EA might well have been sold to the forces of darkness, but I've found myself drawn to one of their long-running and (vaguely) successful franchises for many years now. In fact if I started to veer off into "New Games Journalism" (is that still a thing?) territory, I could describe the continuous painfully expensive upgrade cycle on old PC rigs to try and get whichever the current flavour of BF running sweetly, the fact that my friends and I all gathered together in a crusty old village school hall turned community centre to play Battlefield Vietnam (arguably still the best in the series) at my "Stag Lan" (Eurogamers, a shout out to anyone who still remembers that and our glorious victory over the clan that insinuated themselves amongst us for that event). I could go on but it's 2025, and the new game has just dropped.
Weirdly, I only missed the 'future' games in the franchise, picking up just about every single other one. (Battlefields 2142 and 2042 being the two games I completely ignored), at first greedily hogging anything that could be played over a bit of wet string with a bunch of mates (usually in the same room, usually screaming obscenities at each other) before everything went online and lan parties became a thing of the past.
The modern games have largely been hit and miss, even the ones that base their warfare back in good ol' Dubbleyew dubbleyew two, but I started to hear rumours that Battlefield 6 would bring the franchise back to its roots - and with ace coders Criterion (still wasted on war games when they made some of the best racers ever to roar across your consoles) now nestled firmly in the Team Battlefield camp, I figured that it'd be a slick experience and probably worth a look.
Modern gaming is a rubbish experience. I remember start to finish, installing a Battlefield game in the time it took for the kettle to boil back in the PC days. Nowadays you insert the disk you've just spent 60 quid on and wait. And wait. And even with a newly upgraded full fibre broadband package boasting pretty decent download speeds, you wait a FUCKING LONG TIME until the game is playable beyond just popping off rounds at a shooting gallery (calling that the 'playable' game is insulting, just don't bother EA).
In all, on a 450mb connection it took about an hour to download the assets (all that bullshit about 'copying from disk' needs to get in the bin too, we all know all the disk is there for is to provide a digital key to ensure you're legit, a nefarious drive to get folk to buy all their games from online stores if ever there was one). So you wait for the entire thing to download only to be told you then have to download the single player campaign, its HD assets, and christ knows what else (oh and let's not forget the massive day 1 update that all games have). So skip the rest of the morning - from end to end I spent 4 very impatient hours waiting for the single player campaign to be in a playable state.
Folk who know the series, or are familiar with the likes of (spit when you mention its name) competitor products like Call of Duty know that games like this dump you right in at the deep end, into a morass of bullet hailfire and screen-shaking explosions, American accents shouting manly things like "Get yer ass in that trench" or "This is Charlie Actual, I'm gonna send some fire downstream" (or make up your own, it's always fun). In the Single-Player campaign you play one of these completely identity-less cardboard cutouts, thrown into a situation where the nefarious Pax (some massive multinational privately-funded army) are trying to throw the world into chaos. NATO has freshly signed over a base to them but PAX don't want to do it the nice and quiet way, and start bombing the shit out of you before you've even had the chance to pack your toothbrush. So it's time to make good your escape atop the gunnery position of a knackered looking buggy.
This is where you get that ol' "Battlefield" feeling coming back in spades. That unique sense that you're firing massive 7.62 MM rounds at things that are just shrugging them off, and pinpointing their return fire directly at your bonce. As it was, as it shall always be with Battlefield games, you spend half the time listening to that sickening "Thud thud thud...WAIL!" that signifies half your energy bar has just been depleted and if you don't get your stupid head back under cover you're going to lose it.
Scoffers will just say "Well, get gud then!" but I defy anyone even with the most laser-like reflexes to tell me it's any different for them. So in the opening scenes of the single player campaign I thought I'd done a pretty good job considering my advanced years, staying alive until I exfilled the jeep (yeah use all the proper military terms, why not) and promptly got shot to pieces and needed someone with a Defib kit to shock me back into consciousness (you can choose that, or you can choose to expire and restart the checkpoint - and thankfully the game DOES checkpoint fairly regularly so you won't lose too much ground).
Very quickly though the age-old skills (what there were of them) started to kick back in. A weird muscle memory, even though I'd largely played this series with mouse and keyboard rather than joypad. A strange sense of familiarity began to creep into the way I began to play and strategise. And guiltily I'll admit this freely. I fucking LIKED it!
I guess I haven't played a COD game since, sheesh, probably the one with Kevin Spacey in it (which is probably donkeys years ago now) so I don't really have that much of a frame of reference between the two, but for me Battlefield has always had more of a tactical feel to it, and that was how it felt rattling through the single player campaign. Like all the bad decisions you made really made you pay big time in terms of dying / progress, and that it wasn't just random, it really was trying to get you to learn how to use cover and use your arsenal of weapons (I mean how the player even manages to stand UP carrying all that stuff is beyond me) to good effect. At first I was blindly firing in all directions trying to use the red prompts to figure out where I was being shot from. Eventually I remembered that this isn't exactly important - what IS important is to get cover, permanent non-destructible cover, and stay the fuck down until you see the whites of an enemy's eyes (or at least a moving shape that isn't a tree, one of your team, or some other random person-shaped object you just wasted half a clip on).
Reload well, and use cover then. But there's more to this game than that. I started to see the first signs of the infamous new scenery destruction model creeping in during some of the urban combat levels and began to acknowledge that even stuff I thought of as 'permanent cover' was anything but, and a well placed volley of heavy artillery fire could literally knock the building out from under (or over) you. Dang, I REALLY always wanted to see that making a return to the series. I remember this being the case in Battlefield: Bad Company to a lesser extent (with a lot of 'scripted' destruction) and though the modern stuff probably just does a very similar scripted thing, it really did feel like you could also use that to your advantage and target structures or explodables with your fire and cause the enemy to have a really, really bad day.
So far the best moments have been:
- Finally getting control of a vehicle and bombarding the crap out of enemy forces stupidly using a petrol tanker as cover. Not so AI after all!
- Realising how slick the cover model is
- Gleefully picking up new enemy weapons at every opportunity, realising that the weapon I started with (and have long since lost) was way better. So never doing that again.
- Feeling like the old Battlefield skills that long time lay dormant were revived in spades
- Finally finding a game to replace Roadcraft (which sadly I've now finished, DLC maps n'all)
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