Inside Battlefield: Bad Company

Logan Booker exchanges rifle fire with Karl-Magnus Troedsson, senior producer on Battlefield: Bad Company.

Battlefield.

To your average dictionary or English teacher, it’s just two words fused to form a single, super word. Not that ‘field’ keeps up its end of the bargain, but ‘battle’, well, battle is one of those swell combinations of letters that paints all sorts of images in your head. Say, running courageously at an enemy encampment with nothing but a pistol and slice of toast; mining the crap out of your opponent’s vehicle bay or shooting your teammates in a mad scramble to commandeer the map’s only biplane, only to crash the thing in excitement five seconds later.

Okay, we’re not talking about battles here, but the Battlefield series of games. Developer Digital Illusions CE (now EA DICE) single-handedly forged a new chapter in first person shooter history – the online-only, mass multiplayer FPS. It did it first with the original Battlefield 1942 in 2002, then Battlefield Vietnam. Battlefield 2 brought the series into the present, while the most recent instalment, Battlefield 2142, introduced futuristic elements. If you were to count the number of simulated battles that have occurred in these games combined, you’d have to be a million-fingered spawn of Cthulhu to keep track. What you don’t need copious amounts of digits for is to recognise what facts all these games have in common.

They’re PC and multiplayer only. There’s a generation of console gamers out there that have yet to enjoy the sweet rush of Battlefield mania, and a generation of Battlefield players who’ve never experienced the title with a strong singleplayer campaign. EA DICE hopes to rectify both situations with its latest project, Battlefield: Bad Company.


Something different
“It’s not so much a transition as it is an offshoot,” explains senior producer Karl-Magnus Troedsson. “Battlefield was invented on PC and we’ll never let go of this heritage, the PC still holds a very interesting proposition. However, offering the Battlefield experience to the millions of console players as well makes perfect sense.”

EA DICE is quite adamant about the whole console thing, so PC gamers will have to skip this iteration of the game unless they buy an Xbox 360 or PS3. “This time around we’ve said no to a PC version and focused all our efforts on the console development to take this to another level.”

You’d think jumping to consoles would be enough. But no, the developer has big plans for Bad Company’s singleplayer campaign, a facet it has neglected in other Battlefield games.

“The story doesn’t relate much to previous Battlefield games as this is the first time we’ve done a true single-player campaign, driven by characters and a real story,” says Troedsson. “In the game you play a new recruit called Preston Marlowe, who has just been placed in B Company.”

Rather than being an elite squad of crack commandoes, B Company contains the US Army’s “misfits, troublemakers and general screw-ups”. That doesn’t stop the army from assigning B Company dangerous missions – not because it thinks you can complete them, but more that it doesn’t care if you return or not. Hey, if you can accomplish some good in the process, the army has come out on top.

Of course, B Company doesn’t take kindly to being sent on suicidal adventures. Along with his new-found mates Haggard, Sarge and Sweetwater, Marlowe decides it’d be better to desert than cop it sweet from high command.

“When the opportunity arises to pursue a large cache of black market gold, horded by a ruthless mercenary, they decide it’s time to stop following orders and go AWOL,” says Troedsson. “Sometimes the gratitude of a nation isn’t enough.”