It’s… good?

Let me first preface this by saying that my opinion of Battlefield V is complicated, and describing it simply as “good” is papering over many of the cracks in what is an extremely flawed shooter with far more than its fair share of bugs. However, even taking those into account BF V has been receiving a kicking from both the gaming press and the Battlefield fanbase that I feel is rather disproportionate to its sins, many of which can be laid at the feet of Electronic Arts rather than series developer DICE. It’s EA that forced them to release in time for Christmas without much time to polish, and it’s EA that launched the game with a baffling array of purchasing options and release dates that appears to have confused the target audience to the point where many were unaware it had released at all, and both of these factors have done much to turn the regular playerbase against the game. Given that, and the host of other issues plaguing Battlefield V that do partially stem from DICE’s terrible track record for Battlefield launches, it’s frankly a minor miracle that I can sit here with a straight face and describe the game as “good”.

Battlefield V is good though, god help me. I didn’t like Battlefield 1 at all. I fell out of Battlefield 4 very quickly. I did put over a hundred hours into Battlefield 3’s multiplayer, but my gold standard for the series remains Bad Company 2, the first game that truly leveraged the Frostbite engine’s destruction physics and which had a heavier focus on infantry combat and attempted to minimise the experience of being killed over and over by some sad sack in a fighter jet obsessed with maximising his K/D ratio. And while I wasn’t expecting much of Battlefield V when I bought it, and it certainly doesn’t surpass the good times I had with Bad Company 2, I am very surprised to find that it offers the best Battlefield experience since Bad Company 2.

Battlefield V is a return to the series’ World War 2 roots, except this version of World War 2 rendered in the Frostbite engine is both absurdly pretty and seems somehow unreal because of it, like it’s almost (but not quite) blundered into the Uncanny Valley. That feeling isn’t helped by Battlefield V being very much a modern shooter under the WW2 trappings; because FPS players in 2018 are used to modern settings and modern weapons there are far more semi-auto and assault rifles floating around in Battlefield V than you’d strictly expect from a World War 2 engagement, and to justify this each classes’ weapon options mostly consists of experimental prototypes that might have possibly been fired at a Nazi one time, maybe, if you squint at history a bit. Both sides have access to the same selection, too, so you’ve got Germans running around with Sten guns and Brits laying down hails of fire from their MG42s. The choice of setting is largely reduced to visual flavour and there’s almost no concessions that have been made to it in the gameplay; it’s a modern Battlefield dressed up in WW2 chic rather than a true flashback to the glory days of 1942. This isn’t necessarily a problem as (with the exception of Battlefield 1) the modern Battlefields have been very good multiplayer shooters – just so long as you know that’s what you’re getting.

I suppose the WW2 set dressing ringing so hollow was ultimately a good thing, as I have quite a soft spot for Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield V utterly failing to bring it to mind in any way meant my nostalgia wasn’t getting in the way and I could assess the thing semi-objectively. The centrepiece of the game is still those gigantic 64-player rucks with a bunch of vehicles and planes thrown into the mix, and it would be a mistake to say that Battlefield V is doing anything truly revolutionary with the concept. What it does do is make a whole host of under-the-hood changes to mechanics that had previously been taken for granted as part of the Battlefield formula, and this moves the series back in the direction of thinky tactics and teamwork over run ‘n gun twitch shooting and/or sitting back in a tank racking up a kill count.

In fact, tanks are a great place to start breaking Battlefield V down. Tanks in Battlefield have always been somewhat vulnerable to infantry — especially if that infantry could get close with C4 charges — but Battlefield V really dials up that vulnerability to the point where a tank cannot proceed into an environment that has a lot of cover without friendly infantry support to protect its flanks. Every building might conceal a panzerfaust. Every hedgerow might vomit forth a stream of angry troops with dynamite. Even if you’re in a heavy tank a single Assault class player with these weapons can do enough damage to push you to the brink of destruction so you have to take them seriously. And while there’s a third-person chase camera for driving around that might give you a some advance warning of approaching infantry, if you’re actually fighting in a tank you have to go back into the tunnel vision of first-person turret view to reliably land your shots, giving them plenty of opportunity to slap that dynamite onto the vulnerable rear armour of your tank. Even if they don’t kill you the tank damage model means they’ll likely cripple the tracks or turret or otherwise inflict irreparable damage that forces you to withdraw. Tanks that lack infantry support must either sit in the middle of a wide open field and snipe from afar in a not-particularly-effective manner, or else make suicidal runs into enemy-held territory that will end with them exploding 90% of the time. On the other hand a tank that does have infantry support is an incredibly effective force multiplier, distracting and suppressing the enemy and creating space for the friendly infantry to take and hold territory. You can still get some impressive kill counts in a tank if you play it right, of course, but that doesn’t feel like it’s the primary goal of the tank any more.

The increased vulnerability of tanks also has a lot to do with the spotting changes in Battlefield V. Previous Battlefield games have given all players the ability to spot enemy players for the rest of their team by putting their crosshairs over them and hammering Q; this attaches a giant red triangle to their heads that tracks them as long as they remain in vision and points out their location to the rest of your team. I didn’t particularly like this spotting system because it made it practically impossible to sneak around and attack from the flank; one enemy player spotting you meant that the entire enemy team now knew where you were and your surprise attack was ruined. Battlefield V, though, takes the spotting ability away from the vast majority of players. You can still push Q to put down a static danger marker for your squad to indicate the general direction of a threat, but this is imprecise, doesn’t track enemy players, and isn’t visible to the rest of your team. The Recon class still has something close to the previous incarnation of the spotting ability, but they have to whip out a special Spotting Scope to do it and while they’re using that they can’t fire their precious sniper rifles, so having a Recon on your team who’ll actually spot enemies is kind of like finding a unicorn in the wild. However, when they do it — again — acts as a tremendous force multiplier. Spotting is a powerful ability, but everyone having it just meant that everyone was spotted all the time. Giving it to one specialist class with a specialist tool highlights just how good it is; I played a round a couple of days ago where three friendly players were defending a house against two enemy squads, but they also had me perched on a hill two hundred metres away spotting the enemy positions for them, and they were able to slaughter the enemy because they knew exactly where they were while the enemy squads had to fumble through their attack blind.

Even little things like your equipment loadout make you more heavily reliant on other players in your team to be fully effective. Battlefield V has a very low time-to-kill with only a few bullets being required to put somebody on the ground, which I quite like, but most of the guns in the game have very small magazines and your soldier avatar doesn’t carry around a huge quantity of spare ammo. It’s next to impossible to dispose of more than two enemy players before getting stuck in a lengthy reload animation, so you’re not going to be Rambo-ing your way through a four-person squad single-handedly and will need backup from your own squad in order to survive. A single sustained engagement will exhaust your ammunition supplies, so you’ll need a friendly Support player on hand to give you more; this has been the case for a while in Battlefield, but I can’t remember it ever being quite such a pronounced requirement as it is in Battlefield V. You spawn with a single set of bandages that you can use to restore your health after being riddled with bullets, but after that’s been used up (which will happen pretty damn quickly) you’ll be stuck a single bullet away from death until a Medic tosses you a fresh pack. Medics themselves have their usual ability to pick up downed teammates before they outright expire and get long-range smoke grenades to conceal them while they’re doing this, but that smoke is also startlingly effective when dropped on an enemy strongpoint to smother their vision — if you can coordinate the rest of the team to charge in before it disperses.

Then there’s this newest iteration of the Frostbite engine. Battlefield’s recent use of Frostbite’s terrain destruction features has baffled me somewhat. Bad Company 2 set the standard with some comparatively primitive yet effective building destruction that ranged anywhere from “make a hole in the wall” to “drop the building on somebody’s head”, but subsequent installments rowed back from such comprehensive destructiveness, instead choosing to focus on some big and impressive scripted destruction (like the communications mast coming down in Caspian Sea). I don’t recall dynamic destruction ever being a really noticeable element of 3 or 4, which was very disappointing. However, Battlefield V’s destruction finally surpasses what DICE achieved eight years ago. Buildings get shredded in a satisfyingly organic manner when hit with explosives and heavy calibre rounds. Somebody using a house as a fortification? Blow up the walls and take away their cover. Somebody camping the stairs? Stick some dynamite on the ceiling underneath them and drop them into your waiting gunsights. Lobbing a panzerfaust through a window will cause chunks of debris to rain down from the roof, and this debris can damage and kill enemies hiding inside (which you’ll get the kill credit for). Buildings don’t outright collapse as they did in Bad Company but this is an acceptable substitute, and once enough explosives have been punted into one it might as well be destroyed as it’ll have no walls left and its cover value is precisely zero.

Battlefield V goes one step further with its terrain features, however: it allows you to create as well as destroy. Each map’s control points has a set of fortifications that can be built up from sandbags and barbed wire, and while the Support class can build faster and can also add stationary weapon emplacements these basic fortifications are something that all classes are capable of building. These fortifications are less useful as actual cover — you can build firing steps to peek over the top, but this just guarantees you’ll be shot in the head instead of the body — than they are at limiting enemy access and blocking their line of sight into a point, but that’s reason enough to build them. There’s a basic mantling system in the game that can be used to vault through windows and over walls, but you can’t vault over barbed wire, and having a nice thick wall of sandbags obscuring enemy sightlines allows you to move about on a point in relative safety. Of course this is just another piece of terrain to be destroyed by explosives when an enemy gets close enough, and fortifications can be built and destroyed several times as a point changes hands from one side to another. Fortifications aren’t exactly transformative to the gameplay, but they are a very nice extra feature that I think I’d miss if they didn’t appear in subsequent Battlefield titles.

Put that all together with some very satisfying ballistics — the guns all feel incredibly satisfying to use, and the sound is as great as you’d expect from a Battlefield game — and you have a Battlefield whose core loop of spawn-fight-die-repeat is extremely engaging because there’s so much you can do to help out your team beyond just killing people efficiently. No matter how many bugs and rough edges and general lack of polish Battlefield V has, DICE have gotten the basic gameplay of battling alongside your team in colossal firefights very, very right. The maps are a bit hit and miss but there’s only one outright stinker (Hamada) and they’re let down more by a focus on infantry combat over the vehicular antics that the Battlefield series is known for than they are inherently poor map design. Even if you strip all of the long-term progression stuff out of the game and reduce it down to just that basic experience of shooting dudes, that basic experience is still decent enough to make Battlefield V a very fun game to play indeed.

And that’s a particularly good thing for Battlefield V, because almost everything outside of that basic experience is a flaming garbage fire.

First up, Battlefield’s battlefields, fun as they are, are not without some serious balancing issues. There’s no killjoy quite like being instantly obliterated by JU-88 that’s dropped a staggering 32 bombs on your position that you can do absolutely nothing about; the air war has always been the preferred dumping ground for the terminally dull tryhards in Battlefield, and Battlefield V is no exception. What really bugs me about planes is how non-interactive they are for an infantryman. When a tank rocks up on your position you can at least spawn as an Assault and try to whack it with a panzerfaust or three. On the other hand when you see a bomber coming in there’s absolutely nothing you can do; the static anti-air emplacements do so little damage to them that a bomber can come in on a direct approach, taking fire the entire time, and drop its bombload straight onto on the the AA gun, and then fly away to repair. Your best bet is to run for cover, but the interface for dropping bombs is pinpoint-accurate and if the bomber decides to aim at your particular clump of scattering infantry you’re dead. At least in the modern Battlefields I could take a shoulder-launched AA missile that’d make a helicopter or plane think twice before diving on my sector of the battle. Here you might as well try the old Soviet trick of lying on the ground and taking potshots at the plane with your gun as it flies overhead since it’ll be about as effective as anything else you can do. The actual counter to bombers is fighters, but there’s a limited number of aircraft spawn slots and if they’re all taken (usually by people on your own team seeking those sweet bomber kills) you’re out of luck. This is the biggest ongoing failure of the Battlefield series: they have never managed to make aircraft interesting for anyone who wasn’t flying one, and Battlefield V is a particularly bad example of the problem. The best you can do is ignore them and hope they don’t target you.

There’s also — and still, over a month after the game released to the first wave of people who bought EA’s subscription service —  a ton of really aggravating annoyances and rough edges based mostly around movement and positioning. Battlefield V’s mantling system is incredibly hit and miss; your avatar will be able to pull themselves over this two-metre wall no problem, but that two-metre wall is a no-go. Is it because it has vines on it, or because the mantling system is buggy as fuck? I honestly can’t tell. At least your avatar has something of an excuse there; there honestly isn’t one for them being unable to drag themselves through a window on the first three attempts until the mantling finally catches on to what you’re trying to do, and it turns out that ineffectually hopping around outside a building or next to a knee-high snowbank is a great way to attract the attention of the enemy and get shot half a second later. If you set yourself up prone with a bipod machine gun behind a nice piece of cover looking down a street (which is exactly what you should be doing) what’ll often happen is that you’ll slowly slide sideways out of cover into full view for absolutely no reason. Reviving people as the Medic now involves a short animation of zapping them with a syringe of go-juice, but you need to be in just the right place for this animation to trigger, so often you’ll pop your smoke, scuttle over to your downed friend — and then just stare at them stupidly because the revive prompt hasn’t appeared because you aren’t standing in the correct spot, or because they’re too close to a wall for the animation to happen. The subsequent dance you have to do around their body to get the revive prompt to pop onto your screen is, again, an excellent way to get your body aired out by 9mm parabellum.

This is nowhere near the full list of issues with the gameplay, it’s just the set of issues that most immediately came to mind when writing a paragraph about things that get in the way of me enjoying the game. There’s a lot more of these rough edges that, although more generally benign — the bug where revived players occasionally get hurled thirty feet across the map because the game can’t figure out where to respawn their avatar is at least entertaining — still betray a gross lack of time for DICE to polish their product. It’s not quite at the point of feeling like I’m playing a beta (which puts it above some other Battlefield launches I could mention) but still needs another couple of months before it can achieve its full potential.

But hey, at least I have some faith that all of those dents and scratches in the gameplay will be buffed out at some point down the line. Battlefield 4 was incredibly broken on launch, but my friends who stuck with it tell me that it was eventually patched into a very solid game. Crucially, aside from planes (which they’ll never fix) there’s nothing you’ll encounter in a round of Battlefield V that’s so irredeemably bad that DICE are better off ripping it out completely and replacing it with something better. Unfortunately the same can’t be said once you step out of a game and back into Battlefield V’s menu systems, which are hands down the worst UI experience I’ve seen in a AAA game this decade. The interface for actually getting into a game is, thankfully, only moderately confusing (although god help you if you want to participate in their Tides Of War battle pass thing), but most of Battlefield V’s menus are focused around equipping and upgrading your soldier classes, and this process is an absolute car crash.

For starters, despite having access to identical equipment loadouts you must set up your Assault loadout for the Allies separately from your Assault loadout for Axis. Just unlocked a new gun and want to try it? Hope you remembered to equip it in both the Axis and Allies menus, otherwise you’re going to end up wondering why you’re starting a match still clutching the piece of shit Sten gun you had before. It’s not even like they’ve made it painless to switch between each side’s loadout menus for a class; you have to click back out into a team menu, click again to switch sides, and then click a third time to go back into the class menu. Bizarrely, while loadouts are tracked separately your gun customisation is not, so sticking a new sight onto your MP40 only needs to be done once — this is the way I’d expect it to work, obviously, but it’s a lack of consistency that betrays just how haphazard this UI is, and it feels like it’s been put together without any real unifying concept of how human beings use menus in a Battlefield game. Or, you know, human beings in general. The really, really aggravating thing about tracking each side separately is that you’ll end a match as a Allied Medic, get switched to Axis for the next map, and find yourself starting as an Assault because that’s what you were playing the last time you were playing on Axis. It’s just a totally unnecessary duplication of effort — having to set my Medic loadout twice every time I want to change something, having to keep an eye on things to make sure I’m still the same class I was before, it’s hardly game-ruining but it is a constant drag on my enjoyment.

 Of course the reason you now have to set up each side’s loadout separately is the one you’d expect: cosmetics! While the actual usable equipment for each side is identical, the unlockable (and, obviously, purchasable with in-game currency) cosmetics are not, so the game doubles up on equipment menus just to let you have one outfit for the Allies and another for the Axis. I’m not inherently opposed to customising my characters’ looks — except this is an army, where people wear uniforms, and the meaning of that is kind of inherent in the name. You can’t introduce cosmetics into a game where everyone is supposed to look the same without breaking that game’s internal fiction. As it happens Battlefield V has only the most tenuous connection to the actual Second World War so I’d have been fine with DICE going whole hog and making it full-on alternate dimension WW2 if it had resulted in something interesting to look at, but instead they half-ass it with a bunch of ragged outfits and drab camouflage patterns that make everyone look like they’re fighting in the Hobo War. I don’t know how they expect to sell anyone these cosmetics because they’re so boring — not only that, but because all classes can equip all cosmetics it totally breaks any concept of recognising an enemy soldier’s class via their character model. That’s an important information channel that’s been totally shut down for no benefit, in addition to creating this godawful menu system where I have to do everything twice.

The rest of Battlefield V’s UI crimes are mostly sins of obfuscation. Every class, vehicle and gun now has a specialisation menu, which affects how they play, and a customisation menu, which is cosmetic only (except for the gunsights), and the difference between the two is never explained and I’ve seen several people miss that the actually-important specialisation menu even exists. When you unlock a new equipment option you can’t access it right away; instead you have to go to the Armory to “claim” it (literally a box-ticking exercise) before you can use it. I think the Armory is supposed to be an in-game store that got the actual store parts ripped out of it when the Battlefront 2 loot box controversy blew up, because there’s only seven or eight things in there that you can buy with Battlefield Bucks¹ and no way of purchasing Battlefield Bucks with real money that I can see, so it just adds another pointless step to unlocking stuff. Battlefield now has daily quests in the form of Assignments, and you can also equip up to four Special Assignments that take longer to complete, but once you do complete one there’s no way to equip a new Special Assignment in game; you have to quit back out into the main menu to do it, and because that involves sixty seconds of staring at a black screen with a loading symbol (I have absolutely no idea why it takes so long to load the main menu, and I suspect DICE don’t either because it’s still happening a month after release) I’ve inevitably forgotten all about it by the time I get there.

In fact, do you know what Battlefield V’s menus remind me of? This tongue-in-cheek attempt by web developers to design the worst possible interface for entering your phone number into a web form. Battlefield V isn’t quite that bad, but then the only reason those web forms are worse is because they’re intentionally shit, and they both share a fondness for wasting the user’s time in byzantine rituals that are almost Kafkaesque. I genuinely have trouble believing it’s something that a human being sat down and designed and a bunch of other human beings looked at and signed off on for this AAA game that took hundreds of very talented developers and millions of dollars to make. UI design is a science these days; you can hire clever specialists who will have endless meetings with you to discuss what exactly the user flow through a website or an app is going to be and how to make their experience as intuitive and painless as possible so that they’ll stick around to (hopefully) give you some money.  Somebody should probably tell DICE this, because right now they’re coming across as the UI equivalent of Flat Earthers, and it’s a good thing for them the actual game is so good because I die a little bit inside every time I have to do anything that’s not playing the game in Battlefield V.

I guess at the end of the day DICE aren’t doing anything particularly out of the ordinary here, either for them or for Battlefield. Nearly all of the Battlefields have been excellent multiplayer shooters in one way or another, and Battlefield V is no exception. This particular flavour of Battlefield happens to be more to my taste than other recent attempts, but while the changes it makes do have a significant impact on the overall timbre of the game they’re hardly revolutionary; it’s still Battlefield, and — more importantly — it’s still a Battlefield game developed by DICE that launched just over a month ago, with all of the baggage that that entails. This means you kind of have to grimace and/or laugh through the staggering fuckups you know are going to be in the game because, despite their internal idiosyncracies and their truncated development timeframes, DICE are still the best in the business at producing this kind of mass-market military multiplayer shooter. While Battlefield V is in something of a rough shape right now it is at least a fully-featured game that you can play and enjoy and get a lot of fun out of in spite of its significant shortcomings. It’s sad that I have to lower the bar like this, but that’s a damn sight more than a lot of other AAA titles have managed this year, and while Battlefield V would definitely have benefited from an additional three months of development I think DICE at least have their priorities in the right order: it’s full of irritating little bugs but none of them are ragequit-worthy, and while the menus might be mind-bogglingly stupid it’s not something that directly impacts on the shooter part of the game. That part they got mostly right, and hopefully it’s only going to get better from here.

(Oh, and as usual I played some of the single-player campaign, and as usual it was some of the most derivative horseshit I’ve ever experienced in an FPS. I’ve been saying for years DICE should drop it and focus on the multiplayer exclusively — you know, the bit they’re actually good at — and hopefully now that Call Of Duty has gone multiplayer-only Battlefield will too, if only because DICE won’t have anything to slavishly copy any more.)

The post Thoughts: Battlefield V appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

It seems the universe has a sense of irony.

Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (i.e. 2011) I wrote a review of Battlefield 3’s single player campaign. It was, to put it mildly, not a very good game – and I even got to questioning whether it was a game at all, being as it was an almost totally creatively bankrupt experience that alternated between a barely-interactive theme park where you occasionally shot people (or not, since your involvement in the game was entirely optional and the thing would happily play itself without you lifting a finger) and braindead turret sections that were very thinly disguised as vehicle combat. It made almost no use of the destructible buildings provided by DICE’s Frostbite engine outside of scripted cutscenes, had writing and dialogue that was offensively stupid, and in general was just a black hole of awfulness that ranks somewhere in the top five worst games I’ve played in the last decade.

Now, one day DICE is hopefully going to realise that very few people buy Battlefield for its CoD-knockoff single-player, and they’re going to just cut the whole thing entirely and plough the vast numbers of man-hours they waste on it back into making the series’ excellent multiplayer as good as it can be, and the gaming world will be a much better place for it. Sadly that day has not yet arrived, and so I find myself in the rather unfortunate position of having to review yet another Battlefield single player campaign. To say that I wasn’t looking forward to it would be something of an understatement, but with the multiplayer being yet another shining example of a botched, premature game launch I had little else to do this weekend. So I gritted my teeth, girded my loins, and ventured forth into what I fully expected to be another five hours of sheer hell.

This is why I was quite surprised to find that Battlefield 4 isn’t quite the unmitigated disaster that I was expecting. Sure, my first impressions were not favourable; the story starts with a flashback sequence again – always a reliable sign of a hack writer –  and my prodding of the first mission’s scripted helicopter attack revealed that it would sit off in the middle distance twiddling its rotor blades if I stopped the car and refused to participate in the thrilling chase sequence. You get promoted to squad leader after that first mission, yet your supposed subordinates spend the next few missions telling you what to do and making your decisions for you (while naturally relying on you to do everything that’s not sitting behind a piece of cover taking occasional ineffective potshots at the enemy). A typical combat encounter will consist of enemies running in from off map or deploying from helicopters and immediately crouching down behind cover with their heads conveniently sticking out so that you can headshot them. On the face of it Battlefield 4 is as shooter by the numbers that’s just as restrictive and on-rails as its predecessor, with the only real difference in the structure and layout of the levels being that it’s slightly better at camouflaging that fact this time around. A paragon of good game design this most definitely is not.

And yet despite my rock-bottom expectations, despite the awful Tom Clancy-esque plot and clichéd dialogue and formulaic structure of the game, despite every fibre of my being screaming at me that this was just a slightly prettier version of the un-game that was Battlefield 3, I found myself having fun. Only occasionally at first, and with a certain resentfulness that it meant I couldn’t outright hate the game, but while I would hardly call the first half of Battlefield’s 4 single player campaign a compelling reason to pick up the game it’s probably still worth playing if you’ve bought it anyway. The reasons for this are almost entirely down to the improvements that have been made both in the technical capabilites of the Frostbite engine and how the campaign uses it; the scripted destruction now more directly involves the player and there’s more opportunity for you to perpetrate your own mayhem by destroying the structure the bad guys happen to be standing on, but this is small fry compared to Frostbite 3’s new innovation: the weather effects.

Battlefield 4 is an extremely good looking game. That goes without saying. It’s even good-looking running at 1440×900 on my jalopy hodge-podge of a computer. Even so, Battlefield 4’s weather effects honestly have to be seen to be believed. They’re incredible, going far beyond just having a rain filter plastered over the players vision and actually simulating wind and waves during a storm. When you’re in a boat it bounces from wave crest to wave crest; when you’re on land there’s so much crap blowing past your field of vision that it makes it very difficult to pick out targets. The fourth level of the campaign is a beach assault during one of these storms, and even though I’ve done beach assaults in a dozen other shooters the storm made it seem fresh and new again, trying to spot enemy soldiers through the murk of wind-swept detritus and beating rain. I couldn’t help myself. I started to have fun, and I continued to have fun even though the level later transitioned to yet another mobile turret section. Battlefield 4 is the last game I expected to do this, but it showed me something refreshing and novel and I’m prepared to forgive it quite a lot because of this.

Unfortunately my newfound forbearance didn’t last long. I’d already had to put up with a lift door that opened to reveal a soldier standing in mid-air because the level geometry hadn’t loaded, and a tank that was supposedly hunting me that I was able to climb on top of and dance a merry jig on without the tank AI reacting, and the same tank subsequently getting immobilised with its barrel stuck through a window, and a helicopter battle where the helicopter cheated by diving beneath the surface of the ocean to evade my gunfire. I’d resigned myself to having to bulldoze my way through to the end of what is a thoroughly buggy game, but there’s a reason why I only talk about the first half of Battlefield 4’s single player, and that’s because I was hit with a series of crashes to desktop halfway through the game during mission four. It locked up when firing guns, when running to cover, after I died and clicked the button to reload – I couldn’t play for more than a couple of minutes without the whole thing spluttering to a halt and sending me back to the last checkpoint. It had hardly been well-behaved up until this point, but after having a few glimmers of unexpected fun with the game I wasn’t counting on Battlefield 4 almost immediately slamming the shutters down and physically preventing me from carrying on any further.

In some ways this is a relief – while the stunning weather effects almost single-handedly lift the single player out of the chasm that Battlefield 3 fell into and into the vicinity of “interesting curio”, it’s still not something you play because it’s good, but rather because you bought the game anyway and it at least does something that (as yet) no other game has really attempted. I made five or six attempts to carry on with the campaign, but I’m secretly quite happy to have an excuse to not have to sit through the interminable loading screens and cutscenes any more. I still find it quite ironic, though; not only that the game did manage to clear that low, low bar my expectations had set for it, but that it then pulled a Madagascar and refused to let me carry on rather than allow that fun element to infect the rest of the game.  DICE are renowned for buggy launches but even so I find Battlefield 4 to be exceptionally bad in this regard¹, and judging from various web forums I’m hardly the only one.

DICE are a top-flight developer with the full backing of EA who are supposedly market leaders in their genre, so why is the game so bug-ridden when I’ve played FPSes from Eastern European developers made with a fraction of the budget that were almost completely bug-free? I have no doubt they’ll eventually patch it – they did with Battlefield 3’s horrendously broken multiplayer netcode – but it’s yet another example of a premiere PC franchise that has been pushed out the door early in order to hit a particular market window, with the publisher trusting that it’ll sell copies based on its name alone. In a way I’m part of the problem; I knew it would be a buggy mess at launch but I preordered it anyway, but this is another one of those games that’s so bad it’s going to make me swear off the next iteration of the series unless I see something that’ll make me think it’ll turn out differently – and when Battlefield 4 can largely be described as “Battlefield 3, except with weather”, I think that it’s a series that’s highly unlikely to surprise me again.

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The post Thoughts: Battlefield 4 (Single Player). appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is it. This is the herald of the End Times.

What several people will say upon reading this review is “But Hentzau, why are you even bothering with the single player component of Battlefield 3? Surely you bought it for the multiplayer like everyone else.” This is true. However I seek to understand the latest and greatest trends in gaming, and what is also true is that DICE have put an absolutely astonishing amount of effort into Battlefield 3’s campaign. They’ve explicitly designed and marketed it as a CoD killer, apparently forgetting that the Modern Warfare franchise is currently lying barely conscious in a pool of its own bodily excreta after that underwhelming second outing and really didn’t need aping to this degree, but nevertheless making a CoD-alike is a tremendous undertaking (if only in the same way as the special effects in the Transformers movies are a tremendous undertaking) and not one to be attempted lightly. Battlefield 3 is, in short, a game with some serious oomph behind it that reflects what developers think consumers want to see, and so I’m going to treat it as such.

This, of course, is where we come to the third truth: I think Battlefield 3 might just be, bar none, the single worst game I have ever played.

That’s a pretty ambitious pronouncement. I’ve played more than my fair share of bad games this year, let alone over an illustrious 21 year gaming career. Is Battlefield 3 really worse than all of those hundreds of titles? Let’s find out together.

Battlefield 3 opened with me wedged uncomfortably into an APC with five other fellows. The APC had no windows so it was hard to tell, but judging from the way everyone else in the vehicle was bumping and swaying around I surmised that the APC was in the process of going somewhere. Some of that desultory conversation that game developers think is sufficient to give the player’s faceless squadmates some character took place, and I learned that I was currently in Iraq. Which I suppose is slightly better than Modern Warfare setting half of its campaign in a country that was quite conspicuously Not Iraq, but it still doesn’t win any points for originality.

Then some garbled radio transmissions came in scattered with lots of nonsense military jargon like “VICTORS ON THE MOVE” and “HOW COPY”, which was apparently a big deal because we all got out of the APC to find ourselves sitting in the middle of a roadblock. Wait a minute, hadn’t the APC been going somewhere before I got out of it? I had a look around and both ends of the street were blocked off, with the only side street also being blocked off after a short distance. Not entirely sure what was going on there; maybe they were driving it round and round in very small circles while everyone inside got hotboxed on marijuana.

So anyway, my squad got sent off to find another squad which had gone missing. This is where the first thing directly copied from CoD cropped up and it wasn’t a good one: the legendary unopenable door. Well, it does open, but FPS developers these days just don’t trust the people who play their games with the tremendous power of door-opening. Instead, I had to stand there and wait next to the door while a responsible adult opened it for me. This is one of those little FPS conceits that really borders on farce; they can’t let me go too far too fast or I’ll break their meticulous scripting designed to make the game world behave realistically, so their solution is to have the main character – a man who is ridiculously talented in all areas of warfare, who is so expert in the use of machine guns and sniper rifles and rocket launchers that his squad relies on him to do every task involving those things – be too stupid to open a door on his own. Because that’s realistic, right?

Behind the fiendishly complex mechanism of the doorknob lay the wondrous and fantastical world of… well, a parking lot.  It was here that the game sprung its first firefight on me, with a generic horde of balaclava’d guerrillas suddenly emerging from behind a wall to pepper my squad with hot lead in a distinctly unfriendly manner. “Fight off the guerrilla attack” or something very much like it popped up in the objective box, so I dutifully murdered goon after goon after goon until it became apparent there was an infinite supply of the buggers spawning somewhere out of sight. It wasn’t until I killed two RPG men on a balcony overlooking the car park that this steady stream of baddies abruptly dried up. What was so special about the RPG men that their deaths caused the hundreds of bad guys lined up behind that five metre long wall to suddenly lose heart? I don’t know and I suspect DICE don’t either, aside from the RPG men having hardcoded flags which turned off the spawn point.

Fast forward a little bit. I’ve gone through several heavily scripted gameplay segments – taking out a sniper, covering a casevac from a rooftop, disarming a bomb, defeating a man in hand to hand combat using my extensive quicktime training, fighting off a full scale insurgent assault – all the while trying to shake off the nagging sensation that puts me in mind of a rat running through a maze or one of those pigeons trained to push certain colour-coded buttons for food. An earthquake has devastated the city, and I’m cut off from the rest of the team. As I slowly crawl out of the wreckage I am confronted with the thing that finally made me crack.

It’s a rat. A rat which scurried out of a drainpipe and immediately began biting my character’s finger. I didn’t even have time to wonder why he wasn’t using his vastly superior size and intellect to punch the fucking rat in its smug fucking face before a “Push the left mouse button!” icon flashed up. I couldn’t believe it. This rat was apparently such a huge problem for my character that he needed my assistance to defeat it. They turned killing a rat into a quicktime event. Battlefield 3 is a particularly bad example of the “Push *button* to advance the plot!” school of quicktime encounter design, but even so this marked a new low in my experience of FPSes. Not only was I not trusted to open doors on my own, not only did my squad need me to do everything that didn’t involve blind-firing an M-16 over a barricade, but the main character wasn’t even capable of killing rat without my help. It’s like the game suddenly decided to give me the finger for being stupid enough to play it.

Okay, game, I thought, if you’re not going to take me seriously I’m sure as hell not going to take you seriously. I’d been harbouring certain nasty suspicions about the scripted nature of the encounters I’d had with the enemy so far. When I joined back up with my squadmates I was directed to man a Humvee turret to fight off an enemy attack while we all waited for evacuation. I climbed into the Humvee. I manned the turret. I didn’t fire a single shot. I simply looked around with growing horror as the game played itself without any input from me whatsoever. Baddies fired at the AI marines. AI marines fired at the baddies. Baddies also fired at me, but I was invincible while I was sat in the turret. There was a lot of shooting and banging and smoke and screaming and bugger all consequences whatsoever, since my AI friends got back up after being shot in the head for the fifteen hundredth time apparently none the worse for wear, while any baddy who died was immediately replaced with a new copy straight from the cloning vats. This went on for about two minutes, after which the game’s internal timer had run down and an Osprey turned up to get me away from this pre-scripted hell. Just in case I was getting too snug in the invulnerable comfort of my Humvee the baddies fired a scripted RPG at it which blew it to smithereens while miraculously throwing me clear – otherwise, I might not have realised that it was time to leave and stayed there forever! How fortunate I was to have DICE looking out for me there.

These encounters are repeated time and again, making up as they do about 80% of the game. What’s worse is that the game’s insistence on sticking to the script leads to some truly bizarre events. I spent five minutes frolicking on a hillside being pounded by intense artillery fire while the rest of my squad screamed at me to bring them the mortar they so desperately needed because I’d realised that the artillery explosions were merely for show and were hardcoded not to land anywhere near me. After an intense firefight in a canal the marines I was with had all miraculously survived thanks to me being completely awesome, but the game thought that only one of them should be permitted to carry on to the next portion of the level and so the other three suffered immediate and catastrophic brain aneurysms, at least judging from the way they spontaneously and simultaneously dropped dead. And when I was told to flank round the side of a bank to look for another way in the screen suddenly went red and I was confronted with a YOU HAVE DIED message because apparently I was supposed to flank around the other side, not this one, and I’d wandered too far off the scripted track.

This necrotising fasciitis even cripples the game’s attempts to play to its strengths. The great asset of the Battlefield series is that you’re not just playing some footslogger; you can at any time get in a jeep or a tank or a helicopter or an aeroplane and dispense some vehicular-based death. But when I reached the part of Battlefield 3 where I got to fly a jet I was actually a little bit flabbergasted to discover that I wouldn’t actually be flying the jet. I was the weapons officer, which for the game’s purposes translates to “occupying the passenger seat” or, more accurately, “a thinly-disguised turret section”. An assortment of enemy jets flew behind my jet for a while and I mashed the flare button to stop their missiles. Then, for no reason whatsoever the enemy jets would then pull ahead of my jet and I’d switch to hammering the missile button. Both flares and missiles were unlimited and both my and the enemy jets moved so slowly it might as well have been a biplane dogfight from WW1. Actually scratch that, a biplane dogfight would have been amazing. This was boring. It is the most bored I have ever been when playing a game because there was no danger and no challenge. There was just me, sitting in this glorified theme park ride, waiting for the baddy jets to give up and go home so that I could get on with next bit of the game.

(Except, of course, the next part of the game turned out to be a black and white bombing run section that’s the product of somebody taking the AC-130 bit of Modern Warfare and stripping out absolutely everything that made it exciting/disturbing to play. There was no time limit and I had unlimited bombs/missiles. The plane flew in circles until I’d finished blowing up the targets on the ground. SAM sites spewed up thousands of rounds of flak but it was just for show since every single round missed my jet. And just in case the player might still have been able to wrest a little bit of fun out of this sterile, pointless experience there’s a maddening 5-10 second delay between watching a missile impact and being able to fire a new one.)

I think I’ve now managed to get across the fact that Battlefield 3 is A Bad Game, so it’s time to take a step back to address the broader philosophical problem I have with it that turns it into The Worst Game. To wit: that a game that essentially reduces the player to a spectator and which happily plays itself for a large portion of its length isn’t really a game at all. A game is, at its root, an adversarial test of skill; the point of a game is to complete some challenging task and to complete it to a high standard. Computers can allow us to substitute unfeeling AI as our opponents, and they can allow us to generate enormously complex or daringly simple worlds and systems in which the goal is simply to survive or succeed, but the end result is the same: kill all the bad guys, crush the enemy base, build a shining jewel of a city, become the king and rule the world, the point is that the player has to perform well enough to win.

Now, if you make a game where the player’s involvement is essentially optional, and where that involvement often has all the difficulty of pushing a single button on cue, then you have removed the adversarial component and you have removed the challenge. Winning no longer means anything because winning was always guaranteed from the start. Battlefield 3 does not resemble a game as we know them. What it most closely resembles, to me, is one of those godawful FMV games they used to make back when the only thing that would fit on a CD was reams and reams of dodgily-compressed video; the video would play, and after watching it for a few minutes the viewer would be invited to push a button – ostensibly to make some sort of choice that would influence the plot, but really they were doing it just to watch another few minutes of video. That’s what Battlefield 3 is: a 21st century FMV game made with a multi-million dollar budget and cutting edge technology. And yet it is somehow worse, for although FMV games were amazingly dire it was at least possible to fail¹. Battlefield 3 isn’t a game you play. Battlefield 3 is a game you watch.

That’s Battlefield 3 in a 2000 word nutshell. It’s immensely pretty and a huge amount of work has been put into it, as befits one of EA’s flagship titles, but all it’s produced is this completely meaningless and vacuous product that can barely call itself a game at all. It’s only the Russian Spetznaz sections that provide any sort of relief whatsoever; since these take place in very hectic close quarters environments which really allow the Frostbite engine to shine and I was only towing a two-man squad it’s all much faster and tenser and felt like I was doing legitimately crazy special forces stuff. But they don’t save it. They don’t even come close. If this is the future of FPS gaming then I want no part of it;  it’s ironic that back in April Portal 2 was making me extremely optimistic about up-and-coming big budget scripted genre experiences, but a mere six months later Battlefield 3 has come perilously close to breaking my faith in the medium as a whole.

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The post Thoughts: Battlefield 3. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.