Tom "Durus" Nevill wonders if Battlefield Bad Company 2 has what it takes to be taken seriously as a competitive game

This article is the sole opinion of the author and does not represent the opinion of Heaven Media Ltd or the opinion of any affiliates.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 is due to be released in March and looks to continue the run of successful Battlefield games, but is it going to be the next competitive game? Are people from CS:S and CoD4 going to look to move over to a new game and start afresh? Though we don’t know the answer to these questions directly, we are able to have a fairly good stab at them.

The Battlefield Series has always been a hugely popular one, but it has never really taken off competitively as some games have. Battlefield 2 saw plenty of tournaments and events take place but you could never compare it to CS:S and CoD4 at their primes, and obviously it wasn’t a patch on CS 1.6. However, it certainly had the user base and the popularity to become a great game. But like a lot of EA games, it was lacking certain things that allowed it to become a fully competitive game.

Now though, Bad Company 2 is coming to the shelves and it is looking like it could quite possibly become a competitive game. Though we are only at a beta stage, it has been one of the most anticipated betas around. Fileplay, a sub site of an internet provider that has colossal amount of server power and bandwidth at their disposal, crashed several times at the release of the beta keys a couple of weeks ago. Since then any opportunity to get a key has seen hundreds of people flocking to Fileplay to try and get their hands on a key.

If you manage to get into the game and onto the server browser you can see that there are thousands of people playing the game, and it is not even properly out yet! The servers are completely full throughout the day. This certainly shows you that the game is going to popular, but how suitable is it going to be as a competitive title?

Battlefield has always suffered from one thing, the lack of a good engine that supports good bullet reg. Battlefield 2 was an excellent game to play, but everyone would agree that the reg in the game was appalling. The amount of times you would aim at someone’s head only to find that a bit of dust flew off and the opponent turned around and shot you with a grenade launcher. It simply didn’t cater to people with good aim, at least not as effectively as the likes of CS:S and CoD4 did. This instantly made it less likely to succeed as a competitive title.

However, in BFBC2 this seems to all have changed. From playing the game you can instantly tell that the reg has changed and it feels a lot better. It is not like playing CoD4 or CS:S as people don’t die anywhere near as easily, but that is the same for everyone. If you hit someone it registers as a hit, and if you hit their head it is a headshot. The hit boxes are definitely a huge step up from what they were back in the BF2 days.

That was by far the most important aspect of the game that needed to be sorted out if the game was going to succeed competitively. From there they built on what worked for them in the rest of the BF series. Large maps, vehicles and helicopters all thrown together to make a perfect mix of realistic games.

Bad Company 2 takes it to a new level as well, with the ability to destroy practically everything on the map. This is something that we haven’t ever seen in a competitive game, and it is certainly going to be very interesting to play with. Just because you are stood behind a wall in a building doesn’t make you safe. The amount of times I have been taking cover from a soldier with a machine gun for the tank to shoot at the building where I am lodged and destroy the wall in front of me completely. Left in a cloud of dust (yes that does actually happen), I soon found myself gun downed by the infantry charging in. This is definitely going to add an extra factor to the game in a competitive light.

Graphically it is simply amazing. Though I have had to turn my settings down to low to give me a good FPS (with my two year old PC), they still look simply amazing. Battlefield has always boasted good graphics, but the ones we have seen so far in the beta look just amazing! The maps are stunning, the explosions out of this world. This is certainly going to attract the sponsors to support a game as this is definitely one for the spectators.

So is BFBC2 a guaranteed a competitive title then? They have sorted out the bullet reg and they have made a graphically stunning game. Of course not, at least not yet. As always, the game is full of bugs. The amount of times the game sends you back to desktop is unbelievable, and every now and then you will get some annoying messages appearing out of nowhere. Don’t even get me start on the server browser, but if any of you have played BF2, imagine that, but worse. That is certainly saying something.

There is also the issue of gametypes and maps. Currently we have only seen one gametype, Rush, which is very similar to the ones you see in ET, the Stopclock gametype. The attacking team has to push forward and destroy two objectives before they can move on to the next one. Once at the next one, their spawn moves forward. This focuses the game around two objectives rather than having the entire map to play with. It is a very good idea, but does mean the game lasts for a long time. It is also quite hard to score the gametype as there is no real scoring system in it. There is a ticket system but there is no way of determining a win if both teams don’t complete all the objectives.

However, we have been told that the trusty old conquest mode will be in the full release of the game. This could be very interesting to play, and it is most likely going to be the bigger maps. This is something that we are very used to with DICE, they love their big expansive maps. This is going to cause a huge problem in terms of competitive games; how many people are going to play on each team? In BF2 we saw it start of as an 8on8 game, using the small size maps, vehicles and helicopters. Once the activity died down we saw it change to a more normal 5on5 gametype, but this time only with infantry.

I think it is going to be hard to play this game in the regular 5on5, and I expect it to be at least 8on8, if not more. Competitively this immediately makes it hard. What organisation is going to want a team of 8 people to send to events? They struggle sending 5 people with hotels etc, how are they going to manage 8 people? For events as well it is going to be interesting if they actually do support it as there will always be the problem of the bigger team sizes running through it.

No matter how much I say this game is going to work, it is still going to come down to how the final product looks. We know DICE like to cut corners and there are invariably going to be a lot of bugs. Any patches we see soon after release will, like always, fix some bugs only to make new ones. We also know that they don’t really have competitive play in mind, so things like a good spectator mode are not going to be coming any time soon.

So is Bad Company 2 going to be the next competitive game? Probably not, and if it is going to get anywhere near the top end it is going to take a very big and united community to push it forward. God I can’t wait to play the game, but somehow I just don’t think you will be seeing it at a WCG or even a TeX equivalent tournament any time soon.