Well, where to start? How about the single-player campaign? It's as good a place as any, so let's see how it fares.
You got your Black Ops in my Battlefield single-player campaign!
I know it's been said before, but this was literally the first thing that went through my mind within the first ten minutes of the single player campaign, which is sad because it admittedly had a pretty cool start, with you boarding a subway train and shooting people up, only for you to get KO'd and segue into a god damn bunch of flashback scenes where this soldier is recounting the events that lead up to you boarding the train. Kind of like how Alex Mason is recounting the events that lead him to being strapped to a chair being questioned with the aid of shock-therapy in Black Ops.
To me this is pretty much the biggest indicator of trying to copy CoD. At least with Bad Company the games' single player were taking a sort of
"Kelly's Heroes" approach and wasn't really taking itself too seriously, which at least gave it some levity compared to the straightlaced seriousness of Modern Warfare. That being said, there are plenty of other reasons that BF3's single player campaign fails to impress. One is that overall the campaign just feels underwhelming and uninteresting. And I'm not even talking about the story. You go from fighting on a train to...yep, some Middle-Eastern marketplace ghetto, where you get lead from scripted shootout to scripted shootout. Perhaps the most damning complaint is how little and poorly the Frostbite Engine is utilized. We see buildings collapse, rubble and destruction, streets torn asunder, but the problem is that
this is all scripted. Your actions leave no lasting impact on the levels, and you can't utilize the full potential of the physics engine to actually turn shootouts to your advantage. It feels like you're playing Modern Warfare, but a very generic version of it. Someone might say "Well Call of Duty does this with their single-player all the time so why rag on it?" but clearly people were not buying Battlefield 3 to play Call of Duty! If they bothered to have a single-player campaign, people clearly wanted something unique and different from what other FPS games are offering. They could have excelled in this regard but instead took the path of least resistance.
Something else that was irritating was the stage where you flew an F-18. The first few minutes is genuinely pretty neat as you board this fighter, and you see the attention to detail. But then you are actually in the air and it's literally an on-rails segment that very quickly devolves into you playing "spotter" to fire your nigh-useless guns and nearly-as-useless missiles at enemy aircraft, which is then appended with a bit ripped straight ouf of Modern Warfare as you go into thermal vision to bomb targets. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the combat in Killer7 was more exciting than this crap. Sadly I can't really comment much more on the campaign, because I never could work up the desire to finish it. To just sum it up, it feels like "Been there, don that already." Looking online further reveals that even more elements of MW are ripped off, such as playing a character that is killed by a bad guy, looming threat of nuclear terrorism, and cliched American government double-crossing bullshit.
How the single-player campaign could have been awesome.
The big problem here is that people are used to being lead by the nose in CoD and a lot of FPS games in general (I know not all of them do this.). People are
expecting that. How do we exceed people's expectations? How do we get them to go "Holy shit this is fucking awesome!" instead of exiting out of the campaign after a few hum-drum missions?
What puzzles me is that with as big, varied, and open as the multiplayer maps are, why the developers don't try using those elements in the single-player campaign? Imagine this: You start the campaign and you're with a convoy doing a routine patrol in some place (could be the Middle-East, Serbia, Georgia, Korea, even fucking Mexico). You play Private Smith, a stoic and untalkative individual who is beginning to wish he was in combat to break up the monotony of being on uneventful peacekeeper patrols. Then all hell breaks loose. A huge fucking task force of bad guys show up and wreck your convoy. You are seperated from the rest of your men, who are either captured or killed. Congratulations, Private Smith, you are now at the forefront of a massive blitzkrieg-like enemy assault that threatens to overwhelm the region and threaten the lives of your ill-prepared fellow soldiers. Your radio is jammed. The enemy has the element of surprise. The fate of your fellow soldiers and the entire region/country/whatever now rests entirely on your shoulders. Good luck.
I think there's a lot of cool shit that can be done within this very simple premise. First off of course having all of this happen on a large map instead of it being in a bunch of corridors opens up a lot of possibilities. You start out on the countryside, and the bad guys are on the advance, and they haven't noticed you...yet. Do you try to slip by unseen, or try to raise some hell? Do you sneak away in some bushes, or try to snipe an enemy commander from cover and hope they can't peg down your location? Do you try to escape immediately or try to hinder the enemy forces with a little guerillia warfare? Perhaps have multiple exits for each stage to give you some branching paths, like one path takes you to the mountains, another path will take you to a city.
I think something that could be explored is having each level have a single, basic mission: Eluding the bad guys. But there could be optional tasks that can be done, like trying to sabotage enemy efforts, or protecting civilians, or, gathering intel, or trying to make contact with your superiors, or rescuing your fellow soldiers, or discovering enemy sympathizers. What if the game's overall outcome were to change depending on what you did or didn't do? Make it so that if all you do is just try to escape, things go very badly in the wake of the enemy's ucontested advance. Make it like the modern day equivalent of being on the forefront of a German blitzkrieg, only it's a videogame and you have it in your power to do something about it.
Either way, the options presented to you are nigh endless in each level. Say in one level you learn of an enemy convoy bringing supplies and munitions towards the front lines. So you decide to ambush it. You are in a city and they are driving through a narrow road, and with the assistance of some RPGs (or some landmines and C4), you can blast the front and back of the convoy to box them in, leaving it to your discretion to deal with the rest of them, while still having to deal with your surroundings being demolished thanks to enemy gunfire and ordinance. Or perhaps instead you hijack a tank and use that instead? Or manage to get a helicopter and use that? Or you yourself having to evade enemy/allied bombers and mortars. At the very least this gives the main selling point of the Frostbite Engine and the vehicular combat and larger maps greater relevance outside of the multiplayer mode, where it's pretty much the only place it is dynamically utilized in the entirety of BF3.
Hell, if you wanted to take a page out of Minecraft's playbook, have the game randomize enemy soldiers and resources from campaign to campaign. Or depending on your performance have the game adjust the difficulty. If you are doing really well, then the game ups the ante by sending more shit to throw at you. If done well this could help lengthen the game's replayability by making one playthrough completely different from the ten playthroughs you did before.
One reason I think having huge stages would be good--as opposed to a huge open world--is that it would help keep the single-player focused. You still feel like you're on a ride, but you actually feel like you have control over where you want to go and what you want to do. And perhaps after each level there's an after-action report showing how much (or little) you hindered the enemy forces, leading to a statistical measurement of the overall war effort ala Valkyrie Profile and changing the circumstances of the levels due to your performance. This could
greatly enhance the replay value of the single-player because you could take a different approach to getting things done each time. And if done well then it would be a refreshing and unique contrast from CoD, which at the end of the day would allow Battlefield to sell by building more on its own unique merits rather than trying to cash in on the popularity of a competitor by shamelessly copying it. Instead of just being a "character" in a linear unchanging story, the events of the single-player pivot squarely on your actions alone. Older videogames used to make you feel like the entire world pivoted on your decisions. Having a straightforward FPS do that--and done well--would be awesome.
Who wants to co-op?
BF3's coop mode. It's meh. Honestly I'm not a fan of Modern Warfare 2's co-op mode, either. The only thing going for MW2 is the local multiplayer, otherwise it's just a band-aid over the lack of longevity in the single-player mode. Although in MW2's defense, you at least got a whole lot of missions on the disc (nevermind the fact that you have to unlock them all, thanks IW, you [REDACTED]s). BF3's survival stages feel very half-assed. First off, you don't even get that many. Second, they feel very unimaginative. The first level is literally just recycling a set piece from the single-player's first stage and just making you fight a bunch of waves of enemies. It just feels very boring and lackluster. And it's hard as hell, but not in a good way. Your cover gets shot to pieces, but because the whole thing is static, you don't feel as though you can use the physics engine to turn the battle to your advantage. So instead of a dynamic experience each time you do the same stage, you're just going through the motions instead. Finally is the lack of offline co-op. Online-only, baby, because we gotta justify that ten dollar online pass! What is amusing is that co-op nets you unique weapons...to use in multiplayer. So instead of interesting levels, they instead made up for subpar co-op missions by using the carrot-on-the-stick method. I'd harp on this less if when I played the co-op online mode, I was actually able to play with my friends. As it was, we could never connect (which for some games this happens, and others it doesn't). But that's something I'll address later. In the meantime...
How do we make co-op awesome?
I think the real question is why don't we take the changes to single-player and apply cooperative play
there instead of some tacked on half-assed challenge stages that only serves to divert resources from the real meat of the game? Have the option to play the single-player campaign with a friend online or locally, which would all of a sudden open even more options in the campaign mode. If you're online, why stop at two-player coop? Why not three or four? Have the game adjust itself to maintain a suitable level of challenge with more players (smarter AI enemies and more of them, including enemy vehicles and perhaps have them randomly spawn to shake things up a bit). Perhaps optional multiplayer objectives could be added? If the single-player is made robust enough, you can get all the variety of "survival" missions in the single-player itself, by being provided opportunities to use tanks, jeeps, and aircraft, and being able to tackle certain objectives using teamwork to open up options that would have been closed to someone who was on their own. But if you really want to have survial missions, actually put some thought into them, and give us a lot at the outset, at least MW2 did a good job of giving us variety (though we have to unlock that shit, which is fucking [REDACTED]ed). And that brings us to...
Multiplayer.
Well, I've been chewing up the rest of the game, so now it's time for some faint praise. I'm not going to lie. The two Call of Duty's I've played online (Black Ops and MW2), I'm not terribly good at. The fact that the multiplayer on BF3 was meant to be more open and greater focus on teamwork and cooperation was just as important as just running around shooting people is what did pique my interest at the outset. Assault soldiers can heal and or revive your comrades on top of just shooting people. Support uses big machine guns to lay down supressing fire when they're not dropping off ammo refills. Engineers are fixing your tanks when they're not blowing them up or shooting down enemy aircraft. And Snipers...uh...Snipers...well they suck.
What was cool to me is that all the classes have some way of getting experience points to level up without having to kill anybody. You get XP for healing your allies, for refilling their ammo, or for fixing their vehicles. What does the Sniper contribute? Nothing. They got some kind of sensor device but there's literally nothing that the Sniper class can do that nets them any kind of gradual XP gain that the other classes have. So why play a Sniper? "Oh, but Snipers can use Sniper rifles! The other classes can't!" Yeah, it's hard to take that logic seriously in a game where you can equip a shotgun on any character, load it up with slugs and a scope, and just as effectively (or close to) snipe targets using another class as you can with a Sniper. What irritates me about this is that every other class in the game gets rewarded for being a team player...except for the Sniper. And the Sniper can do some genuinely useful things...but they aren't rewarded for it. Why play a class that is effectively gimped in its growth compared the rest of the classes in the game? And furthermore why even play that class when it's offensive strengths can be replicated by any other class in the game? (mind you I haven't played the game in months so I don't know if that has been changed, if it has feel free to call me a moron)
Wait wait wait, this is the part where I'm supposed to be praising the multiplayer! There's vehicular combat, but it seems that more often than not the maps I played on didn't have any, or have that many, and the controls for them were awkward and you'd more often crash a helicopter on takeoff rather than actually fly it. Oh but at least there's the big maps filled with people going at it with each other...except that's not the case on the PS3 and 360, as the maps (on foot) are scaled down and there are fewer people fighting against each other per map, which leaves the online feeling barren and unexciting during matches. But of course there's the idea of teamwork with your squadmates to get things done...only that rarely happens since it seems a lot of people either don't use headphones, OR if you do use headphones, they rarely use them, and if you and your team happens to be in the same match together, good luck actually making it into the same squad, and even better luck that your headphone chatter doesn't get cut out randomly during a match.
PRAISE GODDAMMIT I'M SUPPOSED TO BE PRAISING THE MULTIPLAYER!!! So when it comes to weapons in this game, I like it. Well, compared to Modern Warfare 2. You got your usual ranks to level up, just like CoD, only it feels like it takes forever to get to the next rank. But at least with your weapons you have more customization options,
and you can have multiple attachments at once, unlike in CoD where your options are a bit more restricted. Of course in order to get those attachments, you have to grind your gun with usage. And grind, and grind, and grind. Arg, dammit! If DICE was so keen as to rip off the storyline of Black Ops, why didn't they think of ripping off gameplay features that could have improved the game? What about a currency system to let you purchase your weapons' attachments instead of having to fucking grind for them through use? Maybe I don't want to use the Red Dot Sight, maybe I want to use the ACOG? Or maybe I want extended clips? Or a shotgun instead of a grenade launcher on my HK416? Like, right away? And not have that entirely hinge on actually being able to kill people with my gun? And you know, what, that brings me to--
If you're going to rip off Black Ops, rip off stuff people actually gives a damn about!
People wonder why Call of Duty is so popular? Well I have a thought: Everybody has taken a shot at trying to emulate Call of Duty's success. But it seems like they forgot to emulate the
offline local multiplayer. I see how feature-heavy and how many neat options I get on Black Ops (even compared to Modern Warfare, which is probably why 3's sales are lagging behind Black Ops') and then I see how sparse BF3 is by comparison. Black Ops has an offline multiplayer, but it isn't just competitive, but cooperative, and I'm not just talking about Zombies. I mean you can set up bots and have you and a friend fight on a map cooperatively, and not just competitively. Shit offline you have access to everything from the outset without having to unlock it! Let's put it like this: There's plenty of stories of EA hurting finacially right now. Imagine EA goes tits up tomorrow. Congratulations, the servers are down, and the only reason you bought BF3 is now gone. And the other two/thirds of the game are too derivative and meh to justify playing it. When the day comes that Black Ops' servers get shutdown, you can still do everything you bought the game for, because you have access to almost all the online's features offline. And not everyone has internet, or a good enough connection. So having a near-identical offline experience as online (without the annoying people) is a boon. By not having that option, that more than anything probably put a hard cap on BF3's sales (all in the name of EA trying to control its customers).
And another reason having offline multiplayer would have been helpful: This game could have ripped off Black Ops' Combat Training. In fact this game outright NEEDS it. Mainly because when you play the game normally, it's just another FPS shooter. That all changes when you try to fly a helicopter or jet fighter. All of a sudden I went from playing an arcade shooter to playing Combat Flight Simulator. It stuns me that when I get to fly a chopper on Black Ops, how easy it is to figure out and do even when I haven't had that many opportunities to do it, compared to BF3 where it feels like I need a fucking actual pilot's license to fly this shit. And there's really no way to get any practice in besides multiplayer, when you are actually lucky enough to be on a map with a vehicle, and provided you can reach said vehicle before somebody else. Having a training mode where people could get acquainted at a comfortable pace would prevent a lot of frustration and make the online less chaotic because more people would be coming into it knowing what they are doing.
Summary: You want to be more successful than Call of Duty? Then give people a reason to want to play your game more.
Call of Duty's biggest competitor is against itself. With Black Ops Treyarch appeared to realize this as they probably realized that MW2 had left a bit of a bad taste in people's mouths. The result is a game that didn't just strive to make a game that was better than Modern Warfare but a game that would keep people from losing interest in Call of Duty in general, in that it features a superior offline mutliplayer experience not only with multiplayer but with the Zombies Mode that will still be there for those that bought the game long after the servers have shut down. This is what Battlefield must do. In fact this is what any FPS that wants to do CoD business must do. In fact any game of any genre needs to strive to do this. The reason I bothered to write this is that I like what Battlefield is trying to do. However the execution (at least in the case of 3) leaves a lot to be desired.
The single-player is monotonous and has been done before all the way back to Half-Life. The survival mode is a step down from MW2's. Online is the only area of the game that stands out from it's competitors but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Mind you I didn't even go into huge detail about all the bugs and other issues. The biggest problem though is the lack of local multiplayer. This kills the game's longevity because when the servers finally go offline, a big reason why people were interested in this game goes along with it.
The real enemy here is disinterest and a lack of ambition. Maybe people are tired of single-player campaigns that lack longevity? Use the huge map designs and physics engine to create a single-player campaign that isn't narrowed down to just running down corridors and doing scripted events and watching cutscenes. The goal shouldn't be to have single-player "Just because." or as an appetizer for the multiplayer, the goal should be to make a single-player mode so robust and exciting that it could very well compete with your multiplayer, and feature a vastly greater amount of replay value than anything your competitors offer, which could be further augmented by having the option of local or online coop instead of just a phoned in survival mode from another game where it's not even that good to begin with.
As for multiplayer, people should pay more attention to what Black Ops did. They made the game less grindy, more accessible, and better balanced than MW2 (and from the sounds of things probably MW3). It's not perfect, but Treyarch's heart was in the right place. Instead of just emulating what CoD has done, Battlefield should focus on trying to make their online less grindy, more accessible, and better balanced still, and this could all be done while still maintaining the spirit and original intent of this series that sets it apart from all others and makes it unique and exciting. That means having offline cooperative/competitive multiplayer with bots. That means having a training mode so that players can get themselves acquainted with how the game works in all aspects so they don't go straight online and find themselves constantly getting facerolled by people with people with more experience and better gear. If Skyrim can do this for The Elder Scrolls, then surely to God, Billy-Bob and Buddha, Battlefield can as well. And if this means not looking bleeding edge in the graphics department, then it's a worthy sacrifice to give more features and cool stuff than just a bunch of pretty and bland bullshit. CoD hasn't been pushing the graphics envelope but that hasn't stopped it from being successful.
Simply xeroxing what someone else has done won't allow you to be successful. Taking what has already been done but making it more exciting and accessible while still adding some depth will. That's how all good sequels work, and how all good games in the same genre work. It seemed that DICE might have gotten this with Bad Company 2, but it would appear in EA's zeal to go after Activision, we simply got the former and not the latter that Battlefield, and gamers, deserved.
