PSC Gamer

Make a Good Game Better – Battlefield Bad Company 2

May 29, 2010 at 11:24 pm (Make a Good Game Better) (Battlefield Bad Company 2, BFBC2, Good Game Better, reflections, Video Games)

This is the first in a series of features that will look at some of today’s most popular games and offer suggestions as to how to improve them.

Battlefield 2 is the best and most successful team-focused fps in recent years. However, as with all games, it isn’t perfect. Here’s a list of some tweaks and changes I think would give the game that extra polish. Got any ideas of your own for this or future battlefield games? Post them in the comments section below and I may add them to the list. Ready? Here goes…

Gripes

• The amount of auto aim seems to be tad ridiculous, giving players headshots regardless of accuracy. Nearly every time I quick-scope/no-scope someone with a sniper rifle it is a headshot. Tone it down please.
• An option to have your team speak English (or whatever your 1st language is) and your opponents speak Russian, regardless of which side you are playing on. Sometimes I don’t even realise that a charge has been armed or destroyed (I know there are visual clues but my eyes are focusing on keeping me alive my, my ears are listening for updates on the map wide situation.)
• Spotting is broken. Fix it. To elaborate, in the beta you could spot continuously by repeatedly tapping SELECT, this allowed you to find enemies by moving your cross hairs around and constantly spotting. Subsequently, a cool down timer was put on the spot button meaning that you can stare at a tank, mashing the Spot button, until you are blue in the face (and your fingers are blistering) but you will not be able to say to your teammates “Look out, there’s a massive tank cannon death machine rolling towards us” – something that they may not have noticed given the level of noise on a Bad Company 2 battlefield. So please, bring back unlimited spotting, it doesn’t do any harm, and we’ll all finally be able to keep track of that Apache helicopter while trying to shoot it down.
• Team wide voice chat.
• The ability to rotate the camera around the person you are about to spawn on to see if you are likely to be killed the moment you spawn.
• Please double the ammo in each gun, it usually takes a clip to kill a person and even if you sneak up on 2 people you’re unlikely to get the second one since it takes so long to kill one of them and then you have to reload. This could possibly be solved by greater bullet damage at closer ranges.
• A faster run speed would be nice to help you cover the large amount of open space in the maps.
• And finally, my biggest gripe with the game, the sensitivity. The sensitivity in this game is so slow that you often can’t follow a running target. After coming from a game like MW2, where you can quickly turn to react to attacks from the sides and behind, in BFBC2 if you see someone to the sides of the screen you stand little chance of turning to face them in time.

Minor Annoyances

• A minor annoyance is the lack of cover that is taller than your crouch height. With the lack of prone (something I don’t mind that much) it would be nice to have some cover that doesn’t leave your head poking out.
• An even more minor annoyance is the fact that in kill cams it shows people’s guns sticking through the wall below windows. Not a problem in terms of gameplay, but can be a bit irritating to watch after just being killed.
• Louder footsteps would be nice.

Would Be Nice

• Option to have the Battlefield 2 music playing as an alternate soundtrack.
• A single player offline ‘training mode’, where you can practice marksman shooting at far away (possibly moving), driving (with a tank shooting range?) and a helicopter  so you can practice flying before taking to the skies.
• A map that has more water to make better use of water craft.
• A map where each side has choppers, for copter vs copter goodness.
• Maps where the defending team has a base/fort in the centre of the map and the attacking team can attack from all sides.
• An urban/city map.
• Remakes of BF2 classics (Gulf of Oman and especially Strike at Karkand)

That’s all I can think of. Hopefully, with Dice’s good record of supporting their games for a long time we’ll see some of these ideas implemented. Got any ideas you think should be added to the list? Leave them in the comments below.