Preview - Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Multiplayer Beta

This may come off partially off-color and in poor taste. Writing about a game's successes or short-comings while it is in closed-beta should not be good practice, but this is something that should not be avoided as a forum of discussion. There are a lot of people dying out there and they want to know why. There are a lot of people playing this game and realizing they are just as good as Jesus or at least his Senior-VP. Even the development team dropped some hints noticing the gap of elite to meat-shields.

I do not know if this article will meet those who are participating in the closed-beta, but please feel free to chime in with your thoughts and opinions. I would also like to state that I am super happy to be reaping some inkling of reward from my little foray in the games journalism world by being invited in a beta. This is not a 'nee-ner-nee-ner' article, but one that hopes to discuss games that carry the label, "Work In Progress".

What you should know? Aside from my copy of Battlefield 2: Modern Combat for the PS2, I am a relative 'newb' to the Battlefield series. So me dying a lot seems about par for the course. I knew Battlefield: Bad Company 2 would be hardcore and more strategy oriented seeing as Modern Combat was more along those lines. Knowing that DICE was putting out another installment had me pensively excited. Pensively because over the years, I guess I have grown more into the 'run & gun' type of FPS shooter. I have sadly forgotten my roots.

What to expect? Expect the standard classes of units. You can play as Recon [which is the sniper class], Attacker, Engineer and a Medic. From what I can tell from two weeks of play, the Engineer is your winning ticket. The Attacking unit is "okay" and Recons are the most hated beings on Earth [Hmm... must avoid Battlefield Earth joke]. The Medic class is an absolute joke. The balancing issues are still at work by the ladies and gentlemen at DICE. so I can see this being altered, probably as of me typing these very words.

What you should do? Work as a team, I can not stress that enough. This is hard for me seeing as I have few friends on my PS3 and no friends who are in on the closed-beta. If you have a headset, its not even an option, you have to use it. Though the classes seem unbalanced out of the gate, a player can pick up another, possibly high ranking player's, weapons if they or their team mate kills them. The more you kill, heal and complete objectives, the more extras and weapons you unlock.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is due out March 2010, so there a still a fair amount of tweaking to be done. The game looks incredible, some graphical issues, but really, if you have seen the movie The Hurt Locker, Bad Company 2 will deliver a similar "palm-sweaty" tension. Granted this is coming from someone playing one-map over and over, we will see how the rest of the game shapes up.