After playing more rounds of Battlefield Bad Company 2 (BBC2) than I care to admit, I have come to the conclusion that it is superior to its nearest competitor, Modern Warfare 2. Strangely, my conclusion is not supported by video game critics, who managed to hand MW2 an average of 94% on Metacritic, whereas BBC2 earned an 88%. Am I completely misguided in my judgment or, as is so often the case, did Modern Warfare 2’s tremendous hype-train subliminally strong-arm critics into handing out high scores, lest they piss off their readership who expects nothing less?

Some games just have an internal momentum that is hard to explain. It was a preordained conclusion that MW2 would garner high marks, its many design flaws over-looked and avoided in a ton of reviews, as if Infinity Ward can do no wrong. BBC2 did not enjoy this white-washing of facts when it came time for reviews and BBC2 and was treated more harshly for having the same problems as MW2, namely, a pretty short and uninspiring single-player campaign.

Abandon Solo Campaigns

I don’t think either game delivered a compelling single-player campaign and would urge both companies to abandon solo missions in the future. This is a controversial opinion but I think there is merit in the following argument: if you’re splitting manpower between two completely different modes, neither mode is getting 100%. Therefore, single-player campaigns in games like MW2 and BBC2, two titles known and acclaimed for multiplayer, arrive half-baked, six hours in length, have weak stories and little purpose other than a stealth-tutorial for multiplayer mode.

If campaigns were abandoned it would free up additional space and resources for increased multiplayer content; more maps, more modes, more weapons, just more of everything that increases a game’s value and worth over the long-haul. If there is a demand for a single-player campaign then I would urge the developers to create a stand-alone title, much like the original BioShock before it unfortunately succumbed to multiplayer with BioShock 2.

If they don’t think a stand-alone, single-player Modern Warfare or Battlefield game would sell, then why are both companies wasting resources on including said feature? The answer is so both companies can have a bullet-point on the back of the box, basically claiming that all of their bases are covered, there is something here for everyone. MW2 managed to escape unscathed in terms of its rating, but BBC2 was called out for its single-player mode and the result was a average score notably lower than its competitor.

In a perfect world, developers would release a multiplayer version of their latest game, priced between $39 and $49, and a full-blown single-player experience of least 30 hours in length, for an equivalent price. This ensures you pay a little less for what you really want….and you get what you really want, with neither side being shafted in the process.

BBC2 Vs. MW2 Multiplayer….FIGHT!

Multiplayer is where the real value of a shooter rests. It’s what gives a game legs and endurance. It’s what prevents you from returning a game to Gamestop in exchange for something else. It is here, in multiplayer mode, that BBC2 eats MW2 for lunch.

Servers

MW2 multiplayer is supported by a form of peer-to-peer connectivity. Without getting all technical, this basically means a player is selected from within the lobby to host the following game. That player’s console becomes the server for the round, sending and receiving data to all other players. This is a horrible way to create a multiplayer environment because the playing field isn’t level. There is ongoing argument about what I am about to say but my own experience doesn’t lie: the host of a MW2 match is at a serious disadvantage.

Some claim the host has the advantage in MW2, but I have proven to myself over and over again that, at least for me, this couldn’t be more untrue. In MW2 I can tell when I’m the host based on how my weapons behave; slightly compressed audio when using a rapid fire weapon. It’s like I can hear each shot getting bunched up. Then I notice that it takes far more hits on an enemy to bring them down when I’m hosting, a fact born out by my final score, which is always negative by a 1-3 ratio. If I’m not hosting, my kill/death ratio is a quaint 3 to 1, enough to lead the scoreboard in a typical round.

This tells me that MW2’s peer-to-peer hosting scheme is a fraud, simple as that. It takes all the heavy-lifting off the shoulders of Infinity Ward and Activision, sparing them the expense of investing in dedicated servers while offloading an illusory multiplayer experience. One more point: you won’t find any ridiculous Host Migration in BBC2.

Then there is Battlefield Bad Company 2, which uses dedicated servers, a far superior method of dispensing multiplayer data for a level playing field. Problem is, and listen closely EA/Dice, the servers have to work! I’m sick to death of EA constantly underestimating how many servers they need for every new game, followed by a press-release that says “…due to overwhelming demand…” blah-blah-blah, followed by two weeks of connectivity issues and server investment. This should not be an issue in this day an age. Dice has been making multiplayer games longer than most, have had this problem countless times, and appear unwilling or incapable of learning from past experiences. Meanwhile, gamers suffer for the first two weeks while EA/Dice try and get their shit together.

However, when the servers work, as they are working now, and everything is smooth as silk, the multiplayer environment has no equal.

I have one other issue about MW2’s peer-to-peer system that is worth mentioning: it detracts from what the designers can do with the environment. The reason Dice can completely destroy a map though the course of a round, felling buildings, shattering walls, etc, is because it runs on dedicated servers and can afford to exchange huge amounts of data without interfering with the latency of the game. If MW2 offered a destructible environment from within peer-to-peer, well, let’s just say you’d be watching a slide-show of lag. It just isn’t technically feasible and the game design suffers from built-in limitations.

Which Brings Me to….Moments

Moments. It’s a word I use a lot when discussing video games with people. Moments are those times when something so cool, so unexpected happens that it puts a big, dopey smile on your face. A moment is usually a one-of-a-kind event, something you’ll never be able to duplicate no matter how hard you try, the kind of situation that finds you begging for a instant replay so you can show your friends.

In order to have moments, you need a game that offers the ability to create moments. A title like Grand Theft Auto is a perfect example. It gives you a huge world, tons of weapons and vehicles, and the ability to do what you want when you want to whoever you want. In this way, it sets the stage for an anything can happen atmosphere.

In the two weeks I have been playing BBC2, I have had countless moments. A moment like the time I fired a tank shell into the flying fuselage of a helicopter, watching as it spun out of control towards the ground. Two guys bailed out, chutes open. Helicopter crashes into an enemy tank, both explode. One of the guys who parachuted out of the copter managed to glide down and land ON my tank. Unfortunately for me, he was a Recon armed with C4. I blowed up real good, but I laughed the entire time. That was a moment.

BBC2 is generous in its moment creating ability. It has no equal, thanks to the huge variety of options offered the player. With MW2, moments are few and far between, extremely limited in scope. Players don’t have much to work with. The environment never changes, there are no vehicles, little in the way of variety and it quickly becomes redundant. You seldom come away from a round of MW2 with a story worth telling.

In MW2, You Earn Perks. In BBC2, You ARE the Perk

Both MW2 and BBC2 offer a perk system, but the two differ tremendously in how they implement the concept. In MW2, perks are, for the most part, automated upgrades. For instance, calling in a helicopter to lend support until the other team finally shoots it down. It’s a hand-off experience, requiring little to no skill on the part of the player. All you have to do is kill X amount of players without dying and you get a temporary perk.

In BBC2, there are no temporary perks, just permanent upgrade options for the various classes. However, the perks are all sitting out there on the battlefield. Want a helicopter? Then go pilot one. Want a UAV? Then secure the console and man the controls. BBC2 doesn’t hold your hand in any way. If you want to kill people then you’ll have to muster some skills and do it yourself.

MW2’s perk system detracts from the overall experience because it forces players to, for lack of a better word, camp. Since the only way to get a perk is to NOT die, it forces a large number of players to basically hide. I have no problem with camping and hiding in games, but when your most popular game mode is tired old Team Deathmatch, camping feels completely out of place, a testement to MW2’s failure of focused design.

Focused Design

Infinity Ward included a ton of multiplayer game modes in MW2. Problem is, most people are perfectly content with Team Deathmatch, the second oldest multiplayer mode known to man. Part of the reason for this is because Inifnity Ward didn’t spend much time working on compelling game modes. They used the same stack of maps for every mode, which is simply lazy. You cannot shoe-horn every game mode onto every game map and expect quality.

Case in point is BBC2, which offer two main modes in Rush and Conquest, with some secondary modes like Squad Deathmatch. If Infinity Ward had designed BBC2, all game modes would be available for all maps, but Dice wisely understands a map needs to be designed for a specific game type. Hence, Rush maps are completely different than Conquest maps.

By focusing the design of the game around two completely different modes, BBC2 feels polished and balanced, whereas MW2 took a “kitchen-sink” mentality and hoped for the best, which didn’t materialize, evidenced by so few people playing anything but boring-old Team Deathmatch.

Why Would You Recommend MW2 Over BBC2?

I have been asking myself the above question for several days now and am struggling for a good answer. In a lot of ways, MW2 feels like a variation of Halo, only with modern weapons. It’s chaotic, fast-paced and confined, whereas BBC2 is far more focused, larger in scope with significantly more variety…plus the potential for infinite moments.

Would you say the graphics are better in MW2 than BBC2? Debatable. I would say close-range graphics in MW2 are more detailed and vibrant, but BBC2’s destructible environment more than makes up for the subtle details on a character model. When I launch a grenade at a wall, I want the wall to explode, not bounce off like like a tennis ball, as happen in MW2. I consider walls exploding to be part of the graphics universe and it enhances gameplay to such a degree that, in the end, there is no valid comparison between MW2 and BBC2: BBC2 is new school, MW2 is old school. I can ever again enjoy, or treat seriously, a shooter that doesn’t allow for destruction.

Perhaps one would recommend MW2 over BBC2 for newer players. MW2 is the training wheels for BBC2, the game you start with and outgrow as your skills rise, eventually entering the world of BBC2, ready for strategy, tactics and actual team-based objectives. MW2 is boot camp for the real war you’ll find in BBC2.

One can’t really make an argument of MW2 over BBC2 because of developer support. Infinity Ward has been notoriously lazy in creating new content to support their games and take forever to address technical issues. For BBC2, Dice will be unleashing a ton of content and has a built-in store interface complete with a schedule of coming goodies.

Just a few days ago a valid argument would have been stability. BBC2 servers were offline for far too long and no one could play, something that didn’t happen at MW2’s launch, albeit for reasons related to their peer-to-peer multiplayer illusion, an illusion that cannot be patched or fixed, ever. Now that BBC2 servers are stable and humming along, MW2 has lost one of the few feathers in its cap.

So…I’m still fishing here and not getting any bites. I’m not finding anything MW2 does better than BBC2 in terms of multiplayer. What say you? Surely you loyal MW2 fans can point out some elements you feel are superior? Let me know in the comments below, after you’re done calling me every name in the book.

I haven’t officially reviewed Battlefield Bad Company 2, though I’ll make my opinion quite clear: it is superior to Modern Warfare 2 in every respect. I’ll be presenting my case in a future article, one that will surely irritate MW2 fans clinging to brand loyalty. In the meantime, I have some issues with Battlefield Bad Company 2 that are driving me nuts and chances are you…yes you, are responsible.

World Wide Suck

Unlike most video games that are either great or not based upon its own merits, Battlefield Bad Company 2 is a truly great game, made less so by an abundance of players who don’t know their ass from their elbow. I’ve made an attempt to alleviate some of the rampant suck by writing a helpful multiplayer guide, which you can find here. Part II will be coming soon.

Unfortunately, most people who suck don’t know they suck and hence, their suckiness continues to evolve within an impenetrable bubble of suck. That would be fine if they were playing on their own private server, but they aren’t; they’re cooped up with me and I’m trying to win a round.

Let’s take a closer gander at how players suck:

What’s The Objective?

Bad Company 2 multiplayer has a pretty simple objective, depending upon the game type: either blow up or defend two crates within a zone in Rush, or capture and hold at least 2 out of 3 control points in Conquest. While this seems pretty freaking straight-forward, apparently these concepts are very difficult to understand for an alarming number of players.

If you are not actively engaged in either defending or assaulting crates or control zones, you are wasting everyone’s time who has an interest in playing the game as it is designed. I’m talking to you, the six snipers on the assaulting team, hiding up in the mountains for the entire duration of the round, taking pot shots at defenders who aren’t even busy defending. No team needs 6 snipers. That’s 6 people who will never assault the crate. Add to this a few people in tanks and a few more in a helicopter, and you’re left with only a few poor bastards (usually me) trying to penetrate enemy lines with zero support.

Let me make this real simple: When you are on the attacking team, you cannot win by killing more of the defensive team than they kill of you. It’s not possible. It’s doesn’t matter how many times you try or wish things were differently, it just won’t work. This isn’t Modern Warfare 2.

Typical Scene: I’m on defense. An enemy has penetrated the lines and managed to activate a crate. In a perfect world, several defenders would be converging on that area with guns blazing, removing hostiles and deactivating the bomb. This isn’t what I generally see.

Instead, I see people standing around, making no effort whatsoever. Or, if they make an effort, it is so half-assed as to be useless, like the dainty noobs who appear too frightened to enter a building because they might get killed so they hang around outside like a gaggle of drifters, waiting for god knows what until finally the bomb explodes, objective lost. Good work men. Try not to work up a sweat next time.

Where The F*&K Did You Get Your Pilot’s License, Phoenix University?

My balls shrivel every time I hop into a helicopter as a gunner or passenger, my life at the mercy of some pilot I don’t know. It’s like Chat-Roulette, you never know what is going to happen or what you’re going to see, but chances are it won’t be pretty.

Some people just aren’t born to fly. I’ll place some of the blame of this on DICE, who made no attempt to create a flight tutorial or practice area, two elements that would have gone a long way in reducing frustration. Because of this omission, players are left learning to fly in a live multiplayer environment and that means the rest of us get to be Guinea Pigs for your flight-training.

If you can’t fly, please don’t hog such a valuable asset. Learn by watching. Read the manual for controls. Adjust the controls from the options menu to better suit your style. Hell, just know the controls.

The absolute worst thing that can happen is a rookie pilot uses the helicopter as an expensive transport vehicle, landing the machine behind enemy lines, hopping out and doing whatever that noob is going to do. In the meantime, a crafty enemy simply jumps into the copter and takes it for himself. If he knows what he’s doing, that helicopter will now become a serious threat to the other team. Worse, the original team won’t gain access to another helicopter until the original is destroyed. This rule hold true for all vehicles, not just helicopters.

Every vehicle you abandon can, and will be, used against you. Either repair the vehicle or blow it up so it respawns. Don’t just let it sit around!

A word of advice on flying: don’t over-compensate. Little movements on the stick is all you need. Learn to hover first, controlling your speed by pitching the nose forward and back. Fly slow at first until you gain some insight.

More on Page 2

Congratulations, Modern Warfare 2, you managed to disappoint the hell out of me in 2009, more than any other game I played. I couldn’t care less that you managed to sell more copies than any other title or that you’re #1 on the Xbox Live Activity Chart. That tells me more about the gaming public than the quality of your game. So what is wrong with Modern Warfare 2? Let’s see….

The Multiplayer Illusion

My biggest complaint of Modern Warfare 2 is the horrible net-code used in matchmaking and player hosting. This issue tarnished the original Modern Warfare and it seems to be even worse now. It’s so bad that I simply don’t play the game anymore. PC players know of what I speak because peer-to-peer hosting has been forced on them by Infinity Ward and this really makes the quality of multiplayer suffer considerably.

Now, a lot of you may have never played an FPS on the PC. Your only experience of multiplayer may indeed be on consoles only and as such, you are blissfully ignorant as to what is going on during a multiplayer match. As for myself, I’m an old-timer, someone who spent many long nights tweaking my Quake (or Counter-Strike) config file for the best ping, fiddling with QuakeSpy to reduce my latency as much as possible. Because of this past, I am acutely aware of lag, perhaps more than most.

Here’s the deal: I’d say a good 60-70% of the time I am picked as a host in Modern Warfare 2. I can tell immediately that I am the host as the game behaves slightly different. Sound-effects of an automatic gun become more compressed and, worst of all, it takes nearly twice as many bullets to fell an opponent than when I am NOT hosting. My average score in a typical, non-hosted game is about 20-8. If I am hosting, this reverses to 8-20. Every…time.

This huge discrepancy ruins the game and reveals the overall illusion that stinks up Modern Warfare 2. It tells me that when I think I’m doing well, it’s probably because other players are lagging and when I’m doing bad, it’s not because I suck.  In short, multiplayer is fundamentally flawed in Modern Warfare 2. Those of you with crappy connections will probably never be selected as host so you go on your merry way thinking you’re better than you probably are.

The whole thing is bullshit, especially when compared to Battlefield: Bad Company, which uses dedicated servers to offer a level playing field.  With all of the money Infinity Ward makes, you’d think they would invest in some dedicated servers, but apparently the industry is moving in the opposite direction, which is bad news for competitive gaming.

All The Other Stuff

Lame multiplayer code is enough to make Modern Warfare a loser in my book, but its problems don’t stop there. Lots of little things add up to crap.

Like…

Explain to me the logic of this: You create a collector’s edition of Modern Warfare 2 that ships with a stupid pair of night-vision goggles and yet….and yet….wait for it…here it comes….you don’t include one single night map? You have 16 multiplayer maps in this hunk of junk and not a single night map? This is modern warfare? Last time I checked, the majority of ‘modern warfare’ is conducted at night. Someone please notify our troops in Afghanistan they are doing it wrong.

Then we have the playlists, most of which no one cares about unless it says Team Deathmatch.  Want to play a large team deathmatch? Then you have to pick a different playlist that also includes Domination for some unknown reason. You can’t play one without the other. Infinity Ward has all of these under-utilized playlists and yet they don’t offer the most obvious choices people would want.

Need I mention the painfully short, poorly written campaign? Why even bother with single-player if you’re going to expend so little energy. Just make Modern Warfare a multiplayer-only game and have done with it. If people demand a campaign, release a stand-alone product priced accordingly. Everyone gets what they want and each gang gets their money’s worth.

So you like unlocking titles and tags but hate scrolling through umpteen pages just to find out what it is? Yeah, I hate that as well.  It appears Inifnity Wards spent a whopping 10 minutes designing their awards interface. It’s cumbersome, weak, inefficient and boring.

Then we come to the perks, which in my opinion has destroyed the integrity of the game. With so many powerful perks now, it forces people to “camp” just to keep their kill-streak going. Now I don’t have a problem with camping, but when you have large maps and the overwhelming majority are playing Team Deathmatch, there is simply no incentive to move. This is horrible design, perhaps made worse by Infinity Ward’s lack of focus on solid multiplayer objectives. I reflect back fondly on Counter-Strike, a game that had a simple objective that made all the difference: rescue the hostages or escort the VIP. Players needed to move. They needed to attack or defend. There was a goal, something to do, a reason to move and a reason to get involved. Here, you are rewarded for doing as little as possible.

Modern Warfare 2 just feels aimless and it doesn’t matter if you pick something like Domination or Headquarters, as Infinity Ward is under the mistaken belief that you can design one map and stick all the the game modes on it, whether it be Capture the Flag, Team Deathmatch, Domination, etc. None of these game modes are entertaining, evidenced by the overwhelming majority of players sticking with boring old Team Deathmatch.

I could easily nitpick this game to death. Terribly disappointing title from top to bottom. Great graphics, solid sound-effects….but that’s it.

Once again Modern Warfare 2 is making the news and not for a good reason. Unlike last week, which found players exploiting a bug that allowed an individual to explode, this time around we have something more nefarious: a bug that spreads like a virus, infecting all players who come into contact with the carrier.

According to reports, players get “infected” by unwittingly joining a private match hosted by a carrier. They then get hit by the same issue — unlimited ammo and no reloads — and can pass it on if the end up hosting any games themselves. Allegedly, it’s “spreading like an STD.”

This unique issue started out as a mod on the PC version of the game, which we spoke about yesterday. It has been transported to the Xbox 360 and put to more sinister work. Infinity Ward is apparently “working” on the issue, and it appears that Microsoft is wielding its banhammer for anybody caught employing it.

Obviously, Infinity Ward has fucked up once again. Worse, they are threatening bans (once again) for anyone found exploiting their crappy code. How about we ban Infinity Ward for not open beta-testing their product like they did with the original Modern Warfare?

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