Shoot you in the face

Well, late last night (or early this morning) I beat Battlefield: Bad Company.   Just about everything I wrote in my early impressions holds true throughout the game, so I won’t ramble on and on about it.  But I must say, for a game I had to convince myself to buy I am really surprised by how much fun I’ve had with it.   I can’t sit here and tell you all that it is perfect, because I had tons of issues with it, but none of the issues mattered because I sat there for hours and hours with a giant smile on my face having a freaking blast.   The game, offline, is just flat out fun.

Online is a whole other can of worms.  On the one hand it is also insanely fun, but it’s left me wondering how they could have made some design decisions.  Basically, the problems arise from the fact that it is very, very easy to “cheat” to get tons of points, which means in any given game either side will have a few folks that just go off and blow up their own trucks and then repair them and do that over and over for a whole match.   Obviously, if you have more guys doing that on your team than the other team does you will be outgunned and have no chance of winning.   The other problem is online achievements.   Online achievements are a very tricky thing to do right, and almost every game does them wrong.  In fact, my whole experience with BFBC added on to other console shooters of the past has me laying out the groundwork of the Do’s and Don’ts of online shooter design.   Hopefully I will have it posted in the next day or two.

Overall though, with people playing the game correctly, BFBC online is about as fun an online shooter as I have played.  Now, of course, I’ve only been playing it for a few days, so I can’t speak on it’s lasting power…  but there are so many options on what to do while you play that I think it will be staying in my tray for a long time to come.  Until Socom: Confrontation, at least.

And for those that don’t know…  Socom has been pushed back a month and is now expected in late October.  As bummed as I am (Socom is my favorite console shooter of all time), I am happy they are taking the time to get it right.  Though they have made some questionable design decisions themselves.   They just revealed on their blog that matches will be 10 rounds with no tie breaker.   How can they think that is a good idea?   They are also planning to ape the Halo/COD party match making system, another error in my opinion.   But, yeah, I’ll cover all of this in the bigger post I am working on.