Inside Battlefield: Bad Company

No Battlefield game would be complete without classes and weapons. Bad Company is no exception.

Players will be able to choose from the following fields: Officer, Assault, Demolitions, Support and Sniper; and firearms will include .45 calibre pistols, M203 grenade launchers, mines and more. Sounds like your standard array of roles and weapons... except you’ll be able to use them in a fresh new way – total destruction of the environment. This is thanks to EA DICE’s Frostbite engine, designed in-house by the developer.

As with more recent Battlefield games, players will have to unlock weapons before they can access them. Most however can be gained via the campaign.

Okay, so we know the focus is on singleplayer. Does that mean there’s no multiplayer at all?

“Battlefield: Bad Company is true to its heritage by including a full online experience as well as the offline campaign,” explains Troedsson. “This is a very important part of the game and anyone that enjoyed the previous games should be very pleased with this new installment.” In short, we have nothing to worry about. In fact, Bad Company comes with an entirely new multiplayer mode called ‘Gold Rush’. It’s a ‘defend and hold’ style game mixed with objectives. Attackers must destroy the defending team’s caches of gold, which provides access to more areas of the map, as well as additional reinforcements.

“The general idea with it is to keep the action in the game closer together, not spreading all the players thin around the huge maps which often happened in the old Conquest mode,” say Troedsson. Fans of Conquest mode have no need to cry – it will be accessible via a free download post-launch.

Frostbite, the good kind
EA DICE has always been possessed by the need to craft its own technology. Frostbite, the engine that underpins Bad Company, is completely proprietary and will make its first appearance in the developer’s console debut. With the popularity of Unreal Engine 3, Gamebryo and other options, why is EA DICE obsessed with building its own tech?

“Developing a new engine isn’t a cakewalk and every company going down this road really needs to ask themselves why, especially today when there are proven engines available for licensing,” warns Troedsson. “Our reason was that we really wanted to create a cutting edge game that made the most out of the next-gen console’s hardware. In order to do this while at the same time innovate with things like destruction, creating our own engine was the natural choice.”

Troedsson also says that the known hardware of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 has made this process easier. The team started work on the Xbox 360, but over the last year or so most of EA DICE’s efforts have been pumped into the PS3 version. Both platforms provide impressive hardware for the game to operate on, even if Sony’s console threw the developer a few curveballs.

“It’s just a matter of harnessing that power and making the most of it. This can be very different when comparing to previous instalments of the platforms. Working with parallel processing on the PS3 has been a challenge but it also opens up some great opportunities.”

Overall, it sounds like the jump to the loungeroom systems has been smooth, if not beneficial.

Perhaps the biggest compromise EA DICE has had to make is on the modding side. This deficiency has been offset by beefing the multiplayer support by adding persistence for awards and medals, leaderboards and unlockables.

“On top of all this we’ll supply even greater insight to player performance on the homepage, where additional stats and comparison tools will be available,” adds Troedsson.