and weapons to play around with but it was their second expansion that really beefed up 1942's available content this final expansion titled secret weapons of world war ii was initially planned to be much smaller matching roads to rome's more modest offerings but the developers over at dice canada had so much fun with the idea that they managed to cram in eight new maps 18 new vehicles and six new weapons what a wild insane expansion it's funny how these days we talk about multiplayer games getting ridiculous or that oh this isn't really authentic where 1942 in kind of battlefield 1's vein later on very much pushing the technology that was on the cutting edge that time with jet packs and super tanks and massive aircraft gear it was insane but that was also the fun of it the fun of it was hopping into an experimental nazi jet plane what other game were you doing that in at the time following this last expansion dice continued to support 1942 further with smaller updates adding in some minor balancing tweaks technical fixes and even a few free maps they also strongly encourage the most dedicated of fans to make use of the refractor engine to build their very own experiences resulting in incredible player-made conversion modifications that either expanded upon the world war ii theme like forgotten hope or delivered players into entirely different eras of combat including world war one vietnam and even the gulf war all three of which would serve a pivotal role in shaping the series's future whatever the game lacked it being flexible and audible ended up creating these communities that built things that they wanted to see the game do that the game didn't originally do there's a whole core of all these mods that started to just come out and building the battlefield the perfect battle for games that these people wanted to play overall battlefield 1942 and its expansions were a major hit audiences everywhere praised the game for its highly innovative design especially in regards to its huge player counts 1942 is a video game that was all about the scale because no other game had that scale at the time i mean it was just absolute pandemonium compared to some of the other games out there you just had so many people packed into a server and real people you know we were used to having bots around sometimes but you know having real players 32v32 for that time period was absolutely wild it was the first game to not only offer 64 players but do it at a high graphical fidelity and with a fully functional physics system in vehicles you have to remember at the time there was no other games even coming close to this though despite its revolutionary design it wasn't without its faults either with stiff controls and unforgiving gameplay mechanics that would hinder the general enjoyment of the experience you know it's it's interesting to look back on games like battlefield 1942 with kind of these rose-colored glasses and then you go and you play it again i was struck by uh the movement uh not being super fluid you know and how spoiled we'd become with uh the more modernized games dice were not at all concerned back then about player dynamics or unique abilities or perks or customization that wasn't on the table back then because just the idea of putting 64 people on a map with dozens of vehicles and multiple capture points that was enough alone to sell a video game back then and sure enough 1942 managed to go on to nearly double the sales of its predecessor becoming one of the top played multiplayer games on the pc in 2003 and winning several pc game of the year awards along with it dice and the old refractor team had finally proven that their multiplayer centric vehicle sandbox was capable of standing on its own and electronic arts seeing huge potential in this new property were quick to green light a follow-up as the lead dice studios in stockholm worked on the next major step for the refractor engine technology the recently acquired sandbox studios now known as dice canada underwent an overhaul of its own frederick william one of dice's four co-founders was assigned to the studio as its head manager and aimed to streamline their development pipeline reducing the staff size by 40 and refocusing attention towards singular projects rather than multiple console ports like before their first project after this restructuring was the secret weapons of world war ii expansion for 1942 this served as a sort of testing ground for the studio allowing them to familiarize themselves more with the refractor engine then following its success dice canada entered into production on something much more ambitious a full standalone release that would propel players into the heart of another major conflict in the 20th century the vietnam war this was a highly unusual step for a shooter game in the early 2000s sure there were a few other vietnam war games released around this time most notably teradon's viet cong series but for big publishers portraying such a controversial war seemed like a big risk but the developers at dice canada weren't nearly as concerned with this they saw some potential in the conflict's unique aspects mainly the idea of asymmetrical warfare and guerrilla tactics and were fueled further by their love of the 1942 mod eve of destruction this mod first released in the summer of 2003 gave many fans of the series their first taste of vietnam era combat the mod repurposed practically every map from the base game to feature more jungle scenery along with hundreds of other maps that were added over the course of the mod's lifespan alongside these maps were new vehicles weapons factions sound effects it was an exceptionally ambitious conversion mod but it was still severely lacking in a few areas especially in regards to its balancing and dice canada sought to address its shortcomings with their own official vietnam-based entry only a few months later to help them capture the most iconic aspects of this particular conflict the development team turned to several popular vietnam-based films for inspiration most notably apocalypse now full metal jacket platoon we were soldiers and even robin williams's portrayal of adrian cronauer featured in good morning vietnam they then updated the refactor engine with a new vegetation system called overgrowth which allowed the developers to bulk up each environment with thick grass trees and bushes an absolute must when portraying this particular conflict then after a little under half a year of full development dice canada released their one and only standalone entry to the series battlefield vietnam once again exclusively for windows battlefield vietnam while fundamentally similar to 1942 still feels remarkably different everything from the menus the font and the music have been completely redesigned to more properly immersed players into the game's atmosphere loading screens for example now play popular 1960s and 70s rock hits like jefferson airplane's white rabbit rare earth's get ready edwin starr's war and most recognizable of all ccr's fortunate sun the soundtrack is easily one of battlefield vietnam's most memorable features and what's more all the songs can be played in game from most vehicles and blasted out loud for all to hear as you drive by with a simulated doppler effect [Music] but battlefield vietnam's great soundtrack and style aren't the only things it has going for it it also seeks to completely transform the feel of the gameplay experience with wildly different level environments more modern weaponry and several other quality of life improvements now as i've said before this game takes several cues from popular hollywood films on vietnam operation irving for example is a near one-to-one recreation of that iconic helicopter attack sequence at the start of apocalypse now the yangjong valley similarly matches the layout of the hillsides used to portray the same battle in the film we are soldiers and other more urban environments like puang chi and hue borrow portions of their layout from the final act of full metal jacket i definitely prefer the urban maps in that game they just had so much atmosphere to them the infantry combat was a lot better and they had those propaganda towers that would actually work they would really demoralize you while you're playing the game [Music] to accompany these cinematic homages battlefield vietnam also features a plethora of other major historical battles from the conflict all built around the idea of asymmetrical warfare the vietcong and to a lesser extent than north vietnamese were of course not quite as well equipped as the american soldiers so to play into this the maps regularly force the american and south vietnamese teams to play on the offensive with only a single forward operating base to start while the vietcong and nva are given a majority of the capture points spread out across lush densely vegetated jungles this intentional imbalance gives battlefield vietnam a very unique feel from other entries in the series as players will need to adjust their tactics to account for their faction's own limitations this game also reimagines 1942's class-based infantry design shrinking the number of classes down to only four with two distinct loadouts for each class on top of this each of these eight loadouts is unique to that particular faction again emphasizing the game's asymmetrical feel the first of these four classes is the assault class like before the assault class is intended for intense frontline combat with full auto machine guns assault rifles and a pump action shotgun the second class though the engineer is where things get a little bit more interesting on the us and south vietnamese side of things the engineer class is equipped with a semi-auto m14 rifle along with a couple of returning gadgets like land mines repair tools and explosive charges the latter of which can now stick to surfaces before being detonated but there are a few new gadgets like a welding torch to damage enemy vehicles up close a deployable mortar that functions a lot like the artillery from 1942 and anti-personnel claymore mines meanwhile the vietcong and the nva are set up a bit differently instead of those rifles they're equipped with submachine guns like the mat 49 and while they still get to use mortars and repair tools they don't have access to claymore c4 or the welding torch they're instead given more deadly defensive traps like the punji sticks that could be drilled into the ground to block narrow access points they can also wire explosive ignition traps in parked vehicles and most important of all they can use their shovel to create new spawn points giving teammates easy access to key objectives the third class is the heavy assault this is more or less the same as the old anti-tank class with loadouts that include things like the law and rpg but players using these classes are given more of a fighting chance now with semi-auto rifles on either side along with other powerful weapons like the m60 light machine gun and the m-79 grenade launcher finally there's the scout class built once more for long-range engagements and support but unlike 1942 the scouts binoculars have been distributed to most other classes as a standard tool however the scout does at least get a few new tools like a yellow smoke grenade to mark positions for friendly aircraft and on the vietcong and nva team they get small defensive traps like cow trops and bouncing betty's that can be easily hidden in the tall grass regardless of which class or loadout that the player chooses battlefield vietnam sports some subtle improvements to its core mechanics to make the combat feel a bit more satisfying weapons feel more deadly now thanks to the improved accuracy and lower time to kill and the improved sound quality helps to deliver a satisfying punch to each shot that manages to hold up much better than its predecessor however despite those small improvements it's still the vehicle combat that remains battlefield vietnam's strongest asset and while the jeeps tanks patrol boats and napalm carrying jet fighters are all fun to play around with it's undoubtedly the new helicopters that steal the show helicopters add a really unique dynamic to the sandbox action as they're more of a persistent aerial threat launching volleys of rocket pods on groups of infantry and circling helpless vehicles they also allow for rapid troop deployment around the map as pilots can airlift large groups of players mobile spawn points and even ground vehicles thanks to a deployable winch overall battlefield vietnam was fairly successful next step for the battlefield franchise it took everything fans loved about 1942 and transplanted it into the harsh jungles of southeastern asia all with a confident style that perfectly captures that hollywood-esque vietnam war experience playing battlefield vietnam was a cool evolution from battlefield 1942 because it was the first time you were getting at least a taste of more modern technology they had helicopters they had jets with lock-on air-to-air missiles and they had napalm strikes crazy stuff like that plus you had jungle maps that were denser there was more dense city maps it was sort of an upgrade all around the real way to look at vietnam is that not only was it a more interesting setting for a game back then there was also just a ton of vehicles that you had no access to in a world war ii game that just wouldn't have been a thing you know whether it's the helicopters whether it's the proper jet fighters whether it's the bombers you know all these types of of these gameplay aspects and also just the lush jungles the sheer elevation of the maps was a massive change as well there are a lot of nuances to vietnam that separated it from 1942 that i think maybe i didn't appreciate back then though it was obviously not without its faults either many noted that the game wasn't quite as ambitious as the 1942 mod eve of destruction with its lack of maps eclipsing any sort of quality of life improvements it may have made vietnam didn't even receive any sort of expansion packs post launch either though it did at least receive a few free maps with game client updates along with integration of an unofficial community-made world war ii mod that brought back a few maps from 1942 however this minimal support would soon make sense as the lead team over in the stockholm offices were putting the final touches on the entry that would transform the series forever now before we get started talking about this next entry to the battlefield series we can't ignore arguably one of the most influential user-made mods of 1942 this is desert combat a full gulf war inspired conversion mod created by a trio of american modders who later went on to form their own development team called trauma studios like with vietnam portraying modern conflicts like the gulf war was not at all a common practice back in the day you have to remember that this was the early 2000s and so the wars in afghanistan and later iraq were only just getting started because of this the topic was especially sensitive to cover and even more so to feature as the backdrop for a video game but as a mod the developers had the freedom to build the gameplay experience that they themselves wanted to play resulting in an uncompromised portrayal of modern warfare complete with countless vehicles weapons and middle eastern themed locales desert combat quickly went on to become one of 1942's most popular conversion mods with many players purchasing 1942 for the sole intent of installing it driving up the sales numbers and drawing the interest of dice themselves it soon became clear to them that this new modern warfare setting offered a plethora of new gameplay opportunities making it the perfect fit for the next major battlefield installment but before they could get started there was the matter of the aging reflector engine to attend to despite those few graphical improvements that dice canada managed to incorporate in battlefield vietnam it was clear to everyone involved that the refractor engine was on its last leg so with the help of returning battlefield vietnam programmer andreas fredrickson the core of the refractor engine was overhauled allowing for even more advanced simulations like ragdoll physics to be incorporated then in the summer of 2004 dyson veiled their vision for the future of the series with a brief proof of concept of their next project running off a prototype version of their next-gen game engine refactor 2. the demonstration showed off a small-scale skirmish between a squad of u.s marines in an undisclosed middle eastern city and highlighted several new features including bullet penetration advanced lighting more complex animations and an increased focus on tactical action the fan base were ecstatic this was by no means the first modern warfare game to be made but to have the battlefield series tackle the era especially with such impressive graphics made the announcement particularly exciting the dice still had a lot of work ahead of them refractor 2 wasn't quite finished yet and almost none of the multiplayer maps planned for the game were completed it was during this time that the 100 some developers at dice stockholm rapidly pieced together what would later become battlefield 2 with an entirely new faction being established to help provide more variety to the overwhelming amount of middle eastern themed locations they had been working on as they neared the project's deadline dice even reached out to the creators of the desert combat mod and fully acquired trauma studios in late 2004 subsequently renaming them into dice new york it was from this small team of veteran modders that the iconic squad and commander systems were born a feature that would eventually prove to be critical to the series future success however after failing to come to an agreement about their future involvement in the series dice shut down this new york branch leaving them to sign on with thq a few months later finally after roughly two years of full development the ambitious new project was complete and dice released their highly anticipated next entry to the series battlefield 2 exclusively for the pc with a separate console version modern combat releasing a little bit later battlefield 2 is the first entry in the series to not be based on any real conflict it instead takes place in a sort of what-if scenario where the united states enters into a full-scale conventional war with the people's republic of china and a coalition of middle eastern states to house this new conflict battlefield 2 features a remarkably impressive lineup of maps from the chaotic urban mayhem of strike at karkhand and sharkey peninsula to the 10th riverside skirmishes along the dragon valley and fushi pass there's a ton of variety to appeal to every type of battlefield player strike a car campaign was [Music] just a great map because you're talking a lot of verticality in it so you were able to get on top of buildings and things like that i just remember that being so cool um because i often played infantry and of course you had to fight against tanks and uh that was the place to be if you wanted to do that sharkey peninsula has got to be one of my favorite maps in bf2 i mean you got this crazy tight-knit urban combat yet you've got tanks and apc's rolling through the streets and attack helicopters overhead it was just so crazy when you played it i'd say my favorite map would probably be the docking oil fields those four giant silos in the middle taking jets and uh especially if you're being chased flying through those most people couldn't do it so if they're trying to chase it well they're gonna smack into something to go along with all these great maps bf2 also features greatly improved core gameplay systems to better streamline the flow of the action including the introduction of a sprint key more advanced soldier movement animations and a redesign to the gunplay that delivers more lethality with every shot while also requiring players to maintain firm firing stances and fire and control bursts to retain accuracy and while most of these features were certainly nice additions they're nothing compared to battlefield 2's most important new feature the squad system the squad system allows players to form their own distinctive units of up to six players within their own team within a squad one player usually the one that created the squad is delegated a leadership role and can use the game's new comma rose interface to issue specific orders which are then displayed on each squad member's mini map and 3d display even more importantly the squad leader also serves as a squad's mobile spawn point hugely transforming the way that players approach combat situations just having the ability to spawn on somebody who was already in the action uh instead of having to you know play walking simulator until you got to where all of the the action was uh really help keep the pace up of the battles and keep you engaged and i think that's one of the main reasons why you know battlefield 2 is such a favorite game among fans [Music] [Applause] accompanying the squad system is the new commander role the commander is the leader of the entire team and can issue orders to each individual squad leader using a unique command screen interface on this screen the commander has a full overhead view of the match with the status of every squad their objectives and any identified enemy forces with this invaluable information the commander can control the course of the battle and can even provide direct support with things like supply drops uav scans and most terrifying of all the artillery strike with these systems in place battlefield 2 has a much more organized tactical feel to it aided further by the first instance of an integrated voice chat option and a new spotting system that can relay the exact position of an enemy soldier or vehicle on the minimap for the entire team to save the ability to communicate also makes the game's many classes more practical which is important as each kid's respective role is more crucial to maintaining the balance of the gameplay bf2 features seven classes special forces sniper assault support engineer medic and anti-tank as always each class is armed with our own specific weapon types with the default weapons varying depending on the faction but with this modern setting comes a swath of new modern hardware adding a bit more versatility to each unit snipers for example are now equipped with a ghillie suit to help them blend into the vegetation assaults can fire underbarrel grenade launchers and tossed smoke grenades and the anti-tank class now equipped with smgs can also fire wire guided rockets perfect for tracking moving targets at range bf2 also introduces the new special forces class to the mix whose sole purpose is to sabotage critical assets like bridges vehicles and commander assets using his powerful c4 the special forces was my favorite class in battlefield 2. the fact that it has c4s was the weapon of choice for me i just love tossing those around across walls and getting just loads of kills spec ops just sneaking around flanking the enemy completely and coming up behind them taking out their artillery assets and the uav to make sure that they the commander couldn't use those things then there's the more team play-oriented classes like the support engineer and medic that arguably play the most crucial role in the ground the support class for example is now tasked with resupplying teammates with small ammo bags which is key considering maps no longer house permanent ammo resupply stations engineers still need to repair friendly vehicles and drop mines but they also have the option to remove enemy mines and are necessary for fixing bridges and commander assets that a hostile special forces may have damaged and finally there's the medic that on top of restoring ally health with first aid kits can also revive fallen teammates with his new defibrillator paddles bringing them back into the fight without needing to respawn that was really the the first time that i embraced the medic class and kind of understood what they could bring to the table in terms of it being a team game um you had access to some really good weapons of the m16a2 right that's one that was uh very iconic and continue to be in other battlefield games down the road but of course you had the the defib paddles right and that was that that was a lot of fun to use in the game when considering all seven classes together coupled with the three playable factions there's a ton of weapons to master far more than anything the series has offered up to this point in time and on top of all that players can unlock more weapons using battlefield 2's new persistent player progression system with this system points earned throughout each match are now accumulated and added to the player's total eventually rewarding them with things like ribbons medals and ranked promotions when hitting certain ranked milestones players are also awarded with weapon unlock tokens that can be used to unlock new weapon tiers for any of the seven classes but all that's just the infantry side of things battlefield 2 also reimagines how the vehicles operate as well instead of slow moving panzers shermans and propeller planes players can now power across the terrain in m1 abrams and t-90s rapid-fire anti-personnel carriers mobile anti-aircraft units and several light vehicles like dpvs humvees and rib boats helicopters also make a return with a more powerful torque system coupled with some realistic physics that talented pilots can use to their advantage as they whip around corners and line up deadly salvo strikes favorite vehicle has got to be the ah1z viper i mean i'm a helicopter guy and that's really when piloting became extremely fun in the battlefield franchise you could partner up with your gunner you had cool communication going on especially if you're like buddies playing in the same room or landing up or whatever and you can absolutely dominate like half the server if you actually knew what you were doing i mean it was just a powerhouse but when controlled by skilled pilots it's the jet fighters that are undoubtedly the most deadly of battlefield 2's vehicle types equipped with front-mounted gatling cannons and multiple heat-seeking missiles jet fighters can completely decimate any helicopters before they have a chance to react they're also equipped to deal with ground threats as well with powerful explosive payloads capable of destroying any armored targets what makes these vehicles even more challenging to deal with though is their breakneck speed with thrusters that can deliver players across the entire map within seconds but thankfully the ground forces aren't completely defenseless against all this air power along with the mobile aaa many objectives feature and placed anti-aircraft turrets that can fire surface-to-air missiles after acquiring a clean lock-on pilots can deploy flares in an attempt to break this lock but if they're not careful only a few well-timed missiles can take them out entirely those same roles apply at least to some extent for armored ground units as well that are all equipped with a defensive smoke screen that can be used to dodge wire guided missiles if you haven't already noticed battlefield 2 is the first game in the series to really emphasize the sort of rock paper scissors mentality a helicopter for example is perfect for dealing with light vehicles and infantry but it's highly vulnerable to an enemy jet meanwhile that jet will be vulnerable to a mobile a that in turn is no match for a main battle tank it's this persistent flow of balance that helps to maintain the illusion of control across battlefield 2 more so than we saw with 1942 or vietnam and this concept will only continue to evolve further from here on out overall battlefield 2 was revered as a masterpiece upon release at the time this was considered battlefield perfected and to many it still represents the series's peak with fantastic level designs greatly improved class and vehicle balancing and most importantly a renewed emphasis on team play and player coordination the game received countless nominations and awards with many claiming it to be the best multiplayer shooter of 2005 and it quickly outpaced both 1942 and vietnam in popularity with player numbers skyrocketing well past expectations however it wasn't just its polished gameplay design and fresh atmosphere that made it so popular bf2 also released during a major turning point in the gaming industry where the tremendous success of the xbox's halo series helped popularize the online obsession with serial web shows shot within video games also known as machinima before long every online multiplayer game had their own form of red vs blue often parodying newscasts and money python skits for comedic effect and with the help of battlefield 2's new battle recorder option dedicated players can make their very own machinima in-game using server data that can be replayed over and over from different camera angles thanks to this fans of the series were treated to several fan-made battlefield short films most notably snoken's hugely successful mine jared hudson and friends's the pwned life and of course the creative works of the sur community there were a lot of little nuances about the two that i do remember through the comedy videos the community made back then just because battlefield 2 was a great game that doesn't mean it didn't have it that pissed people off i remember the bunny hopping new tubers of the assault class you know the medic spammers that was where the revive came in and that's when the medic whoring really became a thing in the community you know of seeing the people on top of the scoreboard with no kills with nothing contributed to the team other than just reviving people in the dumbest spots in the worst places um dolphin diving yeah that itself as well the hit detection it's also funny too i think we forget how inaccurate the weapons were in battlefield 2. because i go back to belfast i'm like were the guns really this inaccurate and yeah no they are you know that was battlefield 2. like before bf2 had an impressive selection of full conversion mods as well that took advantage of the newer refractor engine 2 technology there were reprises of classic 1942 mods like eve of destruction and forgotten hope 2. and then there was entirely new experiences like the sur community's sandbox mod that boasted an incredible amount of creative freedom people took maps and just built whole new experiences with them that you couldn't have anywhere else because gary's mod at that point was already pretty established but sandbox was taking something that the engines would the engine was definitely not designed to do and that was to be able to spawn and substantiate objects at will without going through a mod editor or like recompiling a map like if you hadn't experienced at the time it doesn't sound very exciting because a lot of games have these sandbox-esque modes now but at the time it was like really almost nothing else like it especially not in battlefield 2 or any of those other types of first-person shooters and of course we can't forget project reality quite possibly one of the most extensive mods ever built for the series that aims to transform battlefield 2's more casual action oriented gameplay into a brutally challenging hardcore tactical shooter according to its developers the project reality mod first got its start over on the forum page for the old desert combat mod where user requiem rallied together a team to build a hardcore conversion mod for bf2 from here the team made subtle changes to the beloved bf2 formula restricting the heads-up display removing hit markers and reconfiguring the classes with hardware used by active military personnel as the mod took shape the community helped to drive it further introducing server roles that locked players into performing highly specific roles before long project reality became a massively popular spin-off to the battlefield series and eventually transformed into its own standalone title with a higher player capacity more advanced communication options and substantially more content and remarkably the game is still after over 17 years being supported to this day what's more many developers responsible for this mod over the years have gone on to build many of the tactical shooters that dominate the scene today including squad post scriptum and hell let loose all of this just goes to show how incredibly influential battlefield 2 has not just been to the series but to the multiplayer shooter genre as a whole and remarkably it didn't stop there during the launch of battlefield 2 dice canada had already been hard at work studying the new refactor 2 engine and building the first of several expansion packs for the game but in keeping true to their creative vision for vietnam they also wanted to give battlefield 2 fans something a little bit different covert infiltrations advanced gadgets and tools and some really creative level designs the result was the highly ambitious first expansion battlefield 2 special forces released in the fall of 2005. special forces takes the large-scale conflicts of bf2 and shrinks them down into smaller scale skirmishes often taking place late into the night as the name suggests actions available in these missions are various special forces units like the us navy seals russian spetsnaz and the british sas along with a few rebel and insurgent groups as well the core gameplay mechanics remain the same with all the same classes for churning though most of them are now equipped with unique hardware not available in the base game like night vision goggles flashbangs tear gas and a complimentary gas mask and of course the grappling hook and ziplines adding much more verticality to the action along with these new tools special forces also introduces several unique vehicles to the mix mostly shaped around the smaller scale skirmishes associated with the new spec op setting following the success of the special forces expansion dice canada pressed on with yet another expansion in march of the following year this expansion titled euro force isn't quite as ambitious as its predecessor and was instead marketed as just a booster pack with a much lower starting price point with it battlefield 2 saw the introduction of the european union faction equipped with their own unique weapons and vehicles and along with them three new maps offering more traditional all-out warfare only a few months later the second booster pack armored fury was released bringing the battle to american soil with three more maps along with the introduction of several fan favorite vehicles like the a-10 warthog scout helicopters like the little bird and to tie into the home front theme a little more some civilian vehicles like a muscle car and a trailer truck the latter of which contains a crucial clue about the series's future collectively battlefield 2 on the pc was a massive turning point for the battlefield franchise its success helped to solidify the series's popularity among its pc fan base standing alongside other juggernauts at the time like counter-strike dave defeat and the rapidly growing call of duty series additionally it was one of the more technically demanding titles of its time offering state-of-the-art visuals only rivaled by the likes of oblivion fear and crytek's debut title far cry but its most important contribution to the battlefield series was oddly enough not the renewed focus on team play its technical innovation or even how it furthered machinima user made modifications in fact it wasn't this highly regarded pc version at all it was instead the console spin-off modern combat that would inevitably transform the series for better or for worse created by a separate team within dice stockholm battlefield 2 modern combat was built exclusively for console platforms mainly the playstation 2 and original xbox and makes use of the popular renderware engine architecture rather than the old refactor engine because of this the game has a very distinctive look and feel and plays pretty much nothing like its pc counterpart for one modern combat is the first entry in the franchise to include a single player campaign with actual mission objectives and scripted sequences as opposed to just being a bot-filled instant action mode in it players take part in a brutal conflict between the chinese and nato forces in kazakhstan all instigated by a rogue terrorist group called the burning flag the story is delivered almost entirely by brief fictional news reports and mission briefings between maplodes not unlike many of the popular tom clancy games made by redstorm and ubisoft around that time but aside from this limited exposition the campaign experience is dictated almost entirely by the gameplay players assume the role of any number of different unnamed soldiers it must complete a string of objectives across varied environments many of battlefield's core tenants are retained here including specific classes abilities and the option to control vehicles but unique to modern combat is a clever soldier swap mechanic that allows players to instantly take control of any soldier by aiming at them and tapping a button by doing this modern combat essentially simulates the mayhem of the series's signature sandbox multiplayer giving a seemingly endless number of perspectives to every battle whether it be soldiers fighting on the front lines tanks shelling enemy positions or helicopter pilots providing close air support above but by introducing this feature modern combat also makes it so every soldier is expendable challenging players to choose the right soldier for the job and minimize friendly casualties to reach the necessary goal to incentivize efficient tactics further modern combat also includes a robust progression system with high scores on missions rewarding players with powerful weapon upgrades and tools all of which become increasingly more important as the missions increase in difficulty it's a very smart design overall essentially building off of battlefield's popular sandbox mentality and adopting it in a way that feels organic to a single player game though it's not without its faults with some sloppy ai design unreliable controls and some fairly poor scripting especially in its final act thankfully as with most battlefield games the multiplayer remains the standout feature and thanks to add-ons like the playstation 2's network adapter and xbox's new xbox live players on the console can now log on and play in epic 24 player battles across several large maps using a variety of vehicles it isn't quite the same scale as the pc mainly due to hardware limitations and there's quite a few changes in how the gameplay mechanics function as well the medic class for example has been grouped together with a support class without any way to revive down teammates and the anti-tank class has been combined with the engineer with smgs being replaced with shotguns instead but even more notable than those changes is the removal of battlefield 2's more team play-oriented focus there's no squads or commander here leaving players to rely solely on using built-in voice chat options to develop tactical play sadly unlike pretty much every title in the series battlefield 2 modern combat's multiplayer is inaccessible today but in its heyday it did serve a fundamental role in the series's evolution introducing console gamers to battlefield's epic sandbox and setting the stage for the series's drastic shift towards a more console focused direction soon after after the completion of the base battlefield 2 experience in 2005 production on an immediate follow-up became one of the lead focuses in the stockholm offices the second iteration of the refactor engine had taken several years to develop after all and with graphical technology rapidly evolving with each passing year ea and dice sought to deliver at least one more major release on the engine platform before diving headfirst into yet another expensive engine development phase but the question now was where could they take the series next they had done world war ii dice canada did a decent job portraying the biggest conflict of the cold war and battlefield 2 had pretty much covered everything there was to cover when it comes to modern warfare then it hit them why not push the envelope even further and portray the war of the future it was a bold step sci-fi shooters had stopped being popular for a while now with the only exceptions being games like halo or planetside but with the help of discovery channel's limited run future weapons television program the designers at dice came up with a creative new take on the sci-fi shooter that would aim to deliver a more realistic take on what future combat would be to aid in production dice reached out to many prolific modders in the community many of whom offered some fresh ideas to the futuristic concept and finally in the summer of 2006 ea and dice officially confirmed the entry with a somewhat mixed response from audiences 2142 didn't have that kind of like historical appeal to me um because it was you know future oriented you know i guess it's got cool mechs and everything like that but it was a it was a hard sell for me i mean that was a big break for the battlefield franchise you know because everybody was like all right we love the historical games you've got world war ii you've got vietnam you know okay we went to kind of this modern place like where are we going to go from here um and nobody was really like the future you know people didn't really think about battlefield and associate it with that i think there was definitely a case for that i'm sure 2142 got some flack back then to dice battlefield is a spiritual successor codename eagle a game with a fantastical setting and a lot of and a lot of vehicles and weapons and elements that did not exist in any actual war zone but to the greater public battlefield is a military shooter to the greater public battlefield is this semi-authentic game that visually in its sound effects and its models are all based on real conflicts so going to not just fantasy but going to a sci-fi fantasy in an era where a lot of sci-fi shooters existed to all compete against halo i'm sure it got some flack for that but for many fans 2142's announcement was a welcome surprise with players desperate to be a part of the private beta for the game over on file planet using that site's paid subscription service the game was eventually opened up for everyone to try with an online only demo showcasing the game's signature new mode and with its success the hype surrounding the game quickly grew ultimately culminating in the successful holiday release of battlefield 2142 the last main line entry to the series to be made exclusively for the pc battlefield 2142 takes place in the year 2142 with a new ice age having thrust the world into chaos as the remaining superpowers struggle for control of rapidly depleting resources and viable land the only two factions available in this game are the european union and the pan-asian coalition establishing a brand new and literal cold war where both sides are fighting to maintain control of the last remaining dry land on the planet in northern africa and in the middle east as always this game offers no true single player campaign experience opting to tell its story primarily through loading screen briefing pages instead though even with its limited information the world that dice set out to create is quite possibly one of the most unique and creative in the series history the game worlds have this dirty lived-in look to it that makes all the wild technology feel almost believable however ridiculous some of it may be and with the help of its haunting musical score the game delivers this truly fascinating atmosphere that is further expanded upon with its many new gameplay features now when it comes to its core gameplay 2142 can easily be mistaken for yet another mod for battlefield 2. a lot of the same awkward gameplay controls and other quarks are retained thanks to the engine and while the graphics are technically an improvement the changes are subtle and not necessarily competitive with other shooters released in 2006 but underneath this age shell is a remarkably unique battlefield experience that builds on what battlefield 2 accomplished by tweaking some of its rougher edges and polishing up key design elements to make the gameplay more accessible to newcomers the number of player classes for example has once more been scaled back down to four meshing together key team play-oriented abilities with other less important roles the assault class has been combined with a meta class allowing assault players to heal and revive down teammates similarly the engineer has been tied together with the anti-tank and the newer special forces class is now mixed in with a sniper under a collective recon class like we do to both classes often requiring a sneaky playstyle as you've probably already noticed this isn't too far removed from the way battlefield vietnam tried to simplify the class system only instead of just choosing from a few predefined loadouts players can now freely build their own loadouts using various weapons and gear earned through the player progression system like in bf2 players earn points from almost every action in a match and if they're promoted they're rewarded with a new unlock token that can be used to purchase one item from each of the four class unlock trees this can be specific gear for each class like a new weapon or gadget but it can also be a permanent universal upgrade like increased ammo capacity extra grenades or longer sprint times with this new and improved unlock system players can now build a powerful futuristic soldier to suit their playstyle using all sorts of inventive gadgets all built around the same rock paper scissors style balancing previously reserved for battlefield 2's vehicles the recon class for example has access to familiar items like plastic explosive charges and claymore mines but they can also swap these out for optic enhancements to improve the stability and zoom of any sniper rifle or even the it33 active camouflage that can temporarily cloak 90 of the player the recon class was kind of one of the more innovative and experimental classes in my opinion you got a cloaking device so you could essentially go invisible and players with a keen i could see you moving around kind of like predator but otherwise it was a great way to sneak behind enemy lines and you could either take a sniper rifle or like a little pdw into the action it was just a really fun way to play to counter this the support players can equip an active camo id system highlighting any cloaked players nearby or they can alternatively chuck out a powerful emp grenade that will instantly disrupt any electronic devices within range the support class is also given some great hardware to lay down suppressive fire like an automatic sentry turret and a small plasma shield designed to protect players crouched or laying prone other noteworthy gear include the engineer's soccer ball shaped motion mines that will follow enemy vehicles if they detect movement emp mines various deployable sensors that can stick to surfaces and two different under barrel attachments for the assault class an under-barrel shotgun and the deadly under-barrel ar rocket that will either detonate on impact or can be manually set to detonate at a player designated distance the actual firearms themselves also sport some creative designs while also handling completely different from one another what's even more impressive though is the small cosmetic touches applied here that really help to sell the futuristic aesthetic of the game like little animated icons and displays for each weapon site unusual reloading animations and some fantastic sound design even the combat knives are more fun to use now as landing a killing blow on an enemy will award the player with that victim's dog tags that are then added to their account's records forever then of course there's the tons of new futuristic vehicles to drive around in once again designed purposely around a constant focus on balance there's the a8 tiger tank for the eu team designed to be more of a conventional main battle tank opting for superior control over maneuverability but its pac counterpart the nekomata handles completely different thanks to its unique hover technology allowing it to strafe and slide across the battlefield at the expense of control but in this futuristic conflict the tanks play second to a new apex machine the battle walkers that are vastly more maneuverable more heavily armored and equipped to handle everything from infantry tanks and air vehicles thanks to its secondary gunner position without question the walkers are kind of the standout vehicle from 2142 i mean it's a mech in battlefield who wouldn't want to hop into that first thing is when loading up the game they were crazy powerful if you knew what you were doing you could activate your defense systems at the right time and just absolutely slaughter the enemy other noteworthy vehicles include the speedy ocelot and bandit cars equipped with their own sprint boost armor plated apcs with machine gun turrets rocket launchers and emergency ejector pods for a quick getaway and brand new vtol aircraft that combined the speed of bf2's fighter jets with the control of a helicopter thanks to its high-tech jet propulsion but it's the looming titans that really steal the show these airborne giants are part of 2142's signature titan game mode where both teams attempt to destroy each other's flying warship while simultaneously protecting their own to do this teams will first need to deploy as they normally would and capture various control points around the map but instead of depleting tickets these control points come equipped with their own surface-to-air missile system that will automatically target the opposing team's titan and steadily drain its protective shield once the shield has been disabled the titan will then start to take damage from these missile attacks until it's finally destroyed alternatively with the help of aerial transports and the apc's pod launchers a team can launch their own ground assault on the enemy titan itself fighting in narrow corridors in an attempt to knock out key weak points and unlock access to the central core this is where some of 2142's most intense infantry combat can take place with teams fighting over incremental gains until one side inevitably gives way what's more a similar attack could be underway on the player's own titan forcing squaws to think carefully about whether they feel they should attack or defend to ensure victory meanwhile a battle is also continuously waging down below with players that favor vehicle combat battling over control of the silos it's complete and utter chaos and win or lose the epic race to escape the exploding titan helped to establish one of the most cinematic reoccurring moments in the series to date but for players still looking for a traditional battlefield experience the classic conquest mode remains available and made even more interesting thanks to the new tools like the squad leader's ability to set up spawn beacons overall 2142 is either a game players loved or hated it was met with glowing praise from industry critics with many noting the creative new setting the new customization features and the brilliant new titan mode others praised dice for polishing up the core formula establishing more concrete player classes that would inevitably form the backbone of the series's four main classes for years to come but others louded the game for not changing enough of its material even with a bunch of mechanized walkers and tungsten firing rifles this was still the same old battlefield a lot of the same annoying issues persisted from before mainly pertaining to the awkward gunplay and movement controls on top of this 2142 was plagued with numerous annoying bugs at launch with poor performance triggered by the orbital strikes frequent server crashes caused by the movement of the titans and lots of irregularities regarding the various tools and weapons throughout the game the game quickly started to shed its initial strong player base with some either returning to battlefield 2 or moving on to other shooters altogether and as a result dice decided to limit their post-launch content while they focused on the series's future they then turned to the community to help keep the game alive including user-made maps and official updates and even hired groups like the sur community to put together a cinematic trailer to help promote the release of 2142's only booster pack the booster pack titled northern strike doesn't introduce very many new maps or even any new factions but it does at least introduce several new unlockable gadgets that can be used across any of 2142's maps new tools include a grenade to get rid of motion mines a new sticky explosive launcher some additional sensor devices and a new player buff to reduce fall damage additionally northern strike also introduces two new vehicles to the mix a fast-moving hover car called the hakimoto and the powerful goliath that's so damage resistant that players must destroy specific weak points on all sides in order to take it down northern strike also includes a brand new take on the classic conquest assault mode called assault lines where the attacking team must capture every objective in the center of the map before they're able to capture the team's final previously locked home base as with bf2's booster packs northern strike wasn't received quite as well the content offer just wasn't enough to justify the extra cost and servers hosting the new content were fairly rare when compared to vanilla content following its release dice launched a few more updates to the game with critical bouncing tweaks and stability issues being addressed alongside the occasional community-made maps like the sur community's recreation of the classic wake island but otherwise 2142 just didn't receive the same level of support as battlefield 2 and as the dust settled across these futuristic war zones it soon became clear that the series had reached the end of an era and would soon be changed forever now before we move any further i think it's important to acknowledge what other rival shooter games were doing around this time at the start of the new millennium ea's medal of honor series had reigned supreme in the military shooter space with an endless stream of world war ii themed games releasing pretty much every year unsurprisingly audiences quickly grew tired of medal of honor's overly heroic one-man army schtick which then opened the door for infinity ward to reinvent the genre with its groundbreaking call of duty series call of duty was unlike anything else at the time delivering a world war ii campaign where players felt like they were participating in grand historic battles alongside many other ai soldiers that helped to sell the illusion battlefield was of course attempting this within the realm of its multiplayer sandbox but its awkward infantry combat just paled in comparison what's more call of duty had already begun entering the console gaming space with call of duty 2 being held up as the poster child for the next generation of the xbox platform though it wasn't until infinity ward's call of duty 4 modern warfare that things really started to take off with an unrivaled cinematic presentation and highly addictive online multipart component that would inevitably become the benchmark for every shooter series moving forward with call of duty's remarkable success electronic arts re-evaluated how to proceed with their own shooter properties medal of honor just wasn't the tentpole shooter series it once was and battlefield while relatively successful in the pc gaming space was not at all in a position to directly compete with the likes of infinity ward's breakaway hit so following ea's full acquisition of digital illusions and its subsidiaries in 2006 the programmers at dice got to work on a revolutionary next step for the series building a next-gen game engine from scratch taylor made for the then new xbox 360 and playstation 3. the engine given the name frostbite was specifically designed to render fully dynamic environments taking battlefield's core sandbox theme and expanding it to the playable space in ways that the fanbase had never seen before everything could now be interacted with and destroyed letting players effectively carve their own path through the game world on top of this dice also wanted to rethink how they handled the series's single player content taking lessons to learn from modern combat and sculpting a new narrative driven experience inspired by the many impromptu adventures veteran battlefield players had experience when working together as a squad online but at the same time they want to avoid following too closely in call of duty's footsteps as we've seen by now battlefield is not a series that takes itself seriously it was never intended to be so when establishing this new take on the campaign they wanted to really lean into battlefield's more silly light-hearted nature while also incorporating the dynamic sandbox elements that fans loved about the series's multiplayer speaking of which the multiplayer was another area of intense focus for the developers as they saw this as an opportunity to reinvent the series's aging formula conquests they felt just didn't deliver that high octane battlefield experience they wanted as it often removed any semblance of a front line and made the action a bit too chaotic so they scrapped conquest altogether and replaced it with a new objective focus mode instead inspired heavily by the chaotic attack defense style gameplay offered in 2142's titan mode finally in early 2007 dyson ea were ready to show off what they had been working on and released a brief cinematic teaser for their upcoming next project battlefield bad company the trailer demonstrated two things first and foremost there was the new far more advanced graphical engine that boasted a fully destructible world without limits and secondly the trailer highlighted the game's new comedic direction with the introduction of sarge and the loose cannon haggard it was a hugely fresh take on the battlefield series and fans were eager to test the potential of the ambitious new destructible environment but as more details began to trickle in regarding the hotly anticipated next century long time fans were soon met with an unwelcome surprise bad company was not going to be releasing on the pc the fanbase was shocked dice had always gravitated towards pc game development so to see them invest so much time and effort into an exclusive console title just didn't make sense however this wasn't always the intent of dice or even ea in fact as early as 2007 an unconfirmed week of a pdf document from the now defunct gaming website digital battle revealed what appeared to be plans for a direct sequel to battlefield 2 aptly named battlefield 3. the game was intended to be yet another pc exclusive entry to the series and would be able to fully realize the potential of the new frostbite engine with massive 80 player battles fully customizable characters weapons and vehicles and a new battalion feature to further expand on the commander and squad play systems introduced before but for reasons unknown this hugely ambitious version of battlefield 3 never materialized and pc gamers were seemingly left out to dry around the same time dice executives were also looking for ways to innovate from a marketing perspective they were quick to recognize the remarkable success of a new free-to-play distribution method that had begun to crop up in south korean territories and they were eager to see how they could integrate a similar model into their own games so after getting approval from electronic arts dice established a new subset of their stockholm offices called easy studios where a passionate team of developers with plenty of experience using the reflector engine were tasked with piecing together a new smaller scale battlefield entry built specifically to run on a wide range of low spec pc hardware this resulted in a drastically different art style for the game with a cartoony aesthetic that was highly unique and unusual for its time but it's for the same reason that when the game was finally revealed in january of 2008 pc gamers only felt further betrayed establishing a distrust of the studio that would continue to persist for many years to come fortunately for dyson ea there was still a steadily growing potential audience among the console community more than enough to justify this drastic new direction and the positive response to their comedic marketing campaign only further proved that they were on the right track a lot of the marketing material surrounded those characters and they just had so much personality you know they they never really took themselves that seriously right they kind of seem like hey we're having fun you should have fun too and you know i i appreciated that it was a welcome break from some of the really serious uh video games that were out there at the time and in the summer of 2008 they released the next iteration to the series battlefield bad company exclusively for the playstation 3 and xbox 360 effectively launching a new era for the battlefield franchise battlefield bad company is the first truly narrative driven experience in the battlefield series the player assumes the role of preston marlow a young soldier in the american military recently transferred to the dreaded b company after an incident involving a helicopter joyride and damage to a general's limousine hey welcome to the sandbox bee company also known as bad company is the dumping ground for the worst the army has to offer taking soldiers that would have otherwise been court-martialed and instead setting them out on the most dangerous missions with the intent of using them unofficially as cannon fodder upon being transferred preston is introduced to his squad of misfits there's squad leader sergeant redford who perfectly embodies the tired hollywood cliche of a sarge only one day from retirement private sweetwater a tech savvy light machine gunner from jersey and of course haggard a texas-born pyromaniac that tends to act first and think never where together this band of rejects venture out into a deadly conflict against the russian federation across a set of fictional locations somewhere around the caspian sea as they disable hostile artillery batteries secure checkpoints and support the main us troop advancement that's what i call an explosion but after stumbling upon a long rumored legionnaire's gold the squad decides to go awol and set off on their own to recover the vast fortune for themselves it's a pretty creative take on the series and one that does a fantastic job of highlighting the often absurd camaraderie of squad members in a typical battlefield match all coupled with plenty of dark humor and pop culture references to keep the experience from ever taking itself too seriously yeah says you and what army what but what really makes this new singapore experience work so well is the way it plays rather than pushing players through a highly scripted linear adventure with hand-holding cinematics and high-octane chases bad company single-player shares the same sandbox mentality of its popular multiplayer component each mission in the game takes place across a vast semi-open world environment with wide-reaching valleys rivers and mountainsides coupled with small towns and fortifications and players are given seemingly free reign to explore these locations however they see fit so long as they complete objectives and regroup at specified red flares to trigger a cutscene and push the story forward how the player completes those objectives though is completely up to them they can for example run in guns blazing gutting down sentries in close quarters and capturing strategic positions or they can alternatively jump into any of the available vehicles spread out across the map and duke it out in classic battlefield fashion adding to this is bad company's incredible new destructive environments that allow players to carve their own path through each level using a multitude of explosives and heavy ordnance to further reinforce this player-driven gameplay direction bad company's single-player campaign avoids the limitations of spawning in with a specific class or loadout and instead requires players to acquire their gear on the field weapons can be found either dropped by defeated enemies or hiding off the beaten path on stacks of crates usually inside of small structures to incentivize experimenting with different weapons and gadget types that company also makes each weapon a collectible to be sought out with some weapons only being available once or twice throughout the roughly seven hour long campaign it's a decently designed single player experience marrying the beloved sandbox gameplay style of battlefield with an interesting narrative and fantastic characters but as always it's the multiplayer offerings that demonstrate the full potential of the battlefield experience and bad companies reworked mechanics and new features completely transformed the action first off bag company is the first game in the series to drop support for conquest altogether at least at first replacing it with the brand new gold rush mode instead in gold rush players either play as attackers or defender and fight for control over metal crates containing gold throughout a variety of locations the goal for the attacking team is to invade hostile territory and destroy two of these gold crates either by blowing them up with heavy ordnance or arming them directly with timed explosive charges meanwhile the defender's job is to prevent any harm to the gold crates and to deplete the attacker team's reinforcements in the process if the attackers manage to successfully neutralize both of these gold crates then the front line will automatically be redrawn pushing the defenders to a new staging area and awarding the attackers with additional respawn tickets to launch a new assault it's a sort of evolution of the titan mode concepts introduced in 2142 with players focusing their efforts on only a pair of objectives before proceeding further but instead of the claustrophobic halls of a titan these battles take place in larger dynamic environments all of which can be completely transformed with explosives just like in the single player in doing this bad company manages to establish this illusion of a large-scale battlefield with only a max player count of 24 and the action has significantly more structure to it with attackers and defenders now having a better idea of where the enemy could potentially strike from next the map designs also play a big role in keeping the action focused with the dynamic progression of the gold rush mode transporting players from large open sight lines and vehicle-based mayhem seamlessly into more claustrophobic building-to-building urban combat later on rush itself really fixed the problem that they had with trying to fit conquest into modern combat where 24 players just isn't really enough to get that spectacle it has the possibility to it has it when everyone's concentrated on a single capture point but by that point they're ignoring the four other areas of the map so with bad company one coming up with rush mode it addressed a lot of issues of fitting battlefield onto a console really effectively and laid the groundwork for things in the future i think in response to increased demand from long time fans dice also added in conquest via an update later on though aside from newer maps like par for the course bad company's more linear structure doesn't quite lend itself as well to this game mode making rush the more popular of the two additionally back company also sees a major rework to how general controls and combat mechanics function including the removal of the prone ability simplified gun play and a decreased emphasis on team play overall as always players can select between several classes each with their own specific weapon types and specific team play roles there's the assault class intended for frontline infantry combat that can be equipped with assault rifles a versatile underbarrel grenade launcher and an auto ejector healthstem to quickly heal themselves after a brief cooldown the demolition class is equipped with the game's shotguns it is intended to be used as an anti-vehicle unit and so they wield the game's rocket launchers along with hand grenades and landmines next there's the recon class that's again equipped with the game's sniper rifles but can also throw out motion sensor grenades and call in powerful airstrikes using a laser designator then there's the specialist class that serves the same role as the special forces class from bf2 only with a default suppressor attached to each of their available carbines and a cool little dart gun that when paired with lock-on rocket launchers can be used to home in on vehicle targets and finally there's the support class that is intended to both heal friendly players and repair vehicles all while armed with light machine guns there's a lot of great new gadgets and gameplay elements to play around with here many of which seem to take full advantage of the new destruction effects but there's also many unfortunate omissions from the core gameplay design that seem to take the series in the opposite direction including the removal of defibrillators an overly simplified squad system with only four slots and no leader and no team commanders with the only remaining shred of the feature being the manually controlled artillery cannons available at certain deployment points players can still at least use their fellow squad members as mobile spawn points which helps to keep groups of players in close proximity most of the time but even still bad companies multiplayer feels almost like a free-for-all and the end result is a more chaotic and more casual experience it's a lot like modern combat though unlike modern combat bad company was a rousing success reviewers everywhere praised the game for its lovable cast of characters its genuinely charming atmosphere and its addicting new rush gameplay mode it was one of the first times that we got a real campaign it was so counter to a lot of what other video games were doing at the time you know you look at call of duty you know they had these big epic uh you know battles and you know it felt like the whole world depended on everything and then you get to bad company and uh you have just this group of rejects who are just continually thrown into harm's way and their lives don't really mean anything you know and you get a good feel for these characters you learn to love them it was it was a real treat excuse me sarge wouldn't it be easier to do it the other way around or or we could split up into teams and take them both at the same time oh yeah yeah that's interesting or i can shoot the two of you and do this thing along with marlo uh okay we'll do it your way you're the boss others complimented dice for perfectly integrating an experimental new engine with the core of the gameplay design if you have a gameplay element that is technologically based you are going to demonstrate that in your designs it just makes sense but what was nice about bad company is that the destruction did not feel like a gimmick i'm not just playing strike a carca but now i can blow up walls i'm playing levels that have their idiosyncrasies and their new tactics that are open with this technology that's now in the game if somebody was sniping from a house you just delete the house know it was a really powerful feeling uh when you're playing the game in that manner for me destruction was huge but bad company's most important contribution to the series is without a doubt it's success on the console platform effectively establishing itself as a potential competitor to the seemingly unstoppable call of duty series and dice would soon use this unofficial rivalry to their advantage as they continue to expand on their new direction for the series before we move on we can't forget about the work that was being done over at easy studios following its mixed reveal response the team at easy studios pressed forward with their new silly take on the battlefield property that they quickly grew to love as it offered an unprecedented amount of freedom to the series with wacky new gameplay ideas visual effects and other features that would have never been included in a mainline release what's more thanks to the live service model they weren't obligated to grind out a specific number of maps and features allowing them to focus their attention on general gameplay balancing and core systems instead to support the project financially the goal was to acquire revenue solely from cosmetic-based in-game microtransactions with things like hats coats and weapon skins all being available to purchase from the game's official website but this would inevitably evolve to include booster microtransactions as well with the justification that some gamers may want an alternative way of progressing through the game a decision that unsurprisingly didn't sit well with audiences once it was implemented then in june of 2009 easy studios in association with dyson electronic arts released their first play for free title battlefield heroes exclusively for the pc platform via an easy to use web browser portal battlefield heroes like the pc centric titles that released before it does not include any sort of traditional offline single player mode though it does at least have a humorous backstory to accompany its wacky new visual style in this alternate version of world war ii the allied forces known as the royals accused the german nation or the nationals of cheating in an olympic bicycle competition insulted by these accusations the nationals declare war on the royal nation and the two sides proceed to fight over their disagreement in various locations around the world it's a very simple and ridiculous premise but one that works in perfect harmony with the game's lighthearted direction as does the revised gameplay design heroes plays a lot like any other battlefield there's class-based infantry combat large sandbox oriented multiplayer levels and plenty of vehicles to play around with but all this is simplified to be more appealing to a younger audience with an increased time to kill decreased respawn times easier to control weaponry and new powerful abilities like force fields and power ups to spice up the action further players can now only select between three classes commando gunner and soldier each with their own variation of core health and speed stats and their own set of available weapon types though interestingly these classes cannot be changed while in game and players are forced to stick with only a single class to start and must purchase additional hero slots if they want to try a different class later heroes also marks the one and only time in the series's history that players are forced to play from a third person perspective at all times with the player soldier always being visible in the bottom center of the screen a big reason for this change is battlefield heroes's huge emphasis on player customization there's a ton of cosmetic options in the game's menus mostly tailored towards the player's chosen class including helmets face masks boots pants jackets shirts and even emotes that can be triggered during gameplay but because battlefield heroes is a free-to-play game most if not all these cosmetic features along with most of the weapons released for the game are locked behind a steep progression curve where players can either grind out matches to temporarily rent gear using the silver vowel points or spend real world money on the more valuable battle fund credits that could not only unlock the coolest looking cosmetic gear but could also permanently unlock powerful weapons and additional hero slots because of this system battlefield heroes was inherently a pay to win title rewarding players not just for their skill but for how much they inevitably spent on microtransactions and the end result was a mixed response from critics and fans alike the game itself many felt was loads of fun with a charming atmosphere and solid mechanics all easily accessible even from some of the weakest computers but most of the core battlefield audience were unamused by battlefield heroes's delightful antics and saw the title as a weak attempt to satisfy the growing demand for another mainline entry on the pc immediately following the release of bad company the developers at dice stockholm began to experiment more with the frostbite engine expanding on the destruction physics and tweaking the lighting design in hopes of establishing a baseline for a direct sequel but before this inevitable sequel ever received a green light by ea a group of designers within dice were interested in seeing how a classic battlefield map would fare with frostbite's game-changing destruction design and after about a week of internal play testing it became clear that it was just too much fun to not let the fan base try for themselves so after getting the go-ahead by ea they proceeded to expand on the idea in their off time modeling a few traditional world war ii weapons and vehicles while also reworking the mechanics to make it even more accessible than bad company then only a few weeks after battlefield heroes went live on the pc dice released the console exclusive battlefield 1943 with its promised pc version left undetermined 1943 takes players back to where it all began with reimagined versions of classic battles from battlefield 1942 including guadalcanal iwo jima and wake island along with a fourth map the coral sea that was made available following a brief community driven kill count challenge though despite these maps being a direct tribute to the original 2002 classic 1943 feels almost nothing like its predecessor the general gameplay is significantly toned down to make the game easier to pick up and play with things like infinite ammunition health regeneration and only three playable classes to choose between the classes include a rifleman equipped with semi-auto rifles and grenades scouts that can carry sniper rifles pistols and remotely trigger dynamite and infantry that can engage enemies at close range with an smg along with armor using the recoilless rifle and they can also repair friendly vehicles using a wrench 1943 also greatly reduces the number of vehicles available to players with only jeeps tanks landing craft and planes spawning on any of the maps however there is a brand new bombardment system introduced here that allows players to guide a trio of heavy bomber planes and completely decimate ground targets below assuming they're not shot down before dropping the payload collectively 1943 is a very straightforward simplified interpretation of the classic battlefield sandbox formula there's no weapon unlocks to worry about no special gadgets no revives or intricate squad management systems it instead relies entirely on its chaotic conquest action with teams of 12 players struggling for control of objectives across dynamically changing island environments and because it focuses purely on the fun of the sandbox alone it works remarkably well so much so that it's still enjoyable to this day even if there are some major balancing issues to contend with it even introduces the first instance of the game mode air superiority to the series where players battle it out in the air and maintain control of spherical territorial zones to deplete enemy reinforcements overall 1943 is a refreshingly simple take on the battlefield formula and it was very well received by critics as a result with many claiming it to be a triple a experience at only a quarter of the price it even quickly became one of the most successful digital only titles sold in 2009 which back then was quite the feat for a console-womanly title but not everyone was pleased with 1943 some were disappointed with the overly simplistic nature of the game hoping for a more faithful recreation of the classic 1942 experience others cited balancing concerns and general gameplay controls as being problematic but the biggest point of contention was from the pc fan base who were seemingly left out to dry once more there was initially a promised pc port of the game that would have boasted increased player counts and a fully integrated server browser but sadly this release never materialized with general manager carl trojdsten citing that future projects like the long rumored battlefield 3 were being given a higher priority and battlefield 1943's pc port was quietly cancelled soon after while both battlefield 1943 and battlefield heroes managed to achieve moderate levels of success these would eventually prove to be mere appetizers for what was just around the corner [Music] bad company had helped to establish a firm foothold in the console market in a way that modern combat had failed to do prior and while it wasn't nearly as successful as the breakaway call of duty franchise dice and ea were still confident that they could deliver some stiff competition and looked for ways to deliver gamers an even more intense and rewarding gameplay experience to accomplish this they carefully took note of aspects that had worked well with bad company 1 while also considering player feedback in regards to player abilities and balancing they considered several features for the sequel including the return of conquest squad systems and the ability to drop into a prone stance but ultimately many of these ideas were scrapped as they felt bad companies more casual simple direction made it stand out more from the mainline numbered entries and over complicating its design may end up hurting its appeal the announcement of bag company 2 came out kind of a weird time in my life because i was actually working at electronic arts as a qa tester for games so being able to get like early previews of trailers and see playable demos on the campus was kind of a really fun and exciting thing and seeing that destruction firsthand you're like whoa they're really stepping things up it got very exciting and you you kind of started to imagine the future of the battlefield franchise um i think that the major difference for back company though is that it didn't really have a hype cycle behind it you know battlefield fans were excited for it obviously but it didn't but that was sort of the first game in a long time probably since the first one since battlefield 2 that generated excitement with a with people beyond dice's core fanbase meanwhile dice also sought to address the increasingly disappointed pc player base by having the small swedish development studio coldwood games work on a pc port of the title with support for 32 players along with a fully functional server browser to help maintain the community then following another strong marketing campaign throughout the course of the preceding year dice released the highly anticipated battlefield bad company 2 for playstation 3 xbox 360 and the pc bad company 2 kicks off with a prologue sequence in 1944 with a group of us marines attempting to infiltrate a japanese controlled island believed to be housing an experimental weapon of mass destruction but before they can escape the weapon is activated leaving the fate of those involved unknown the game then cuts forward to present day with bravo one charlie having apparently been caught by the us military after having gone awol with the legionnaires truckload of gold in the previous adventure i can't believe you're leading us through another minefield you all are some stupid people but with the war against russia having escalated significantly the us army decides against direct disciplinary action for the squad and orders them to complete a series of even more dangerous missions that just so happened to be directly connected to the rumored super weapon from the game's intro reluctantly the squad returned to action and are deployed to locations around the world including a snowy mountaintop village in russia and various jungle compounds throughout south america along the way the squad is transported by their new pilot flynn aka the ghost rider whose progressive viewpoints and general hippie aura serve to set up a fun comedic back and forth with returning fan favorite haggard yeah it's bad for my karma man don't mess with karma i just fly max let it go that'll fly with me space muffin i'm gonna hug you to the goddamn magic kingdom love you man but aside from this and the one or two not so subtle jabs at the call of duty series bad company 2's narrative feels like a significant step back from the spinoff's first outing the campaign is not only shorter but it also abandons most of its open-ended gameplay design opting for more linear set-piece moments that fail to match the polish of the rival game it tries so desperately to criticize now there are a few exceptions to this like the shang del toro mission where players are given the freedom to tackle three different enemy positions in any order that they like but otherwise the game directs players through narrow scripted paths and bookends them with several vehicle-based on-rail shooting sequences what's more the sequel doesn't seem to deliver that same light-hearted tone of the original either the characters are still more or less the same but the story feels weirdly dark and serious and major cliffhangers from the first game like the fate of the lead antagonist remain unanswered and are pretty much dismissed entirely though while its campaign is most definitely a step back the multiplayer component more than makes up for it with far superior map designs player progression and renewed emphasis on team coordination like before bad company 2's multiplayer maps are built primarily around the popular rush mode with linear dynamic levels that funnel action to more easily manageable chunks and there's a lot more levels to enjoy from the get-go including many fan favorites the selection in two is just fantastic port valdez holds a lot of nostalgia obviously because of the demo launch erica harbour was i think one of my favorite maps and one of the most memorable maps for me it's a very a very linear map and being able to go through each section where each section is a bit different to to the other the beginning is for example just two buildings where the objectives are and in the middle of the map you have this it's not really a city but more of a small town area that you can traverse through the buildings and make sure that you clear the objectives it's very very interesting the way that the map played out compared to other maps i really liked heavy metal and bad company too i spent so much time on that map either playing a recon and calling in artillery strikes on dumb tank drivers trying to snipe across the map or playing in the attack helicopter of course my favorite thing to do and just absolutely dominating people in a pretty much wide open map where if they didn't have aa set up correctly you could dominate each of these maps also offer more destructible assets as well practically every object in the world can now be chipped away with small arms fire offering new clever solutions to combat encounters and if enough load-bearing supports to buildings are destroyed structures will now completely collapse into piles of rubble crushing anyone hiding inside the best improvement over batch company 1 in bad company 2 has to be destruction 2.0 buildings collapsing coming down around you on your enemies on your teammates as you're trying to plant the bomb in rush is just such a thrilling experience the gunplay has similarly been improved one of the chief complaints made regarding the original bad company was its inexplicably cumbersome feel with slow ads times difficult to control recoil and a severely imbalanced arsenal the sequel addresses most of these concerns by decreasing the time to kill reducing weapon recoil and smoothing out the movement animations it still has a somewhat clumsy feel to it especially in regards to sprinting and strafing simultaneously but it's still a sizable improvement nonetheless adding to this is the reintroduction of a spotting system like in battlefield 2 and 2142 players can call out a specific enemy by aiming their crosshair in their direction and pressing the spot button i remember it being a little bit wonky on controller but it was still a really cool concept at the time uh to kind of bridge the gap between you know the the difficulties of of doing things in a digital environment versus real life where you know if you were in real life you would just say hey that guy is over there and then describe the location uh to your your squad mate and you know so the spot feature kind of gave you an approximation of that in-game and again i mentioned that i played uh recon quite a bit uh in this game so i was always you know spotting people whenever i could to try and help out the team and you know show them where everybody is or you know it at least help out my squad in that sense so being able to spot people that's standard nowadays but back then that was uh you had quite a bit of discussion around whether it was fair or not i remember that another big change to bad company 2 is the way classes are handled in keeping with the more simplistic design introduced in 2142 bad company 2 reduces the number of classes back to four each with their own class specific weapons and crucial team play-oriented gear the assault class as usual is armed with the game's assault rifles but they're also responsible for resupplying teammates now using their ammo boxes as the static map specific ammo boxes from before have been removed the medic class also makes a return and carries the game's lmgs and med kits but they've also been given back their defib paddles to revive incapacitated teammates the engineer assumes some of the responsibilities from both the demo and support class from before with access to a repair tool and various rocket launchers one of my favorite classes in bad company 2 was the engineer class i love taking out the helis with the carl gustav and especially taking down the buildings that was just absolutely awesome however instead of being limited to just shotguns engineers are equipped with smgs by default and the shotguns are instead made available to all classes as an optional primary finally there's the recon class that for the most part plays the same as always but to improve the game's realism long range weapons like sniper rifles now suffer from bullet job for the first time requiring snipers to account for things like bullet velocity distance and relative height altogether these four class archetypes make up one of the most balanced class systems in the series to date so much so that thanks to the game's success the four-class system would continue to be used for nearly every battlefield game afterwards with only slight modifications to which class gets which weapon and gadget speaking of which bat company 2 also greatly expands on the loadout customization menu allowing players to not just select between unlocked weapons but also unlocked class specific gadgets and a new take on specializations these specializations for the most part offer passive buffs to the player like increased sprint speed or increased armor but there's a few specializations that can directly modify the weapons themselves adding scopes changing the ammo type or improving their general performance this level of customization also extends to the game's vehicles allowing players to equip tanks with improved optics higher damage output and decreased weapon cooldowns adding a little bit more nuance to vehicular combat along with those new customization options the vehicles have also been reworked to feel more balanced than before helicopters in particular are now threatened by mobile aas and improvements made to the tracking dart gadget that keep them from being an unstoppable force like they were before that being said there are a couple of new aerial threats to contend with including the returning blackhawk helicopter with its powerful side-mounted miniguns the minigun just in general in that thing even just firing that thing it doesn't matter if you're killing people or not just destroying vehicles the miniguns there is it there are very very few weapons in that game that are not fun to fire and the uav that can be used to easily 3d spot enemy defenders and can also be armed with its own light machine gun and laser designated missile system other notable additions to the multiplayer include improved player progression systems the first instance of a dedicated hardcore mode and fan favorite game modes like squad deathmatch and squad rush that pit multiple squads against each other in smaller scale skirmishes squad deathmatch was a real fun time and i kind of missed that i was a bit of a shame when i got to battlefield 3 and found that the game didn't really put much of an emphasis on it and the maps didn't really seem to fit it all that well uh which is a real shame because yeah that was one of my favorite modes in back company too and it was like you know it was not only so dependent on your team but i found that you really got character in other squads i found that you know there would be you would be able to tell who's on which team on the enemies just based on their play style what they were doing collectively bat company 2 was and still remains an impressive addition to the battlefield series it not only greatly improves upon the original shortcomings but it also incorporates classic aspects of the series in ways that serve to complement the whole of the experience as a result bad company 2 received mostly positive reviews across the board with audiences loving the refined gameplay and improved destruction systems the game sold extremely well so much so that dice themselves didn't anticipate the sequel to do as well as it did dice don't know why bad company 2 worked you know they said one of the reasons they haven't done bad company 3 yet really is because they look at bad company 2 as a bit of an anomaly they can't really you know pinpoint why that game clicked with people so much when on paper they added very little the project was initially intended to serve as a buffer giving the core programming team and designers more time to iron out their ambitious next main numbered entry battlefield 3. it's for this reason that many aspects of bad company 2 feel unfinished it just felt very sluggish i think when you compare it to some of the more modern releases of of the franchise one of the worst aspects of bad company 2 was without doubt the lack of strafing while sprinting it's very hard to explain but basically you can't really move in diagonal directions if you played it you'll understand well there's definitely a couple cheesy mechanics in bag company too you could take out m-coms with tanks from across the map if you just figured out the right way to aim them and arc the shot which could break some sequences of rush game modes i personally didn't like how far you could throw c4 in the game might be a controversial opinion but people once you got good with the kind of run and jump and throw techniques you could launch c4 across the map and just get tons and tons of kills with it which in my opinion was a little game breaking at the time but despite these few issues bat company 2 still resonated strongly with the player base and remains one of the most popular entries in the series to date back up to 2 is a game that i just adored from from top to bottom when it launched then when i look back at it i do see the cracks and i do see sort of the design manipulation in places you know destroying buildings these days doesn't have the magic that it once did because you do understand it really is just an animation that's triggered or it's just a set of scripts that's triggered it's not really dynamic in the way that it felt back then in response to its popularity dice proceeded with plans to release scheduled content to the game via an included vip program system ensuring that players that purchase brand new copies of the game would gain access to exclusive multiplayer maps including a few throwbacks from bat company 1 like oasis and harvest day on top of this console players were also given a special four-player cooperative mode called onslaught that pit a squad of players against a large team of ai controlled soldiers then in a surprise reveal during e3 2010 dice revealed an ambitious new expansion pack for the game that would see players return to the jungles of vietnam now fully realized with the power of frostbite 1.5 the expansion given the confusing title battlefield bad company 2 vietnam shares a lot in common with the standalone 1943 from the year before with a ton of error appropriate weapons vehicles music and gameplay mechanics along with 5 brand new maps all for a remarkably low 15 asking price some of my favorite maps in battlefield by company 2 specifically the vietnam dlc where hill 137 and vantage point hill 137 i have a unique connection to because it's one of the um battlefield back company to the vietnam dlc is one of the first battlefield games that i played so it was a lot of learning um it reminds me of um a lot of the the trench heavy maps on battlefield one that maybe more people are familiar with another map in battlefield back company to vietnam dlc that i really liked was vantage point and that's because the last time that i played that map on xbox 360 like years ago i jumped in and me and another tanker were sitting there just sniping at this enemy spawn and we went probably 30 and zero or something like that and we got hate mail for it but it was fun for me just being able to jump back into a game and feel like i remembered and i knew what it was doing after you know my initial uh experience was it with this game was giving the enemy tanks and just dying left and right because i didn't know what i was doing unlike 1943 this expansion also benefits hugely from all the core improvements incorporated into bag company 2 like the 3d spotting system and the tighter gunplay there's also a few brand new features mixed in as well players can for example equip flamethrowers for the first time in the series history useful for flushing enemies out of trench lines and bunkers unlike the original battlefield vietnam this expansion sees a slightly more balanced gameplay approach both factions are still given faction-specific weapons by default but they can just as easily swap their weapons in the loadout menu if they want additionally teams are regularly reinforced with an equal number of armor units and transports in the larger scale conquest mode the only aspect of the game that remains asymmetrical then are the helicopters which are exclusive to the american faction to ensure this isn't too overpowered though small arms fire from the viet cong team can easily [ __ ] choppers mid-flight forcing pilots to strike quickly and retreat to a safe distance immediately afterwards overall the vietnam expansion to bat company 2 was a huge success it took an already incredibly popular shooter game and reinvigorated it with five new maps over a dozen new weapons and plenty of fun nods to veterans of the franchise critics widely praised the dlc noting its remarkably low admission price for a plethora of great new content and with the success bat company 2 would help to establish an even stronger foothold in the market for both console and pc gamers alike which as we'll soon learn would be crucial in the series's biggest step yet by now production for the next mainline entry to the series was not just in full development but had been for at least two years as i've mentioned previously the game given the working title battlefield 3 had always been the long-term goal of the developers at dice ever since battlefield 2's groundbreaking success but to fully realize this hugely ambitious next entry the team used the bad company spin-off series to test the waters and determine how things like destruction could be properly integrated into gameplay [Music] what they didn't expect though was for the bad company series to become as popular as it did forcing them to redirect their focus and target consoles as the primary platform for the next numbered entry instead at the same time the battlefield heroes developer ez studios had begun working on yet another free-to-play pc title given the working title battlefield assault that was intended to deliver the same freemium model only with a more mature target audience the resulting game was 2011's battlefield play for free a sort of hybrid of the old refractor era games mainly battlefield 2 and the gameplay philosophy incorporated in the newer bad company titles several classic bf2 maps make a return with this title including karkhand sharkey master and oman but they have been changed slightly with new flag positions and options to play them in the popular brush mode the gameplay mechanics and user interface have also been updated slightly reflecting more of the bad company's style and weapons and classes have similarly been changed with a far more intricate player progression system that allows players to modify their weapons freely and change the cosmetic appearance of their soldier using a currency called play for free funds like heroes this game was met with a mixed response with most criticisms being aimed at the returning pay to win design philosophy and it would inevitably be shut down only four years later meanwhile the lead programming team responsible for building their proprietary engine had made some significant progress on the next iteration of frostbite aptly named frostbite 2. with frostbite 2 designers like technical director henrik carlson wanted to completely transform the look and feel of the experience delivering a hyper hyper-realistic presentation that would completely dominate the industry but to pull this off properly they would first need to solve a critical problem with how the frostbite architecture handles lighting the solution was a real-time global illumination technology called enlighten with this tech lighting could now bounce realistically off of surfaces in real time resulting in a much more realistic looking presentation but this was only one piece in the puzzle the developers also wanted to overhaul everything about the engine with the intent of making it as real to life as possible this meant a new projectile system would need to be created animations would have to be redone and object model complexity especially characters and weapons would need to be pushed to the absolute breaking point finally after at least three full years of exhaustive development the team at dice were ready to unveil their closely guarded secret and in february of 2011 they released a brief 40-second teaser officially revealing the game's title to be battlefield 3. in the weeks that followed dice released more information on the game including an extended preview of one of the game's early campaign missions that highlighted the incredible new visual direction along with an intense series of firefights across an urban environment in northern iraq the battlefield 3 reveal just absolutely knocked my socks off it was without question the best looking visuals anybody had seen and not only a multiplayer shooter but just a shooter in general i was like there there's no way it looks like this there's no way it it plays like this it was visual eye candy of the of the highest order i remember the hype not to the game but to the game's single-player level reveal they launched these little teasers these little 30-second clips and i remember those alone generated so much conversation and excitement back then with friend groups it's like okay they're calling it battlefield 3 because now this is truly the next evolution of the series and it didn't take long for many to recognize that dice had greatly outpaced the rival call of duty series this time around in fact dice began to confidently boast this achievement with later promotional material throughout the year using taglines like above and beyond the call in trailers leading up to the release then after years and years of waiting the game was finally completed and in october of 2011 battlefield 3 released worldwide for playstation 3 xbox 360 and the pc battlefield 3 features three primary modes of play a narrative driven single player two player cooperative missions and a complete multiplayer suite with more weapons vehicles and map variety than anything offered in the series before there's an insane amount of content right out of the gate so let's start by first going over the single player campaign battlefield 3's story takes place during a fictional conflict in the year 2014 between the u.s military and an iranian insurgency called the people's liberation and resistance throughout most of the campaign the player assumes the role of sergeant blackburn who along with his unit are sent into iran to counter an attempted coup of the iranian government by the plr but while hunting for the plr's leader they instead stumble upon a plot involving russian-made nuclear devices that can threaten to trigger a third world war with the stakes having never been higher blackburn and the rest of his squad are forced to make the ultimate sacrifices as they attempt to put a stop to the mastermind behind this insidious plot it's a fairly engaging premise though not necessarily the most original either with a predictable plot and forgettable characters paling in comparison to the undeniable charm of bad company and because it also released at the same time as the conclusion to the epic modern warfare trilogy it's easy to see why battlefield 3's more serious tone didn't quite work even with its incredible graphics and animation quality still it's at least serviceable with a decent amount of mission variety helping to highlight at least some aspects of what makes battlefield special players can participate in tense urban firefights on the ground ride jump seat in a jet throughout an intense aerial dogfight and storm across the desert in a tank column occasionally accompanied by that iconic battlefield score battlefield 3 was the complete package right like you had an absolutely fantastic single player campaign uh probably far and away uh one of the best of the franchise because it didn't shy away from some of the really uncomfortable aspects of war but also it took you to such a variety of places and it really created this tension and this level of uh risk that was really really high right like you felt pressure of like we have to you know make all the right moves here or the the world is going to wind up in some serious trouble as always the single player mode was merely a jumping off point for gamers as battlefield 3's multiplayer offerings greatly eclipse it in terms of content but before we get to that there's also a new cooperative mode the co-op mode is broken up into six standalone missions each offering a unique scenario to be tackled by a team of two players most of the missions are linear infantry focused affairs with scores of enemies to gun down and repurpose locations from the single player campaign but there are a few standouts like this helicopter mission that lets one player fly a cobra attack heli while the second player controls its automatic cannons additionally this co-op mode also offers seven unique weapon unlocks for the multiplayer that can only be earned after earning enough points throughout all six missions co-op in in battlefield 3 was a great experience as well often overlooked by people i don't think there was enough focus on co-op play in battlefield 3. there was this one mission which you could basically practice your helicopter flying skills with a buddy of yours and i would have loved to see dice make more co-op missions and focused around specific vehicles for example so i think that's a big big letdown for me in that aspect finally we have battlefield 3's main attraction the multiplayer battlefield 3's multiplayer represents nearly a decade's worth of innovation and refinement to the classic battlefield formula with epic large-scale sandbox map designs returning to the forefront along with an incredibly deep weapon unlock and customization system tons of vehicles to master and greatly overhauled movement and combat controls at launch battlefield 3 released with nine different multiplayer maps each offering their own unique combat scenarios to set them apart in fact they're so different from each other that everyone i asked had a different favorite favorite map in battlefield 3 i'm gonna have to say sand crossing sand crossing you just had uh this beautiful you know urban french environment and just just being absolutely gutted by just pandemonium unraveling on the streets i'm gonna say two i'm gonna say sane crossing for kind of a mix of close quarter but a little bit of tank play and then caspian border for a larger map the caspian border is wonderful because i love that i love the almost king of the hill element that you have in the center of that map surrounded by other objectives you also have the big field on the one side the air strips um you have a mix of tanks choppers jets it has everything you want in a battlefield map the main thing i played was 24 7 tdm no shark canal the fact that it has so many of these containers and so many lanes and you just kind of run in circles i'm expecting that there could be somebody around the corner that just really kept the whole pace of the game up and and if you are able to go on this kill streak it just feels amazing there are so many good maps on battlefield 3. it's hard to choose a favorite one for me um just because you know they're so different and each one has specific things that you can play up to so like operation metro of course is always good for the for the meat grinder you know you just have to get lucky that you're on the right team that is aggressive enough to take the middle point you guys hold it it's it's a good intense fight but when you're on the opposite end of all that it's not so much brand bazaar is without doubt the best map in battlefield 3. you've got a lovely lane down the middle flanks around the sides vehicles generally go around the sides of the map infantry in the middle you just get this massive chaos of action that's just beautiful exhilarating and at times incredibly frustrating but overall awesome tehran highway of battlefield 3 i would say the rush game mode on on this map was very interesting play style very different place time each time you played it just because of the knight aspect that it gave you the man who made the beginning of damavan peak should get a raise because that was such a good map for about the first half until you get to the tunnels battlefield 3 was also the start of maps being absolutely horrendous for conquest and then there were maps that were completely horrendous for rush and unlike bad company 2 they didn't lock those off behind dlc that would come out later they all came out at the same time of the game's launch and as a result i just think dice didn't have the time to refine some of those in keeping with the precedent set by the bad company series battlefield 3's maps also feature a revamped destruction system known now as destruction 3.0 with this system players can chip away at even more dynamic objects in the world using their conventional firearms and with bigger explosive payloads players can now drop large chunks of a building's facade down onto unsuspecting enemies below however despite the 3.0 nomenclature this new iteration of destruction isn't quite as dynamic as it was in the bad company titles the structures in the game world are more solid overall mainly due to their sheer size and importance in shaping the structure of the levels themselves you can't bring down the metro tunnels or the townhouses in downtown paris for example though there are at least a few cool scripted sequences coded into some of the multiplayer maps that add a bit more cinematic flair to the presentation most notably the massive tower and caspian border that will automatically collapse towards the end of a conquest match moving on we have battlefield 3's reworked core gameplay mechanics in response to the numerous complaints about bad company's clunky feel battlefield 3 offers a much slicker control scheme with faster player speed and several new maneuvers like being able to vault over waist-high cover players can also dive into a prone position again which is now coupled with its own unique movement animations to immerse the player further weapons have also been tweaked to feel more accurate and powerful than before with tighter bullet spread and lower recoil making general combat feel more satisfying to inject more realism into the combat battlefield 3 introduces the controversial suppression system into the series that causes the player's vision to be partially impaired when under heavy fire i don't think i'm in the minority when i say i didn't particularly enjoy the suppression system in battlefield 3. suppression was the worst feature just not being able to shoot back it was a little too much in bf3 i'm probably in the minority that didn't mind suppression i looked at him like it's part of the game you know i wasn't able to shoot that person because i was suppressed like so like that's the way the game works like integrate it into your mind and start playing it the way that uh is is the the best way to do it another small change with big implications is the addition of scope clint up until this point snipers have had a massive advantage in the battlefield series striking unseen from miles away with powerful one-hit kills but in battlefield 3 any player using a scope magnification greater than six times will now emit a telltale glint at long distances forcing snipers to regularly change positions to avoid being pinpointed there's also a bunch of gadgets new and old to play around with too several classic gadgets make a return like the med kits ammo boxes c4 remote explosives launchers mines and mortars but there's also new unarmed personal uavs called mavs a laser designator device called a soflam the tug's proximity sensor a remote control eod bot and the return of 2142's spawn beacon now available for any recon player to place rather than being limited to just the squad leader for players looking to get up close and personal battlefield 3 features slick new first person takedown animations triggered by pressing a melee key when either behind or to the side of an unaware enemy soldier just like in 2142 and the bad company games knifing an enemy will reward the player with their unique set of dog tags which can now be personalized with a wide variety of etchings and vanity statistics no doubt inspired by the calling card system introduced in call of duty modern warfare 2. vf3 also sees yet another rework to the balancing of its 4-class system with the assault class losing its ammo kit in favor of general medic duties and vice versa for the support class with this change battlefield 3's class configuration is identical to the configuration first premiered in 2142 only now there's way more options to customize the player's loadout in the main spawn menu players are given options to choose between any unlocked gear from any of the four available classes this includes a class specific primary weapon a universal secondary two gadgets and one squad specialization that now applies a passive benefit to each member of the squad rather than just the one player along with this players can now enter into a separate customization screen and can modify each individual weapon separately using a large selection of attachments including different barrels suppressors scopes grips laser sights flashlights and for the first time working bipods that can be deployed on cover to drastically reduce weapon recoil the only catch is that each weapon now needs to be ranked up individually with new attachments being unlocked after reaching specific kill count milestones with that weapon there was a lot more to unlock and it took a lot more effort to unlock things in three which i think then encouraged the infamous 64-player conquest metro and a lot of people just binging one mode endlessly to grind through the progression system and get the items and attachments they want and those were only some of the changes that were made to the infantry side of things all the game's vehicles have also been reworked to be more nuanced than ever with three customizable slots to modify everything from the vehicle's weapons their countermeasures optics and armor additionally vehicles can now automatically regenerate lost health if they avoid combat for long enough though if they are damaged past a certain point vehicles will enter into a new disabled state where the vehicle will light on fire and continuously lose health until it's either repaired or destroyed with these new systems in place vehicle combat is much more interesting than ever requiring players to not just consider what types of vehicles they engage but what equipment that vehicle may have equipped on top of this bf3 also sees the return of many fan favorites from bf2 like the highly maneuverable scout helicopters and of course the blistering fast jet fighters each redesigned to take advantage of the new customization systems there's an insurmountable amount of content to digest when it comes to bf3 with hundreds of hours worth of unlocks awards and player ranks to try and achieve but before players even had a chance to get bored with this material dice followed up with the release of the first of five planned expansion packs as part of their new premium pass initiative the first expansion titled back to carkind brings back four fan favorite maps from battlefield 2 each rebuilt to take full advantage of frostbite 2.0 photorealistic visual design and of course its enhanced destruction systems returning maps here include the gulf of oman sharkey peninsula strikey carkind and as always wake island that even sports a neat little memorial near the airfield that pays direct tribute to the many virtual battles that have been fought there all the maps in it were great but out of all those maps i gotta say going back to strike it carkin one of my favorite maps from battlefield 2 for sure but reimagined in bf3 it just played phenomenally it was so much fun the destruction worked really well and it was just kind of cool to relive some of my favorite battlefield 2 moments in battlefield 3 and have them be even better than before additionally the back to carkin expansion also adds in 10 new weapons to the player's arsenal that need to be unlocked by completing new challenges called assignments on top of the weapons the dlc also brings back a few classic vehicles from bf2 as well including the btr-90 the dpv and the f35 and a few other surprises in early 2012 the second expansion for bf3 close quarters released providing players with four new maps built solely for intense close range infantry combat each of these four maps make use of an improved destruction system dice called micro destruction allowing players to rip apart everything with increased precision including walls desks couches lights and plenty of decorative objects greatly setting itself apart from other infantry focused shooters at the time while this expansion didn't introduce any new vehicles to the game it did make up for this by adding in another 10 weapons to unlock along with a twist on the popular counter-strike custom mode gun fight where teams need to progress through a list of carefully chosen weapons by earning kills and avoiding having their dog tag stolen after close quarters dice went in the entirely opposite direction with the release of armored kill that boasts four massive maps built strongly around vehicular warfare as such this expansion does not offer any new weapons for infantry players but it does introduce a few new vehicles including several light tanks a mobile artillery unit quad bikes and the powerful ac-130 gunship that can rain down hellfire from high in the sky and completely decimate objectives within range armored kill also adds in a new take on air superiority called tank superiority where two teams battle for control using only tanks though just like air superiority before the mode didn't maintain a very strong player base after its first few weeks in fact i think it's important to note that this over dilution of various game modes and paid expansions proved to be a serious problem for many of the unique game modes that dice would inevitably release as dwindling player counts after the initial launch hype would result in late stage content being largely ignored to get people to try to pick up these expansions they added all this extra content that got forgotten so like all the different gameplay modes of each expansion it's like you know tank superiority and armored kill just a lot of these extra abouts of content that again people didn't really get to experience after launch day but even so dice pressed forward with their promised content and towards the end of 2012 released the fourth expansion for battlefield 3 aftermath aftermath is a little bit different from the past few expansions in that it's not really built to appeal to any one demographic of player it's instead based around a theme inspired by the massive seismic activity throughout the course of the single player campaign tossing players into crumbling cities in a desperate fight for survival aftermath doesn't introduce any new weapons but it does add in a makeshift crossbow that could be modified to use a scope and launch different arrow types on the fly though in order to unlock this players are forced to slog their way through the widely disliked new game mode scavenger that combines elements of traditional infantry based conquest with classic arena shooters where weapons need to be procured on site finally in early 2013 dice released their fifth and final piece of content for battlefield 3 aptly named end game unlike the previous expansions end game was not developed by the original dice stockholm team but rather the developers of the dead space series visceral games this was done as a sort of testing ground for visceral as they were in talks with dyson ea regarding a future project that we'll of course talk about more in a bit as for the expansion itself end game introduces four more maps to the game each built to represent a different season its overarching theme is speed each environment is specifically designed to funnel players into fast-paced vehicular combat usually by means of light armored vehicles and the new motorcycles also new to end game is the repurposed ac-130 that serves as a fast deploy dropship allowing players to launch an lav out of its cargo doors in spectacular fashion end game also brings back a couple of classic game modes including air superiority and even the old school capture the flag mode likely as a nod to the series's origin with codename eagle a fitting end for easily one of the most ambitious entries to the battlefield series ever made and this sentiment has been echoed far and wide as critics and audiences held up battlefield 3 as a near masterpiece reviewers praised battlefield 3 for its unmatched visual perfection claiming it to be the most visually impressive game since 2007's crisis others applauded dice for its greatly improved gun play attributing its more fluid and rewarding feel to influence acquired from the call of duty series but even more importantly the fans were happy this was the battlefield that long-time veteran players have been waiting for with massive all-out warfare a seemingly endless number of weapons and vehicles and all the team play-oriented features fans have come to love about the series this obviously didn't happen overnight as the initial launch was met with a lukewarm reception due to a plethora of bugs and design choices but after several major patches and expansions bf3 slowly became one of the series's most beloved entries dice absolutely brought it and the fact that once you got into the game after the reveal and the gameplay held up just as well as the visuals we knew it was something special what makes it special there uh i really think is with battlefield 3 you know dice had such a clear vision they knew exactly what they wanted and they were able to execute right that that's one of the key factors there when we look at some of the other battlefield games uh more recently they have kind of grand visions of things and they they just weren't quite able to nail uh every aspect of it and you look at battlefield 3 and just front to back that game is is phenomenal battlefield 3 even helped to reinvigorate the creative community as well with new youtube influencers and content creators being inspired and wanting to share their passion for the series to their audiences most notably the comedic cartoon short series battlefield friends there was inherent comedy in just learning the mechanics of battlefield and so yeah it was we just looked at that with we can make a show about this crap we got an animation because uh live action was too expensive and that's the most honest answer yeah i wouldn't say it's less work because now you've got to make everyone blink and their mouths move and we wanted to entertain people so yeah and also we started just sitting around in front of microphones recording things that we thought could be funny and then and then uh you know brent would sometimes go that one was pretty good and then cut the audio together and be like look at that there's like four minutes of something that doesn't suck i think i'm gonna try to i'm going to try to make it in a cartoon it does go off thank you we formed some of the character personalities they're almost extreme versions of ourselves like i i have a short fuse sometimes when i play the battlefield game i get angry really easily my character was kind of the rage gamer yeah creating the personality for the new was probably the easiest because he's the butt of the joke you know he's optimistic he's excited but he's horrible and uh so yeah that that character is pretty easy just watch everything that's going on so you can learn how to play the game better we could use that you're not gonna learn anything here what are you talking about i learned in battle i'm battle tested no you are not battle tested that is the wrong term to use for you tony and i's characters are are just kind of like filler normal gamers for the most part yeah i i i'm probably the more the more seasoned gamer the the the battlefield veteran i think we kind of made your character the optimistic character yeah optimistic yeah take it too serious just get just representing that middle of the road character for sure you were playing call of duty and uh i guess the one people really like the colonel but how i uh i mean i came up with that was just the guy saying listen you you do nothing but play battlefield what you know and then and honestly there was nowhere to go except for we just started riffing and then before you knew it i was sitting in a bucket because what else are you gonna do you got a bucket i'm sorry yeah [ __ ] it i i don't i'm not sure if i follow you go to the bathroom you're not playing battlefield in a bucket and you're playing battlefield i can't believe we didn't think of that with the help of this hugely popular cartoon series and scores of other creators on social media the battlefield series saw a massive increase to its core player base greatly increasing expectations for what dice had in store next soon after the launch of battlefield 3 back in 2011 the graphical engineers on the frostbite team looked for ways to improve their tech further frostbite 2 had completely blown away gamers with its incredible visual prowess but it wasn't perfect either with environmental assets being difficult to work with and character models that still didn't quite break the barrier into full realism the devs also recognized that the next console generation was just around the corner and while they didn't receive their own dev kits until at least 2012 they knew that this time around console gamers would need to receive the true battlefield experience with 64 players large scale maps and a buttery smooth 60 frames per second along with this dice also wanted to incorporate new gameplay features and systems that they weren't able to fit into battlefield 3. destruction for example which at this point had become a major staple of the series would need to be bigger and more epic than ever as they felt it would be the perfect way to really sell the idea of a next generation for battlefield now because so many players love the epic tower collapse in caspian border they made sure to include similar massive game-changing moments into every map as a main selling point along with this improved destruction the team also worked on an advanced new network-based wave simulation design along with vastly improved character animations and rendering models and plenty of other critical under the hood changes to push the visual quality further than ever before and all of this was on top of all the regular additions that they had to make for the game itself like new maps weapons and vehicles along with yet another cinematic campaign experience that would take a considerable amount of effort to piece together by the final year of development it became painfully clear that dice had bit off way more than it could chew the game was not at all ready for prime time at least not up to the standards that the team had wanted but with the deadline approaching they were forced to double down and in march of 2013 they officially revealed the new project with an extended look at the first mission in the campaign demonstrating some stunning new visuals and cinematic set pieces the battlefield 4 reveal was exciting because of course battlefield was on this like big hype train at that time bf3 was the biggest game ever and then bf4 was gonna try and top it it felt sort of like a battlefield 3.5 at the time just because it was sort of doing the same thing again i guess what confuses me about battlefield 4 is why it was called battlefield 4. i think even fans even when the game was announced even though there was hype for it i think even players were like wait a minute you guys did battlefield 3 when that was a big deal you know so why are we already going to four a few months later the game was showcased again at e3 with another demo from the single player campaign and a first look at the ambitious new multiplayer offerings with an epic 64 player battle across the streets and rooftops of shanghai i have a really good memory of sitting at uncle i think we were uncle louise and a battlefield trailer came on the television there and your character was on a uh four by four four a four by four run yeah jumps off the building as it's level like doing the revolution thing and screams levolution it was your voice in the trailer yeah i mean we recorded that but they didn't say that they were going to use it at the trailer in the commercial yeah yeah before battlefield 4 came out we're like we want to put you guys in the game which was yeah it was awesome fans were blown away it appeared dice had achieved the impossible taking destruction to a level nobody had expected and the marketing team were quick to follow up on the hype launching a marketing campaign called only in battlefield where community members shared their crazy stories from their experience playing early builds of the game then despite its remarkably short development period dice were able to meet their deadline at least to some extent and released battlefield 4 in late october for the pc playstation 3 playstation 4 xbox 360 and the xbox one battlefield 4 takes place in the year 2020 several years after the events of battlefield 3. players assume the role of sergeant wrecker a member of an elite special forces unit called tombstone who are sent on a series of missions throughout asia in an effort to neutralize a rogue chinese military leader hell bent on sparking the next world war when stacked up to battlefield 3 bf4's campaign is even less ambitious the plot line is practically the same as before trading out nuclear devices for an attempted political assassination and the mission scenarios themselves are much smaller in scale however battlefield 4 does a much better job in characterizing the members of its squad adding in an emotional layer that battlefield 3 severely lacked irish voiced by the late michael k williams offers a humanitarian viewpoint on war and regularly shrugs aside protocol to rescue those in need this personality then clashes frequently with the mysterious hannah whose ties to the chinese secret service calls into question her loyalty to tombstone's ultimate goal all culminating in a difficult decision in the game's climatic finale the bf4 campaign also addresses some of the frequent complaints made about bf3's campaign in regards to its gameplay levels are now slightly more open-ended with players able to choose how they approach combat players can for example swap out their gear at various weapon loadout crates scattered throughout the environment some levels even feature optional vehicles to pilot giving players more agency in how they proceed with each section additionally bf4's campaign introduces a new spotting mechanic to give players some control over what the friendly ai targets during combat which also extends to the occasional support vehicle like helicopters and tanks but aside from those few changes the campaign still feels like a considerable step back sure some of the areas are more open-ended than they were in three but a majority of the game is still remarkably linear with big epic scripted set-piece moments dominating most of the screen time it had some really interesting moments in it and visually there was some wonderful stuff going on i just wish that the campaign was a little bit more cohesive although i like michael williams as an actor he he was phenomenal in so many things that he did it was frustrating to me to kind of see his talents wasted on a character that was you know kind of one dimensional he did his absolute best with the character but um you know you you have irish who is supposedly you know this this spec ops kind of soldier here and you know at every given turn he just like shirks whatever an actual spec op soldier would do you know it's just like we have to bring these people back and you know as as hard as the decision would be um i don't feel like it it would happen in reality you know and and there's many instances of that like his character is a good person uh but he's not a good soldier in that regard and very interesting you know that contrasting with his you know just blind acceptance of you know all of these refugees you know he's just like the these people who i've i've spent no time with are fine but hannah she's up to something it it it didn't make a whole lot of sense so unfortunately battlefield 4's campaign i i don't think really lived up to expectations or potential but for gamers still only interested in battlefield for its multiplayer bf4 offers a ton of new content and quality of life improvements player movement and traversal for example has been updated making vaulting slightly more fluid and players can now peek out from cover and engage enemies around corners for players tired of getting shanked by the enemy bf4 also introduces the counter knife mechanic allowing would-be victims to quickly counter with a quick time event in order to turn the knife around and stab the attacker instead i did not like counter knifing i was not a fan of that i know that other people like it um but it was something every time i tried to counter knife somebody it would never work uh and every time i tried to knife somebody somehow i get counter died so i was not a fan not a fan to go along with battlefield 4's increased emphasis on naval warfare many of the swimming mechanics have also been updated allowing players to temporarily dive underwater to avoid detection use weapons like pistols and knives while waiting on the surface and climb out of the water onto low ledges as opposed to awkwardly swimming around looking for a ladder like before the game's arsenal has also seen some big additions with over 50 firearms at launch and 30 more added with dlc this is purely preference but i don't like just how many goddamn guns are in battlefield 4 and also how many different guns can be used on the same class because to me it kind of degraded the value of what's unique about each class i know it's a preference thing because i know that is why it's some people's favorite battlefield 4 some people's favorite because they love the flexibility of it and they love how they play the game for 200 hours and there's still stuff to pursue and unlock to go along with this all weapons now have four attachment slots to utilize giving players a chance to really load up their weapons with everything they may need however dice has also changed how these attachments are unlocked with many attachments being locked behind a new battle pack system requiring players to either achieve a set number of kills and be rewarded a random attachment or pay real money to unlock higher tiers of battle packs with even less guarantee you'll get the item that you want when on the field players may also stumble across new battle pickups which are essentially weapons deemed too powerful to be made available in a typical player let out these include things like 50 caliber sniper rifles full auto explosive shell shotguns and several different launchers that can devastate vehicles and groups of players gadgets have also been expanded upon there's a ton of different grenades and explosive launchers to choose between new ammo and health pouches perfect for supporting teammates on the fly trophy systems to block incoming explosives remote controlled mortars slam mines and many more devices added with each expansion post launch the specialization system has once more been modified and now requires squads to complete objectives to temporarily unlock passive perks to a selected chain encouraging players to work more efficiently as a team in fact team play in general seems to be a major focus for this title as the squad size has been bumped up to five and the old commander role has finally made a return only with deployable cruise missiles taking the place of the artillery strike i love commander mode in battlefield 4. at the time you know it was a different experience to play on a tablet and personally i liked it because again this was all about supporting your team so you had different things that you could do you could drop in supply crates you could drop in little vehicles so playing it being able to you know launch a rocket at a particular position or something that's really cool that's really really cool the class balance on the other hand hasn't changed much at all suggesting that dice had finally established a desired balance between the four primary roles and like with battlefield 3 players aren't stuck using class specific weapons if they don't want to and can swap out their primary for any all-class weapon instead this means all players regardless of what class they decide to run can use carbines marksman rifles and shotguns giving players more control over how they deploy on the field meanwhile bf4's vehicle combat has been expanded to include more naval based action when it comes to vehicles battlefield 4 introducing naval combat in sort of a new completely redefined way struck a chord with a lot of players myself included and the attack boat being able to do these massive jumps off of waves that had all these crazy cannons on it the driver could outfit the boat for anti-air combat and start taking out jets and helicopters as as they flew by i mean it was just a new element of gameplay that no other battlefield game had really explored to that extent the traditional vehicles have seen some tweaks as well jets have improved visibility in first person helicopters have improved maneuverability and all the vehicles can now be temporarily neutralized after receiving a critical hit adding on to the disabled mechanic introduced prior with these few minor tweaks the vehicle play is more engaging than ever which is key considering there seems to be a much heavier emphasis on vehicle-centric map designs this time around most of the base maps in battlefield 4 are much larger in their scale than the base maps in battlefield 3 and appear to be built with conquest as the target game mode the maps in battlefield 4 weren't specifically made for each game mode it was just you have x amount of maps and here are the game modes for these maps whereas in bad company 2 for example you had these maps specifically made for said game modes i love conquest i do ultimately prefer rush and battlefield 4 was the game where rush absolutely took a back seat to the point where i'm not even sure why it's included then of course we can't talk about battlefield 4 without covering its biggest most heavily promoted feature revolution levolution is a nickname for the many different gameplay altering environmental triggers incorporated into every map in the game this could be something simple like raising roadblocks cutting the lights or setting off a car alarm but it could also be something much bigger that could potentially alter how the rest of the match plays out the most iconic revolution i think is a siege of shanghai in it i would say so yeah the one they probably started with it definitely looks the coolest thing even to this day when you see that building falling over you're like you got to stop and watch this this is so dumb and if you're on top and you hear that noise or you know it's going to go you can jump off and that's that's pretty awesome it leaves a mess the flood the flood and the one what's the flood thing the flood map flood zone flood zone [Laughter] i feel like i don't i don't notice that one a lot of times because i'm not buying it yeah that's one of the things that's one of the smaller levels it kind of happens over there on the side yeah depends on where you are yeah someone blows it up over there and it's like oh the water just rose okay you get annoyingly flooded a little bit in your basement like hayden resort the you know the sides of the hotel being blown up they come down yeah yeah so then you still have a little bit of close combat fighting in the middle yeah in the middle yeah the middle never comes down but now now the uh the sides are rubble and there's lots of good places to hide and yeah you can snipe the huge dish coming down on rogue transmission that completely changing the map is just insane infantry gameplay changes vehicle gameplay too there's places you can't go to new places you can get to if you're underneath that it's game over certainly an interesting idea though the appeal of the game-changing events quickly faded once it became clear that some levels were better off without the revolution altogether the thing i don't like about revolution is that it was really cool when i saw in a trailer but after a while it became so mundane and just made the map less fun to play in they are the best part of sun maps they are the worst part of other maps um it is good in giving maps more gimmicks and therefore making a map stand out more in a unique area but the problem is a lot of the gimmicks in the maps just aren't that interesting and a lot of the ones dude just kind of fall into the territory it looks cool and it doesn't really affect the gameplay very much i think they could have vastly improved the system by giving players more choice in how to bring down the tower and siege of shanghai or what part of the dam to break to flood the enemy team's deployment or something like that could have been cool so i wasn't as over the moon for it i it felt more like a marketing gimmick but revolution's disappointing design elements were minor when compared to battlefield 4's remarkably poor launch state the game was a technical nightmare with poor performance extreme network latency and levolution events that would regularly cause players to crash out of the game altogether the reason i didn't buy battlefield 4 was how broken it was i heard about all of the nightmare scenarios that my friends were running into with battlefield 4. the game would not track or save your progress in the campaign when it first came out so the only way to beat the campaign when the game came out at least on xbox was to sit down and play through the whole campaign it was not the first experience with the campaign that that you want somebody to have a lot of my friends who played battlefield 3 and who i'd played battlefield 3 with for years couldn't load the game they would crash out of it they could play only for little bits without a crashing there's tons of server problems i wasn't as impacted compared to other players by any stretch but it was one of those things where i was kind of used to it there's been a lot of battlefield games with rough launches and i had enough faith in dice at the time that they would make it right but it certainly didn't make the launch experience pleasant by any means the out roar from audiences left dice with no choice but to put future plans on hold including a previously announced new entry to the star wars battlefront series they then spent the better part of the holiday season working on fixing battlefield 4's most crippling problems mainly client crashes and rare instances where bullet projectiles were being counted twice resulting in instant single shot kills as they worked on this they also rolled out the first of five planned expansions made available through yet another premium expansion pass the first of these five expansions is called china rising brings with it four new maps based in mainland china along with yet another take on the air superiority game mode with a large-scale aerial battle with only helicopters china rising also adds in a new bombing raid mechanic similar to the one that they used in 1943 along with five new weapons and two new gadgets the ucav and suav that wreaked quite a bit of havoc on unsuspecting players when it first released after china rising dice stockholm turned to refocus their efforts on addressing the remaining issues plaguing battlefield 4. as they did this ea tapped former medal of honor developer dice la to assist in creating the remainder of battlefield 4's premium content to aid in this transition dice la worked closely with dice stockholm on the second expansion but would subsequently assume full control of future expansions and updates by mid-2014 the second expansion titled second assault features four fan favorite maps from battlefield 3 reimagined to fit within battlefield's narrative timeline and to utilize frostbite 3. caspian border for example now takes place during the fall with all the trees sporting yellow and red leaves and because this takes place after bf3 the massive radio tower collapse has already happened and a new radio tower has been erected on the central d flag instead gulf of oman on the other hand now plays host to a massive sandstorm that will roll in throughout the match and require players to make use of thermal optics to remain competitive along with these four re-imagined maps second assault also adds in five more weapons a couple returning vehicles and the old capture the flag game mode i'm a big fan of reliving some of the classic game modes and maps and so the second assault dlc was great in battlefield 4 and replaying one of the best battlefield 3 maps which was caspian border with a lot of improvements added in battlefield 4 was really fun having that new giant concrete wall and sniper towers really added a new dynamic to the gameplay in spring of 2014 dice then released the third bf4 expansion naval strike naval strike is a slightly more ambitious expansion than the previous two that it aims to emphasize bf4's most interesting new mechanic each of its floor maps is purpose built for naval warfare with large patches of ocean being interrupted by small chains of islands and narrow tunnels on top of these maps naval strike also sees five more weapons two new gadgets and a new hovercraft capable of seamlessly traveling across both land and sea but naval strikes most notable addition is the return of the fan favorite titan mode now referred to as carrier assault just like in 2142 players need to capture points in order to expose the enemy team's main deployment vessel but instead of being a flying fortress in the sky the titan takes the form of an aircraft carrier it's a nice nod to veteran players though it doesn't quite match the intensity of the original mode and as such isn't remembered quite as fondly the fourth expansion is dragon's teeth dragon's teeth aims to add more urban environments to the bf4 experience these maps are much more infantry focused with narrow paths increased verticality and lots of flanking opportunities though maps like propaganda and the sunken dragon do so offer plenty of opportunities for vehicle-centric players assuming they're careful enough to avoid various deadly hazards dragon's teeth also adds in a new battle pickup called the rar that functions similarly to the eod bot only with a machine gun and deadly grenade launcher the final expansion final stand was released at the tail end of 2014 and once again pays tribute to the cult classic battlefield 2142 each of its four maps are based around top secret weapons technology research facilities in remote regions of russia with several direct references and easter eggs to tech utilized in 2142 this includes a walker prototype factory a hover tank production facility and even a massive hangar housing an early build of a titan warship to go along with this strange semi-futuristic expansion final stand also features usable hover tanks pod launchers and new battle pickups like the mark 1 railgun and the xd1 exhibitor both of which also pay tribute to some of the gear found in 2142 by this point in time battlefield 4 had entered a significantly more stable state most of the game-breaking bugs had been removed server tick rate had been increased and thanks to brilliant programs like dice la's community test environment the actual players of battlefield 4 felt like they were finally having their voices heard something that i did ultimately really respect dice for is their sheer reworking of it i know a lot of that was the la studio that was formerly the medal of honor team but they did a superb job of responding to people and addressing people's concerns for the game directly and getting them involved with the cte just in a way that especially in a triple a game you just don't really get to see very often on top of this prominent community members like jack frax have begun to track down even more ambitious easter eggs hidden throughout the game most notably the megalodon but this was expanded upon further with additional community activities like the phantom program they had players decrypting complex codes and clues to unlock unique gear and vanity cosmetics the cte even allowed dice lh to introduce new maps never promised to the community beforehand including a nighttime variant of zavod a recreation of battlefield 2's dragon valley and a brand new map called operation outbreak structured primarily off of community feedback and suggestions thanks to its exhaustive amount of support dice la have managed to completely turn around public opinion on battlefield 4 making it one of the most beloved entries to the series to date long before battlefield 4 had even begun development the general manager for dice stockholm carl magnuson sat down at a bar alongside visceral games vice president steve papatsus the pair shared details about their ongoing projects including battlefield 3 and visceral's dead space after a few more drinks they eventually came up with the idea to revive an old retired cops and robbers concept that had been prototyped prior to 1942's world war ii theme being established but visceral would first need to prove that they could actually create a modern multiplayer shooter experience as their most recent work on dead space was drastically different bringing us back to that end game expansion that i covered earlier as i mentioned before this expansion wasn't just a nice addition to battlefield 3's impressive content lineup but it allowed visceral to prototype the next big entry to the battlefield series with high-speed car chases and explosive action being at the forefront of the design philosophy after their success with end game visceral then entered into early development on this prototype battlefield and noted the core tenets that every battlefield experience would need in order to be accepted by the community this included things like large-scale maps vehicles a class system and an overarching emphasis on team play as opposed to just running in solo however they also didn't want to fall into the trap of delivering the same experience battlefield players had already played a dozen times over and they really leaned into their new cops and robbers aesthetic before long they realized that a lot of their pitched ideas were similar to concepts explored on television programs like justified and they even partnered with its writer wendy calhoun to help orient the narrative direction to fit into a new episodic level structure then to properly tune the multiplayer visceral looked to dice la's successful community test environment for invaluable feedback testing features that would inevitably make their way into their own multiplayer mode finally after years of occasional leaks and rumors visceral officially revealed battlefield hardline ahead of e3 2014 and following their stage presentation they made a public beta available for gamers to try for themselves the initial reactions to the reveal were mixed to say the least with some concerned about the new theme and even accusing it of being a reskin of battlefield 4. cops and robbers setting in my opinion was probably one of the worst decisions dice could have made or my apologies visceral made when it comes to hardline if it was anything else i believe the game would have probably sold a lot more there was something about that setting that just fell off but others picked up on some fairly interesting new features introduced that almost felt like a callback to the popular battlefield 2 expansion special forces the cops of robert setting in general again i'm somebody who you know you tell me your vision for a game i'm like all right i'm on board i'll give it a shot for a lot of people they heard cops and robbers and the response was this isn't battlefield i wasn't as concerned with the setting battlefield is a lot of different things to a lot of different people and for me battlefields really is just different factions fighting against each other with a lot of gadgets and vehicles i was actually okay with that honestly um i know it confused i mean it's definitely puzzling at first it's a bit of a head scratcher but at the same time battlefield had changed its setting enough times that the idea of going to a cops and robbers one didn't really it seemed like okay i'll give it a try i'm okay with that and especially i think the the pairing of a different developer i think helped with that you know the idea that it was visceral um testing this out rather than a mainline dice game that kind of made me more open to it and following a sizeable five-month delay visceral games in collaboration with dice and ea released their first and only entry to the series battlefield hardline for pc xbox 360 xbox one playstation 3 and playstation 4. hardline's campaign follows police detective nick mendoza and his partner kai dao as they investigate a major drug operation in and around miami florida but after uncovering a secret conspiracy mendoza is framed for a crime he didn't commit and forced to work outside of the law in order to prove his innocence and put the real criminal behind bars it's your run-of-the-mill buddy cop drama with plenty of cheesy quips twists and high octane thrill moments but what sets this apart from other games is its unique episodic level structure hardline's campaign tries extremely hard to sell itself as an over budget cable tv cop drama and in this regard it succeeds in pulling this off quite well hardline's campaign i love that visceral and dice ea really supported this kind of attempt at doing something a little bit different with a campaign right you kind of had this episodic campaign with battlefield hardline really modeled after a television show it was an interesting way to approach that uh in a video game um and i also love that there's a lot of the kind of battlefield bad company humor uh inside of a battlefield hardline a lot of people didn't really pick up on that so much but you know it's it's there it's present it's the same kind of humor you know you need a warrant for that play nice boys something tells me you've got your civil liberties memorized and there's plenty of moments where you're playing it where you'll laugh or you'll smile right there's a number of memorable quotes like what are you drug rain man um and the situational comedy that kind of happens around that i i really appreciate it the safest place for you is inside this truck what no no no no no way kimo sabe i'm coming with i'll be right back i promise dude you can't even get in the warehouse without my key card hey thanks hey no no no that's not to say it's perfect though there's quite a few gameplay design decisions that while suitable for the game's unique setting don't necessarily play to battlefield strengths either many of the levels now incorporate a new stealth system allowing players to sneak their way around unsuspecting ai patrols and throw bullet casings to lure them around corners players can then choose to neutralize them silently using various non-lethal means or even hold up mendoza's badge to get them to surrender and arrest up to three perps at once it seemed like they put a decent amount of effort into creating some sort of narrative but the gameplay was so boring where you could pick up those little shells and chuck them around and distract the extremely primitive ai it just kind of felt weird as a battlefield single player you're supposed to be having these big elaborate fire fights and you would expect like a war scene but instead you're just in like cop cars and shooting thugs and stuff in back alleys for players not looking to sneak their way through the campaign hardline does allow for a more aggressive approach which is arguably more fun in most situations as there's a lot of great infantry combat in condensed environments filled with advanced micro destruction similar to that scene in battlefield 3's close quarters expansion the campaign also features a few unique vehicles to drive around in opportunities to play detective and hunt for clues new gadgets like grappling hooks zip lines and plenty of over-the-top scripted moments some of the set pieces i thought were just embarrassing like there was that [ __ ] highway chase before the the plot twist quote unquote where you're just running through with this really awful like heavy jeep that's uber slow and you're just running through the barriers the cops and robbers setting for me was way worse in the campaign than the multiplayer because at least in the multiplayer it kind of embraced the ridiculous setting of the ridiculous nature of it it really did seem like sort of you're operating in a toy box meanwhile battlefield hardline also reimagines the series's multiplayer experience to properly suit the new setting as well at first glance everything looks and feels about the same as any other modern battlefield a lot of the same player controls abilities and other core features introduced in battlefield 3 and 4 are purposely retained due to their popularity but upon closer examination hardline still plays very differently from those titles mostly to maintain its more grounded domestic theme for classes hardline reprises the classic four role system though changes the names of the assault engineer support and recon into the operator mechanic enforcer and professional respectively this change reflects each class's slightly toned down offensive capabilities as most of the hardware usually offered to these roles has either been moved around or removed entirely all the typical battlefield firearms you'd expect are still available like m16s aks smgs shotguns pistols and sniper rifles but the larger more powerful weapons like light machine guns and rocket launchers can no longer be equipped via the loadout screen and are instead only available in a limited capacity as battle pickups in the environment as for the weapon attachments this section of the game also has been scaled back with slightly less choices than in battlefield 4. though their importance to the feel of each individual weapon has never been more important as default weapons often feel incredibly weak and ineffective when you're first starting out with them then there's the new gadgets this is where hardline really gets a chance to stand out as there's a ton of great new tools that completely change up how players approach the action first off there's gadgets that can be equipped to any class ensuring the most important equipment is always accessible this includes things like grappling hooks ziplines gas masks and tasers the latter of which can be used to non-lethally dispatch enemy players and then interrogate them to reveal nearby enemy positions that was just a stupid fun weapon trying to sneak up on on people hit him with the taser and then to interrogate them um and so you were doing a huge favor for your team if you were able to do that then there's other class specific gadgets like the operator's survivalist range that a player can use to revive themselves the professionals laser trip mines and cameras to help set up a strong defensive position and the enforcer's ballistic shield and breaching charges perfect for seizing small interior spaces it's also worth noting that hardline addresses the age-old problem of medics and supports not dropping their med kits or ammo boxes i think a lot of battlefield fans would agree with me where allowing you to take ammo off of a support class who was unaware of you was one of the cooler innovations of hardline it just made it so that not every player had to be hyper aware of everything going on around them and alleviated so much frustration the specialization system also makes a return though it's now been renamed into perks and gives players a chance to choose which perk they want by spending earned team points called reputation with more powerful perks unlocked after successfully progressing through all four tiers even the commander mode makes a return appearance only it's now referred to as the hacker i actually really liked the the hacker commander mode that you had in hardline um in this one you had like electrical boxes you had cameras you had like little gas traps and stuff you could set too that you could um like detonate as the commander so if you saw somebody running through like a crowded area you could set up like a trap there and you could like shot them you could make the electrical box go off or you could make the little gas thingy go off so i felt like hacker in battlefield hardline actually had a lot more things to do to actually affect the game hardwine also takes a very different approach to how the vehicles are handled to account for the cops and robber setting vehicles aren't nearly as militaristic with things like main battle tanks being replaced with armored swat vans instead similarly attack helicopters like cobras apaches and havocs are dropped entirely leaving only transport helis and light scout helicopters instead this is part of the reason i think battlefield hardline has it rough from the battlefield community um in that it doesn't feature a lot of vehicles that we would kind of consider standard to the battlefield series right um there is no tank in uh battlefield hardline and i think that was a big turn off for some people to make up for the scaled down garage hardwine does introduce a bunch of new civilian style vehicles to drive around in including various sedans tuners trucks and motorcycles along with plenty of different police cruisers and interceptors to chase them down with i'm a driving game guy so i like cars i do like cars and it was satisfying to have you know more proper vehicles in the game and like the context of the context of having muscle cars running away from like apcs and such or like heavier vehicles that was cool that was fun well my favorite vehicle maybe not from the driver's perspective is the giant fuel truck driving around just because like you can drive that on to scene detonate it and it goes off like a mini nuclear bomb i mean just the fact that you could have something so powerful and bring it into the combat scene was awesome especially in the mode where it acted as a capture point i mean it was just asking for giant explosions all the time but even with these changes to the vehicles hardline still seems to lean much more heavily towards an infantry focus which is made more evident by its base map designs i'd say downtown's probably my favorite map from hardline it just gave you that crazy verticality and some fun stuff you could do with it whether it was helicopters flying up to the top of skyscrapers or ziplining between the giant skyscrapers or jumping off there was a lot you could do in it and it gave you plenty of like really fast car chase areas especially with that big gas truck driving around and blowing up um i think that was the best showcasing of everything you could do in hardline so probably my favorite map was just that i forget the name of it but that base you know the one that's just like it's just a bank yeah i think it's a bank job i think that one is easily my favorite the one that took place with the um the la river that was really cool as well and also i did love blowing uh fighting through the mansions um i think those were in multiple maps but all of those were fun my favorite map uh was a swampy map i don't remember what it was yeah there was a it was a highway that kind of went around they had like jumps for the cars yeah it was a fun map and then yeah for the blood money like that was perfect nearly half the maps in hardline at launch are primarily infantry based with large complex interior spaces offering plenty of opportunities to play around with the various gadgets and player abilities there are a few larger maps that offer that traditional battlefield experience especially downtown with its massive skyscrapers and dense city streets below but these maps are few and far between for game modes hardline brings back classic conquest along with a basic team deathmatch but other modes like rush have been dropped entirely and are replaced with a few new modes that better showcase the game's unique premise the heist mode for example pits a team of attacking criminals against a team of defending police officers only instead of arming m-coms the attacking team needs to steal duffel bags filled with money and tried to extract them at designated locations as somebody that likes rush hardline was really refreshing because the heist mode was basically just rush it was just a repurposed rush mode and as a result they were a lot it was a lot of fun for me hotwire on the other hand is a twist on the traditional conquest mode where the objectives are not stationary flags but drivable vehicles that need to be driven at high speeds to earn points for the team giving players a chance to participate in intense high-speed pursuits meanwhile blood money tasked two teams of players with recovering stacks of cash from the center of the map and then bringing them back to their own home base though players can also steal directly from an enemy's home base creating a sort of new twist on capture the flag blood money to me one of my favorite modes um because you could just camp you could camp their vault wait wait for them to bring a bunch of money back shoot them steal their stuff take it to your vault yeah it was cool or or just steal from the stash and you know you had options the remaining modes are designed for even smaller scale engagements likely inspired by games like counter-strike and require players to fight over either a hostage or a vip all without any respawns as far as battlefield games go hardline offers some of the more creative scenarios in the series but even with all of its new maps weapons gadgets modes and unique features critics and fans just weren't interested the game was met with a generally mixed response at launch with reviewers torn over the new single-player direction and knocked the game's multiplayer for its many structural changes i think it was actually a pretty good game it just didn't feel like a battlefield game one of the issues that battlefield hardline had from the start is that it was using battlefield's gameplay in a in a setting that needed more for the sake of immersion to really be believable the community at large was even less impressed with the game with many accusing visceral of re-skinning battlefield 4 and initial sales for the game greatly suffered as a result this was due largely in part to when hardline released rather than releasing it in the fall alongside competitors like call of duty hardline's delay forced visceral to release the game in march of 2015 right alongside the long-awaited pc release of grand theft auto 5. with both of these titles sharing similar thematic elements coupled with general series fatigue hardline just didn't develop the same strong community that other battlefield games had which ultimately hurt the success of its many planned premium expansions the first expansion in this collection titled criminal activity adds four additional infantry focus maps to the rotation each based on petty criminal operations and locations featured throughout the campaign with it players also received five new weapons a few new gadgets and a couple new civilian vehicles tied to the maps themselves the second expansion titled robbery is even more ambitious as it adds 13 weapons to the game four unique gadgets and four new vehicles the four maps in this expansion are all centered around big heists with maps tailor-made around the standout heist mode what's even more special about this particular expansion though is its large number of hidden easter eggs most notably those featuring the one and only battlefield friends give me a minute be right out give me a give me a minute and these aren't the only examples hardline is absolutely chock full of easter eggs with secret reload animations pop culture references and probably most ridiculous of all a drivable couch inserted into the game as a direct reference to a real-life drivable couch created by one of the game's developers the third content drop for hardline blackout released towards the end of 2015 and is more of a free update than an actual full-fledged expansion it adds two new nighttime variants of fan favorite maps like the bank job and backwoods along with a new unlockable set of night vision goggles to go along with them this expansion also added three more guns as well though a bulk of the changes offered with blackout are general improvements to the gameplay and bug fixes kicking off 2016 visceral then released the third actual expansion called getaway the maps and getaway are designed to encourage more high-speed car chases with longer roads and bigger environments in general along with these four maps getaway also brings in 12 new weapons a fire racks and four additional civilian vehicles to race around in then after nearly a year since the initial launch vista released their fourth and final expansion to the game titled betrayal betrayal offers some of the more visually unique maps in the entire game with locations like a near one-to-one recreation of alcatraz island a remake of a battlefield 3 map grand bazaar re-imagined to look like a rain-soaked chinatown market a gloomy cemetery and a snow-covered forest rounding out hardline's available locations along with these maps betrayal also adds in an impressive 13 guns and five new melee weapons to the arsenal along with a few map specific vehicles like the snowmobile collectively hardline offers players a ton of great content to enjoy but sadly because of its board timing its marketing and its major deviation from typical battlefield thematic elements many players missed out on all this post-launch content and today servers especially on the pc are pretty much non-existent unfortunately thanks to the very limited success of battlefield hardline um it is a game where i bought premium and have not played half of the maps because you can never find games for them but the majority of the maps in battlefield hardline are stellar despite their best efforts visceral had failed to impress most of the battlefield community and battlefield hardline would inevitably be the very last title that the nearly 20 year old studio would ever release as it was closed shortly after by electronic arts after an unsuccessful development of a planned star wars game battlefield hardline underrated i think it's a fun game uh it also was one of the best games uh from a stability standpoint at launch when it came out in the battlefield franchise right we were just coming off of battlefield 4 which had a lot of stability problems at launch uh when battlefield hardline came out everything just kind of worked out of the box it was a really neat experience and i think it's silly that people missed out on that because they heard cops and robbers well that's not battlefield they didn't give it a chance and as a result they missed out on some really really fun gameplay back in stockholm the developers at dice found themselves working on several major projects at once there was a new entry to the mirror's edge series a reboot to star wars battlefront and plenty of ongoing support for games like battlefield 4 and battlefield hardline but all the while a separate much larger team at dice stockholm had already turned their attention towards a brand new mainline installment the only question was where could the battlefield series go next gamers had already experienced world war ii vietnam modern warfare and future warfare countless times then it hit them why not take the series back to its actual roots and recreate the deadly stalemates of the first world war once this theme had been established the development team were excited to expand upon it further a game based during world war 1 offered a plethora of unique ideas to pull from inevitably shaping the experience into something that battlefield fans had never seen before early development for the game started as far back as 2013 with the team piecing together the desired art style and overarching goals that they wanted to accomplish production then accelerated rapidly following the completion of star wars battlefront and in may of 2016 dyson veiled their new passion project with an absolutely brilliant cinematic trailer that quickly outpaced the widely panned reveal trailer for that year's call of duty the battlefield 1 reveal is possibly one of the biggest moments of the battlefield franchise's history i mean like everybody was keyed into that trailer everybody loved it it's got like crazy up votes on youtube um the marketing for battlefield one was just great all around and who would have thought that a world war one game would have been the best-selling battlefield title of all time the world war one setting in battlefield 1 was a big surprise to me as i'm sure it was to a lot of people i was concerned that there wasn't going to be a lot of variation in the weapons and what we would have access to because world war one's not really known for those technological advances that came until maybe closer to like world war two and after during and after world war ii that was my only um reservation about battlefield one after seeing the trailers initial gameplay i was hooked this was a new battlefield this was a new world war one experience and there was something just so fresh about this next game when it was initially announced i was very curious i was like how are they gonna do this you know having a familiarity with the tactics equipment you know etc uh it was not a particularly mobile war after you know the first few months right um so i was curious how battlefield was going to translate all of their mobility into this very stagnant world war one era and the way that they did it just worked um you know it wasn't particularly representative of what things were like uh back in world war one but it was a ton of fun and it was a completely untapped bit of history in terms of weapons and vehicles and locations and all of these different things um and of course you know going up against call of duty infinite warfare it was kind of this perfect storm of cool stuff and that really resulted in a smash hit for the battlefield franchise then in the fall of that same year dice released the hugely anticipated battlefield 1 for the pc xbox one and playstation 4. battlefield 1 takes place during the first world war and also takes an entirely new approach to its single-player campaign in the process instead of one linear narrative this game offers bite-sized war stories each detailing a different experience faced by a fictional character during the war so with battlefield 1 dice tried a new approach with war stories where instead of having one singular very long campaign they went with kind of bite-sized pieces and set in different parts of the war right there were several of those in battlefield one but everybody comes back to the prologue right which is storm of steel um and storm of steel really did a great job encompassing the brutality of world war one and the global nature of it um it really showcased the brutal nature of the war and uh it sticks with you right it's still something that that we remember to this day uh is that prologue and just how profoundly brutal it was by breaking up the campaign into much smaller narrative elements battlefield 1's campaign manages to play to the series's strengths offering different vehicular and infantry based combat without feeling too ridiculous though at the same time the action still feels weirdly scaled down considering the setting being portrayed with a lot of the same awkward bullet tossing stealth action first premiered in hardline and some fairly underwhelming set-piece moments conceptually i liked it but as always with the battlefield single player i felt that the gameplay kind of fell through there is some really good writing in places in really surprising places but the problem is is just the gameplay context the gameplay context is as has been established for years now dice just don't have the scripting they don't have the production value they don't have the pacing they're trying to tell a really meaningful really heartfelt really somber world war one story that ordinarily doesn't get told and again just the contrast the dissonance of the gameplay in the cutscenes really hurt battlefield 1's campaign overall i think at the very least one does have like at least like there is the the levels in the middle east that you know at least have a couple sandbox elements still not nearly enough to make it really in depth and interesting but at least you know there's the attempt but at the same time the battlefield experience is only in multiplayer for battlefield 1. the multiplayer on the other hand seeks to greatly overhaul the core battlefield experience introducing a ton of era appropriate weaponry vehicles devices and even horses to help sell the simulation and all of this is now coupled with great quality of life changes to improve the feel of the combat players can for example vault over high walls for the first time and slide into a crouch stance to help reach cover safely and entering vehicles or swapping seats is now coupled with a full player animation building on the immersive atmosphere all the weaponry and player classes have also been reworked in order to reflect the relatively permanent arsenal available in the late 1910s this means most of the firearms are some variation of semi-auto or bolt-action rifle though as this is still a fictional sandbox experience several uncommon weapons that rarely saw use during the real war have also been implemented ensuring that the pace of the gameplay stays consistent with other battlefield games as for the classes themselves a lot of the general weapons and roles have been moved around a bit the assault class for example now serves as the squad's anti-tank unit and delegates his medical duties to a dedicated medical class instead meanwhile the support class has now also been given a repair tool along with olympic charges to give them options for enemy vehicles and the recon class now referred to as the scout has been given a few more tools to help support his teammates including armor piercing k bullets to help fight vehicles and flare guns that can reveal enemy positions on the minimap sniper rifles themselves have also seen an interesting new rework referred to as the sweet spot mechanic sniper rifles in bf1 got such a big upgrade compared to other games with the sweet spot mechanic you could just drop people in one shot without getting the head shot as long as you are aware of the engagement distance uh you could get really good they had flares that were great for spotting they had all kinds of fun mechanics plus their sidearms the pistols were so powerful you could drop people with your 1911 or even single shot uh pistol sidearms it was just a fun class to play all around i can't say i was terribly a fan of the sniper sweet spot in battlefield one you know that i think it's very important that you get rewarded for head shots and games um and you don't just get kills for free because you happen to be a certain distance from somebody that was something that i did not care for too much even if i benefited from it quite a bit there's also a ton of unique world war one era gadgets to play around with as well like anti-tank grenades and rocket guns along with a large selection of different melee weapons each with varying damage outputs ranges and speeds many rifles can also be armed with bayonets which can then be used to initiate a deadly bayonet charge perfect for ambushing unaware enemies around corners and down long trench lines the bayonet charge is just so satisfying and it never stopped being satisfying from me especially in the urban maps the urban maps were you activated before seeing an enemy and you come around the corner to stab them right then and there that is cinematic as except it's in multiplayer battlefield is at its best when you get those moments that feel cinematic feel scripted and they're not to expand on the battle pickup system introduced in battlefield 4 and the hero system that was in star wars battlefront bf1 introduces elite classes to the fray allowing players to grab a powerful armored sentry kit or flamethrower to dominate groups of enemies in the trenches i loved the elites there uh the sentry was probably one of my favorites uh just the first time picking up a sentry kit um you know putting on the the the mask and just going to town with the big uh machine gun and feeling like superman was just it was a really cool experience to be able to do that while we're on the topic of special player roles battlefield 1 also introduces new vehicle-specific classes that will automatically be equipped when spawning into one of the available vehicles by limiting the driver's personal defense weapons players are now encouraged to use each vehicle as intended rather than using them as transports and ditching them in enemy territory additionally the vehicles of world war 1 require slightly more team coordination to be used effectively as multiple player positions are necessary in order to protect flanks and properly utilize the vehicle's most powerful hardware the land ships are just [ __ ] awesome i remember reading about how world war one soldiers that had never seen a tank before similar to the romans when they saw war elephants for the first time thought they were looking at a monster when they first saw the landship tanks and you can see why just they look intimidating and menacing i think the way they handled air combat in battlefield 1 has been far superior to any previous battlefield game the fact that a pilot and a gunner had such a symbiotic relationship and that your plane was only going to be as good as your gunner meant a whole lot you had these great aerial dogfight moments where you're gonna really had to be on spot to take out the other planes i just think they were able to take that genre and sort of the slower pacing of aerial combat and really play it to its strengths building off the critical hits and disable features introduced prior bf1 now features individual sections of each vehicle that can be critically damaged directly impacting that vehicle in various ways knocking out the tread on the tank for example will slow it to a crawl while breaking a biplane's wing or rudders will prevent it from making tight churns to fix these crippling effects players can now repair their vehicles without leaving the driver's seat though the effectiveness of this emergency repair is limited slightly as it greatly reduces top speed and control while it's being performed to go along with these modern weapons of war battlefield 1 also lets players play as cavalry units for the first time and can ride around the map on horseback armed with a single shot rifle a saber and plenty of grenades it's such a new experience to the battlefield series we haven't seen as far as i'm aware anything like it before and especially the lance edition with the azar dlc that's that was just hilarious whether you are riding with a spear and lancing people on the way past or hitting them with your sword i honestly just really enjoyed the lever action rifle on the back of the horse sniping pilots at an airplane from a horseback was just a whole new level of cool to keep this unit practical for gameplay purposes both the player and horse have slightly more health than usual though a direct hit with an explosive like the at rocket gun is usually all that's necessary to take one down all these many changes greatly transformed the vehicle combat to be more involved than any other entry in the series which makes sense considering one of battlefield 1's biggest new additions involves absolutely massive vehicles called behemoths behemoths are map-specific player-controlled vehicles that are made available to the losing team to give them a chance to recover these behemoths include an airship a battleship and an armored train all three of which will require a sizeable effort from the opposing team to destroy once destroyed the behemoths will explode spectacularly destroying almost everything in their path no matter where they are delivering a more dynamic take on the series's now signature revolution design it just changed the the map and the game so much that you had to make sure that if you're on the enemy team you have to take out the behemoth because it can do so much destruction i thought behemoths were a lot of fun they were just pure entertainment they were a great way to kind of keep servers from emptying out you know because if a team was really losing uh and they were given a behemoth you know at least you you kind of go down with a fight um and you get to have some fun while you're doing it so whether that was you know on the big zeppelin uh or you were looking at uh the armored train or the dreadnought um those things were all fun to use uh especially if if your team was losing they were kind of like a a break from that where you're like finally i get to feel like i have a chance again you know um so i really enjoyed that a lot of people again kind of saw them as a gimmick uh but for me pure fun along with these elements battlefield 1 also sees some sizable improvements to its dynamic destruction effects allowing players to rip apart practically every structure in the game save for the more structurally integral buildings used to dictate the flow of the map design speaking of which battlefield 1 offers a refreshingly classic feel to the design of most of its available maps with an open-ended sandbox philosophy being pushed to the forefront of a dynamically evolving gameplay experience san quentin scar has a special place in my heart i think just because it was one of the first maps that i played with battlefield once released it allows you to be you know at the bottom of the map where you were in like a little town area with some greenery around you or you could just move up into the map and go into this mushy you know burnt down trees area and just felt very immersive which i think is one of the key aspects of battlefield 1. saint quentin's car with its trenches the little village and the urban streets of amiens have to be best experiences in battlefield one you got the trenches absolutely awesome trench warfare in there and then two with amiens the urban combat just hasn't been done that well in any other game i really loved amiens for the urban combat and all the destruction it had the train moving through the city you could get tanks going down the corridors in the street it was a fantastic infantry combat map and then of course saint quinn's scar which is what they showed off i believe with the demo or the beta of battlefield one it just kind of offered everything you had planes you had the giant airship overhead you had some fun infantry combat in the center of the map and then vehicular stuff out on the outskirts it was just a beautiful map as well montegrappa was probably one of my favorite maps for battlefield 1 just because it was so pretty and it had more of a vertical feeling kind of gameplay that was one of the things in battlefield one that i didn't get that i kind of missed from previous battlefields was that verticality feeling for the game place because these maps are so wide and open and mostly like trench warfare kind of based so monte grappa just because it was on that big green grassy hill just felt like you had more cover to to hide and to move around as opposed to just kind of a flat wide empty map bf1 also more properly accounts for its many different game modes ensuring each map has both a linear aspect to its design along with a proper wide-open conquest variant that feels properly balanced however while rush is still offered it's very much overshadowed by bf1's newest and arguably best new edition operations operations takes everything players love about both rush and conquest and combines them making for a truly epic battlefield experience players either play on the attacking or defending team and fight for control over sectors with two to three flags that must be captured simultaneously in order to push the battle forward like rush the attacking team has a limited number of tickets to capture these sectors however if the attacking team fails they're given two more chances and may be reinforced by a behemoth to help drive the action forward each operation can take roughly 40 minutes to an hour to complete but they're without a doubt the most intense experiences available in the game the operations experience completely changed up battlefields it's like rush on steroids not 32 or 24 players but 64. so many flanks so many opportunities lots of vehicle and infantry combat mixture of engagements the map changes as you go along it's like a story in a way and every game is not the same as the previous one following its release dice then released four more expansions to the game each offering new maps weapons vehicles and even factions the first expansion titled they shall not pass introduces the french army to the war with four maps based on the french hillsides along with two more night themed maps added a little bit later it is a really neat mixture of just like beauty and pain because you've got you know this wonderful french countryside and in the distance everything is on fire there are bunkers kind of cut into the landscape it's it's very surreal when you look at that map it also holds a special place in my heart because when i was able to visit france a couple years ago i went to fort devoe but i also went to verdun heights and to be standing in that location and then seeing it in game is a very powerful experience along with its maps they shall not pass also adds in six french weapons several new melee variants and a few french tanks most notably the massive char 2c that serves as a unique behemoth for some of these levels the second expansion titled in the name of the tsar takes players over to the eastern front and introduces both the russian army and red army in six new maps along with 11 weapons three vehicles and a new cavalry variant equipped with a deadly lance to skewer enemies with the third expansion turning tides players are given a chance to take part in epic invasion style experiences with large-scale operations like the beach landings at cape helix and the zabruka raid being some of the standouts seven new weapons were added this time around along with new naval vehicles like landing craft and destroyers the fourth and final expansion is called apocalypse and brings with it recreations of some of the most infamous battles of world war one including the psalm passchendaele and the twelfth battle of the azanzo alongside these this expansion also brings back yet another take on air superiority this time referred to as air assault along with two maps built specifically for it apocalypse also adds in new weapons a couple new planes and an anti-aircraft variant of the rocket gun built to counter the increasingly deadly pilots in the base game experience overall battlefield 1 was a major win for dice the game was met with overwhelming praise upon release far exceeding expectations following a largely successful marketing campaign reviewers praised the game for its well-designed campaign and its highly original online multipart component claiming it to be the best entry in the series in years and the sales very much reflect this point as battlefield 1 has not only managed to outsell its predecessor but remains the absolute best-selling game in the entire battlefield franchise with over 25 million sales greatly eclipsing battlefield 3's humble 17 million with its success dice had managed to shake off its declining reputation and restored many players faith in the battlefield property at least for the time being immediately after battlefield 1's base content had been released to the public the core of the dice development team got to work on their next entry their team was once more split with many developers now working on a sequel to their new star wars battlefront reboot so resources would again be limited for some time to account for this the team decided to stick with the old war setting as this would allow them to easily modify existing assets to suit their purposes and then decided to set their game during the second world war though they also wanted to avoid the pitfalls of making a world war ii game as battlefield 1's early success was no doubt attributed to its brilliantly original concepts when battlefield 5 was announced to be a world war ii game it seemed awkward it seemed like wait so we're just going back to a setting that we've already done after battlefield 1's whole hype was that we were going to an all-new frontier for really first-person shooters in general so they looked at the war from a different perspective aiming to tell the stories rarely shared about the war this meant no stalingrad no d-day and no iwo jima around the same time dice and ea were also taking into consideration the general market trends of games at the time recognizing that player customization and individuality were key to many of the most successful multiplayer shooters available so they ensured early on that players would be able to freely customize soldier cosmetics in any way that they wanted to create the ultimate world war ii fantasy even if it wasn't technically historically accurate but this would backfire spectacularly as their official reveal trailer proved hugely unpopular with many finding it overly confusing and not within the spirit of the battlefield property i didn't know what it was i thought it was an alternate take on world war ii ish history because the visuals and the stuff going on in the trailer were so over the top and ridiculous i couldn't tell what faction people were fighting for there was a girl with a prosthetic arm that at first looked like a robot arm or something everybody had like braveheart face paint on the reaction was just what you know like that's what the reaction was we watched it and we were like i mean it looks cool but what the hell is happening you know and we looked at it's like yeah in a lot of ways this is battlefield but this is not what people expect that is not at all what they sold the game as prior to that trailer being launched not even in the reveal event in the reveal event they're still keeping the show of it's being really authentic and going back to world war ii in a realistic and gritty way and then that is what people saw i think a lot of people saw that and the game unfortunately just disappeared from the radars instantly with this trailer alone dice had sealed their fate and in the fall of 2018 they released battlefield 5 for playstation 4 xbox one and pc battlefield 5 is structured very similarly to battlefield 1. its single player is once more built around war stories this time focusing more on how the war itself has impacted people around the world stories include a british sabotage mission against german installations in north africa a mother and daughter's attempt to halt atomic weapon production in norway a tier a year unit's experience fighting an operation dragoon and probably one of the strongest of the four the last tiger that follows a german tank squad in the final months of the war together these stories aren't quite as interesting as the ones offered in battlefield 1 with smaller engagements and a severe lack of emphasis on vehicular gameplay the war stories are always just one step away from being really decent um and i say that from the point of view of like you have this great story of commandos in norway uh taking out the heavy water plant and it's one of those things of like the actual story of it is phenomenal um it's it's an incredible story um and i just questioned why you had to take the the fictional route with it and i think a lot of the uh fan base questions uh that as well you know they look at say well what was wrong with you know what actually happened um and i think that that is an important valid question to ask but they do still introduce some of the locations that players will experience throughout the multiplayer despite its reduced development time battlefield 5 offers a remarkably large amount of changes to the general design traversal for example is more expansive than ever allowing players to sprint from a crouch stance dive onto their backs and roll out of a high fall to avoid taking damage as this is a world war ii game the weapons offered are slightly more powerful and more effective than they were before and as such the weapon types have been moved around between the classes again the assault class for example now has access to semi-auto rifles and a few assault rifles while the medics are now assigned smgs and some bolt action carbines weapon customization systems have also been approached differently scrapping the previous weapon variants offered in battlefield 1 and giving players a new upgrade tree called weapon specializations here players can choose between different buffs to their weapon trading at long range accuracy for hip fire control or vice versa depending on the preferred play style the weapon sights and scopes though are handled on a separate customization menu where players can freely modify the appearance of each part of their weapon using unlocked skins and similarly can customize the look of their own soldier using a plethora of different coats trousers and preset heads at first i wasn't too bothered about what we saw in the initial trailers however as time went on seeing the let's just call it phantom of the opera skin stuff like that i wasn't too keen on it the firestorm skins looked great i think they suited it it's a video game it's a little bit out there that's fine but again some of the other skins not so much on top of all this bf5 also aims to expand upon the designated roles of each of its four classes encouraging squads to work even closer than before revives for example can now be performed by any squad member even if that player isn't a medic though if the player is a medic they can revive much faster and they have the option to revive other teammates as well meanwhile the support class has been given even more defense based duties including laying down the team's landmines and using the new fortification tool to rapidly build and repair defensive structures additionally the scouts are now the only player that can effectively 3d spot enemies like in the past limiting other classes to just pinging static locations instead in an attempt to bring back a sense of realism to the action bf5 introduces the highly controversial attrition system limiting the ammunition of each soldier and vehicle and forcing them to frequently resupply from various resupply stations on the map attrition is probably one of the worst things added to bf5 mainly the health aspect you lose your med pack and then you're stuck on what is it 1890 health whatever it may be trying to push up to the objective and it's just a nightmare yes there is med stations but often you can't even get to these or they're surrounded by enemies you would have to take yourself out of the action a lot to resupply as a vehicle player you know having to fly through that weird resupply area as an airplane pilot felt weird going back to stations to resupply your tank feels like you know it should be balanced so you don't just sit in a tank and fire endless rockets all day but you know if if you don't know where the new year station is or if someone destroys it you get out and try to build another one and then you get killed before you can even finish making it not a fan most of the time of the attrition in battlefield v i like the rebalancing of the game i like that you start off with less ammo i like that you need to coordinate more with team members i like that there's a lot more support vehicles the huge maps return i think battlefield 5 has the best conquest in years bf5 also adds in a fortification system that allows players to pull out a tool and build a preset defensive structure to help secure important areas so fortifications i loved again i'm somebody that loves being able to you know help out the team uh impact the map in some kind of way um it's not entirely foreign territory for battlefield right we look at battlefield 4 you've got the little bollards you can raise on some of the maps and in battlefield 5 you've got the ability to build tank traps you've got the ability to build sandbags or anti-tank weapons or this or that and i love that i love being able to kind of reinforce something for my team to make it easier for them to hold that objective conceptually fortifications were kind of cool but in practice it felt weird in such a fast-paced more arcadey game to stop the action for a while and start building sandbags monotonously around a building or digging trenches and stuff there was a cool element there and i like the idea that you could add a new trench to a map to give you a way to make it across a field that otherwise had no cover but just it was monotonous and it wasn't fun to do and i always felt like my skills on the battlefield were better utilized just engaging enemy players rather than sitting there building something up for a long period of time in lieu of the commander role which did not return in either this game or battlefield 1 squad leaders now have access to a reinforcement wheel by earning points capturing flags as a squad squad leaders can use this wheel to call in support onto the field this includes things like resupplies artillery strikes heavy vehicles and of course a deadly v1 rocket strike the massive rockets that's gotta be one of my favorite additions to be a five wasn't a big fan of the artillerists i think they're a little bit overpowered in some places like on operations breakthrough grand operations that kind of thing you know you drop one of those on an objective and the enemy team just has to retreat there's no doubt about it but the rocket there's something about that coming in that really changes up the way the area plays the first time that that happened to me and friends of like not just seeing a massive explosion blinding my screen but being thrown back physically in the game was just fantastic the vehicles in battlefield v also aim for slightly more realism tanks for example have had their turret turn speed slowed down considerably as this was originally tied to match the player's mouse speed in the past vehicles also have limited ammunition for the first time since 2142 meaning players are required to retreat and resupply after a short while to balance this out many vehicles are harder to take down than ever before requiring an exhaustive number of panzerfaust and other explosives to fully destroy when it comes to map designs bf5 offers some fairly interesting backdrops to fight across in staying true to the game's direction these battles aren't your typical normandy beach invasions you'd expect from a world war ii shooter instead players are treated to lesser known skirmishes around holland norway and north africa though despite this vf5 still offers plenty of epic all-out warfare with huge aerial invasions coupled with big tank battles and building to building infantry combat though unlike bf1's more rounded out map designs the maps here do seem to lean more heavily towards a conquest design in general with battlefield 5's launch maps i think aeros was like one of the most well balanced fun maps to play you had this beautiful quaint town that was totally destructible with like cobblestone streets and stone walls that you could just drive through with the tank uh you had bigger wide open fields that you could snipe through tanks could drive through him he had a little bit of light aircraft gameplay that wasn't too overpowering so if he didn't want to deal with airplanes it usually wasn't too big of a deal i think that was one of the better looking maps and better flowing maps when it came to conquest i like the city maps in battlefield v more than just the big open maps devastation was probably one of my favorite maps just because it is the only one that really made me feel like we're in the middle of war this is a war zone this city was destroyed by war you know this is going down so while rotterdam itself it is nice the devastation part of it is what you know really made that immersion come through for me the fan favorite operations makes a return as well though it's now called grand operations to emphasize its more involved design instead of just capturing territory for example grand operations now requires players to achieve special objectives in some areas like delivering a bomb to an artillery cannon much like bf4's obliteration mode also instead of attackers getting three attempts to progress through multiple maps grand operations is designed around a new day system where no matter what happens during each battle the operation will proceed forward to the next location with some slightly modified parameters depending on the attacker's performance at launch despite incredibly loud outcry from community members regarding its pre-release marketing battlefield 5 still managed to perform quite well among critics and its core audience the game was praised for its absolutely gorgeous visual presentation along with some great improvements to the combat and player versatility though many questioned dice's design decisions in regards to things like attrition and time to kill an issue that would continue to persist throughout the game's post-launch content releases that was the reason i never covered battlefield v the reason i didn't is because i saw how often it was getting patched and notably patched significantly patched so as a result i never felt comfortable making a review of it because i figured in less than a [ __ ] month anything i say is viable to change speaking of which bf5 marks the end of the battlefield franchise's reliance on its premium expansion pass with all post-launch content being made free to the player this would explain the much stronger push for special cosmetic skins and character designs as ea's marketing strategy had shifted to align with industry norms unfortunately because of bf5s substantially lower sales figures the decision to only release free post-launch content through their new tides of war schedule inevitably resulted in much less post-launch content to enjoy the first update to bf5 titled overture released at the tail end of 2018 and brought with it the final war story chapter along with a single map and five weapons all of which needed to be unlocked by completing weekly challenges to keep the community engaged for longer a few weeks later dice released their second chapter lightning strikes that reintroduced some classic game modes including a new objective based co-op mode for up to four players along with some more unlockable weapons and vehicles then several months later dice released the long rumored battle royale mode firestorm as part of their chapter 3 update trial by fire in firestorm teams of four players drop onto a massive environment and battle to be the last squad standing all while a deadly ring of fire slowly closes in as far as battle royales go firestorm is pretty decently designed as it incorporates things like tanks and helicopters that were highly unique for the time but because the mode was not made free to play it inevitably suffered from a reduced player count made worse by an influx of hackers that continued to play the game to this day i think firestorm in itself was a very fun and entertaining i'll say game mode but i think it was just let down by by the paywall behind it unfortunately but as as if it would have been its standalone you know firestorm battle rail i think it would have worked a lot better for players not at all interested in firestorm trial by fire also kicks off the battle of greece by introducing a new multiplayer map called mercury the firestorm map was also added to the multiplayer after a few updates though it is scaled down to accommodate conquest additionally cha by fire also adds in a bunch of new weapons and vehicles that are again unlocked by completing various weekly and monthly challenges the fourth chapter defined the odds released in july of 2019 and lasted through till early fall with it dice in collaboration with dice la added four more maps to the game most of which were purposely built for a small scale competitive mode that ended up never being made my favorite map from battlefield v uh consistently here recently has been provence um which is from the defying the odds expansion so it's the one that is set in france uh you've got the purple fields of you know lavender out there it's it's a very pretty map um but i love that you kind of have infantry gameplay kind of centered around that that northern part of the map and then you've got tanks to the south you've got the much more open areas and i love that you know i can i can basically make a decision like oh i want to fight with tanks or i just want infantry but it's just a fun map then in october of 2019 dice revealed their hugely ambitious fifth chapter with its own standalone trailer showcasing the war transitioning over to the highly requested pacific theater along with these locations the war in the pacific chapter also introduced two new factions to the game including the imperial japanese and the united states accompanying these factions are a ton of new weapons vehicles and powerful new gear most notably the return of the flamethrower a deadly katana capable of easily cutting down enemies with a single swing and one of my personal favorites the plunge mine which can be used to devastate enemy armor units at point-blank range fans were ecstatic and upon its release public opinion had finally started to sway back in favor of battlefield v indicating that it had finally reached the level of quality and complexity that fans had always wanted i think battlefield 5 hit its stride with the pacific dlc most of the maps that launched with it were kind of grand slams and iwo jima for sure was just so iconic even for being a very stark more barren map the beach landing and assault was very intense very cool one of the best experiences i think you could have had in the game if you were still playing it by the time the pacific dlc dropped iwo jima probably one of the better maps in the entire game coming up to the beaches wide open combat and then you gradually going through a little bit of the bushes there and then through the tunnels and then the fight up the hill beautiful experience lots of different kind of stuff going on there really good map and again it looks amazing this is what bf5 should have been but rather than proceeding onward with more ambitious updates like this dice announced that chapter 6 would be its final submission to the game adding only one map to the pacific campaign to accompany the three introduced before and with that support for battlefield v felt quiet as dice picked up the pieces and pressed onward when the dust had settled battlefield v had left a permanent scar on the swedish studio's long-standing reputation without the initial influx of fresh players at launch support for the game just wasn't feasible and while it managed to retain at least some players in its transition over to the steam platform a few years later it is still yet to even get remotely close to the financial success of its predecessor with this in mind dice reevaluated its priorities for the series identifying areas that could be sacrificed in order to ensure the quality of their games moving forward they then looked at ways to excite audiences like they had with battlefield 1 and began to brainstorm potential settings for a new mainline installment meanwhile the frostbite team worked to revolutionize their engine once more and began to experiment with increased player counts and more dynamic destruction as they felt these features would be paramount in pushing the series into the next generation but throughout the course of development dice were faced with the reality of the global pandemic requiring a difficult adjustment as developers began to work from home to make matters worse the project would then suffer several redesigns throughout production with some unconfirmed rumors suggesting that another battle royale experience had become a top priority for a few months but this was later scrapped and the project reverted back to a traditional sandbox very late in its development cycle to aid in this final year of development several other ea-owned studios including burnout creators criterion games and dice la now referred to as ripple effect were tapped to contribute to the project and made use of leftover unused assets from battlefield 5's cancelled post-launch material to piece together what they considered to be a love letter to the fan base finally in june of 2021 dice were ready to show off where the series was heading next and officially unveiled the next installment to the franchise futuristic setting for battlefield 2042 was perfect for me i'm a fan of modern warfare and you know semi-modern futuristic warfare i'm not you know so glued to boots on the ground all the time like i'm okay with all these crazy gadgets coming up that we can have in our games you know so i was really excited i'm not somebody who really enjoys uh the futuristic settings too much um but thankfully you know battlefield 2042 is close enough that i can be on board with it i think they're geniuses i think they've struck similar in the way that battlefield 1 struck the zeitgeist at the right time i think they have hit a battlefield 3 looking like game with a setting that gives them the flexibility that something like battlefield 3 doesn't have and on november 12th of 2021 dice released the final entry to the series so far battlefield 2042 2042 takes place in the near future with climate change having devastated the world's atmosphere so much so that all of the satellites in orbit around the planet have crashed to the surface following this event the world is thrust into yet another world war as the last remaining superpowers the united states and the russian federation battle for control of the dwindling resources but that's about it there's no real story this time around as battlefield 2042 is the first game in the series since before the bad company era to not feature a single player campaign it instead offers three primary modes of play each offering drastically different experiences the first option and the core of the 2042 experience is all-out warfare here players can participate in the series signature massive combat scenarios either through a modified large-scale conquest or the returning breakthrough at first glance it's your typical battlefield experience two teams of players jump into a variety of vehicles and grab their favorite guns and then proceed to blast each other away over territorial disputes however for the first time in the series history at least officially the player count has been raised past 64. in fact it's been doubled and now accommodates a daunting 128 players making for some truly chaotic and often overwhelming action to account for this the maps offered in 2042 are substantially larger on average with most objectives being housed in tight close quarter interior structures surrounded by large open spaces rife with vehicles and snipers though in keeping with the spirit of the series as of light battlefield 2042 also incorporates some new revolution based elements as well with the return of dynamic weather effects massive scripted destruction events and a new tornado system to really make a mess of things 2042 also completely eliminates the series's traditional class system and replaces it with a new specialist system instead with the specialist system players can select between 10 different characters each with their own unique appearance abilities and unique gadget irish for example can drop down large bulletproof shields mckay can use a retractable grapple hook to zip up to high ledges boris can place automatic sentry turrets and sundance can use their wingsuit to glide across the map perfect for infiltrating enemy territory unseen as there are no longer any classes each of these specialists can be armed with any weapons grenades or standard gadgets that the player wants eliminating the need to sacrifice a desired weapon type just to fulfill a team-oriented role speaking of weapons 2042 also introduces a new weapon customization option called the plus system with the plus system players can select between unlocked attachments in the customization menu before deployment and can easily swap between desired attachments on the fly giving players more agency when presented with unique combat scenarios however this is also coupled with a much smaller collection of weapons overall with only a handful of each weapon type much in the same way the series was like back in the refractor days as for the vehicles 2042 adds in a new vehicle drop system allowing for heavy ground support like tanks to be delivered directly to the player similar to how the squad reinforcements function in battlefield v as this is the near future several classic vehicle types also make a return like tanks mobile aaa hovercrafts jet fighters helicopters and a couple of brand new units like the powerful transport vtols and the speedy bolts that have become a dominant threat on the field along with these many changes 2042 also scraps a lot of the previously established elements brought forth by some of the more recent entries just some of the examples include the removal of battlefield 5's crouch sprint the role many first-person animations like for entering vehicles or performing melee kills and many of the controversial gameplay elements over the years like attrition sweet spot and suppression it's an exceptionally scaled back experience overall even if it does technically feel larger in scale thanks to its increased player count reintroduction of bots and the new cross-platform connection though for fans looking for a bit more all-out warfare is still technically one-third of the full experience the second core mode of play is called hazard zone in hazard zone players are deployed onto one of several large maps with their squad and are tasked with securing hidden hard drives from crash satellites in order to earn funds to temporarily upgrade their gear between rounds the catch is that there's only two extractions per round so if a squad wants to extract with their valuable loot they're going to need to fight off everyone else in order to secure a seat on the vtol it's a tense mode inspired heavily by the likes of other battle royale moot extraction based games though the addition of things like vehicles and specialist gear do help to set it apart slightly finally there's the third and most positively received aspect of the game battlefield portal portal is as promised a love letter to the fans of the series with it players can build whatever experiences that they want using a selection of maps weapons and factions from classic games from the series past at the time of writing this includes two maps from 1942 two maps from battlefield 3 and two maps from bad company two along with many of the unique gameplay quirks and vehicles that were offered with those particular experiences what's more players can even build entirely new experiences that combine elements of all these games together ensuring players can create the battlefield that they themselves want to play it's an ambitious project and one that has some serious potential to grow into something even greater which is important considering the core battlefield 2042 experience has not gotten off to a great start the game has been out for about a month now and has received the lowest user scores of any game in the franchise prior including the highly divisive battlefield hardline and battlefield v due to a strong marketing campaign the game has still managed to sell decently enough with over 4 million sales within the first few weeks exceeding the early sales numbers of battlefield v but with its multitude of bugs balancing issues and its dramatically altered core gameplay mechanics dice are in for yet another extremely bumpy road to recovery which finally brings us to today nearly 20 years after the series first debuted as we've seen unfold over the course of this documentary the battlefield franchise has evolved substantially with each and every entry what started as a vehicular based quake-style death match has steadily evolved to become an absolute juggernaut in the video game industry with vastly improved weapon control player customization and plenty of insanely over-the-top dynamic destruction though all the while the series continues to struggle with maintaining a distinct identity with some entries attempting to bring the series back to its hardcore pc centric roots while others aim to simplify the gameplay in hopes of growing the core audience i think it's fair to say that the game has changed a lot in the last decade i think ea and dice are trying to appeal more to to the younger audience rather than the veterans which i prefer because it gets everyone involved may it be you know ea maybe the developers and obviously the community what i want from battlefield is dice to only prioritize themselves because if you trace the history of this franchise i think a lot of the best games that capture the most amount of people are all the ones that dice really push for battlefield's biggest mistake i think was setting call of duty in its sights it's improved its infantry combat a lot over the years sure but it's also taking away some of the interesting characteristics in those core games i think it's no surprise that in battlefields 3 and 4 a lot of the best experiences are not found in the base game even still the battlefield series has had a profound impact on both the gaming industry and the community as a whole opening doors that may never have been there otherwise battlefield's affected our lives in a huge way yeah our whole career choices you know from battlefield led to neebs gaming and this is what we do now battlefield's been a tremendous uh source of both fun and professional joy in our lives yeah journey has been just so humbling and so fulfilling i've met such a great awesome group of people through playing this game and some may have even been the source that drove me to start making videos in the first place it's had a huge impact on me professionally as it's become my primary source of income covering this game that i love playing but it's just been an absolute pleasure to be able to talk about battlefield to play battlefield to go over battlefield strategy and make money at the same time it's it's absolutely been a dream come true without battlefield i wouldn't be the youtuber or streamer i am today and i've met so many awesome people made so many new friends and relationships through this game series and cannot be more thankful enough for it battlefield for me has been incredible i've made so many friends uh just by playing the game it's always been kind of an outlet for creativity in a way it's been a release in terms of just enjoying the games but on a professional and personal level there obviously operating a youtube channel that primarily focuses on uh battlefield it's its success has led to some really incredible experiences and it actually directly led to me finding out that my great grand uncle fought in world war one as part of the french foreign legion and died on the somme and i were not for battlefield 1 in that experience i would have never found that out so on a personal level that was also uh huge as well so while 2042 may take some time before it becomes a game that's referenced fondly we can at least take solace in the fact that the battlefield series has delivered some of the greatest video game based experiences of all time and even in its darkest days there's still always a dedicated community that will continue to fight on but what do you guys think which battlefield game has been your favorite and what do you want to see from the series in the future let me know in the comment section i also want to give a massive shout out to everyone who helped make this project possible and of course i want to thank all of you for watching today especially the very supportive members on my patreon who've continued to support me as i put this together thank you all so much for your donations if you enjoy the work i do here and want to see more documentaries like this please consider joining the growing list of patreon supporters your support is hugely appreciated and of course don't forget to like and subscribe for more content posted soon including comparisons reviews and documentaries in all the biggest games

Channel: Nick930

Views: 370,381

Keywords: Battlefield, BF, History of, DICE, EA, Electronic Arts, Soldier, War, Battle, 1942, BF2, BF2142, Vietnam, 2042, Battlefield 2042, Multiplayer, Online, Warfare, Warzone, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Specialists, Trailer, Full, Summary, Development, Documentary, Collab, LevelCap, Neebs, Battlefield Friends, Raycevick, Flakfire, theBrokenMachine, Nick930, History of Battlefield, NeebsGaming, Azura, Gabbytron, Ripple Effect

Id: 7l0biWQrshI

Length: 260min 24sec (15624 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/pickledartichoke]

Thousands of hours were spent in Battlefield 2 during my teen years, nothing will compare to this day for me. Maps, graphics, commander mode, all were revolutionary for its day and some games could still learn from.

[u/kray_jk]

Should do a documentary on Starsiege/Tribes and Delta Force/Novalogic developer. They were also pretty influential to multiplayer gaming and each had unique game engines that lent toward larger scale play than what we saw from id and Quake inspired stuff.

[u/Equivalent_Alps_8321]

BF 2002-2021 lol. RIP

[u/vexargames]

Does it mention me being the first producer on BF1942?

[u/abacabbmk]

RIP

[u/Crimsonclaw111]

This channel has great videos. I also quite enjoy their GTA and MGS videos.

[u/dan1101]

4 hours? TLDR?

[u/GotItFromEbay]

I'm about 1 hr 30 min in and holy crap this documentary brings back so many memories. Battlefield 1942 is what got me into multiplayer gaming and I spent stupid amounts of hours playing Battlefield games and mods during middle school and highschool. Still play Battlefield games today, but not nearly as much (all my fellow millenials are probably in the same boat).

Super cool to see gameplay from these games and be given the back stories behind their development, design decisions, public reception, etc.!