Xbox Living

Yep, another post about Battlefield: Bad Company.  The game’s just crazy fun, and (in my opinion) one of the best Xbox 360 titles out there right now.

But it’s not perfect, and there are a few things I’d like to see added.  I’m leaving out Conquest mode, because that’s coming, and it’s already been discussed.  So, in no particular order, here they are:

1. Team-Wide Communication

In Bad Company, teams are divided into squads of 3-4 people.  The idea is that a smaller squad is easier to coordinate, so you can have a few people working towards a goal, avoiding the chatter of the entire team.  You can communicate with your squad over voice chat — but there’s no good way to get in touch with other members of your team.

In theory, this may sound like a good thing–but in practice there are problems.  I run into this quite frequently, as I usually play with the Support kit.  The Support solider’s job is to heal teammates, repair vehicles and provide helpful ranged attacks and cover fire.

I have 78 teamkills according to Battlefield.com.  Exactly zero of those are intentional.  Almost all of those kills are from the mortar strike.

I’m careful, but sometimes there’s just nothing you can do to stop a teammate from running under a mortar strike you’ve just called in.  Yesterday, for example, I managed to get two team-kills when I called a strike on an island on End of the Line.  The strike was called to take out two opponents on the island.  In the time between my calling the mortar strike and it actually landing, a helicopter on my team managed to kill the two enemies and land on the island to repair itself.  Instead, my strike landed on the chopper, killing my two teammates.

Maybe it’s my fault for calling the strike with a helicopter in the area, but it would have been nice to warn those guys “don’t land there!”, or at least apologize for the kills.  Instead, I wasn’t able to say anything, and one of the guys intentionally killed me the next time he saw me.

I’d like to see them keep squad chat as the default, but provide a push-to-talk for team-wide communication, much like the Big Team Battle mode in Halo 3.  That way, you can keep the small-team coordination down but issue warnings when you have information useful for either your entire team, or anyone not in your squad.

Mortar strikes are effective ranged weapons–until your team members unwittingly charge into the target area.

2. Boot to Kick

I can easily forgive the guy who killed me after the mortar-chopper fiasco.  Although it wasn’t intentional, it was my strike that took out the chopper and the guy wanted to let me know he was unhappy about it.  (After all, he couldn’t do so vocally.)

But there are also those who team-kill with a more malicious intent–the most blatant being over the artillery strike.  The artillery strike is a strong weapon that allows you to call in a massive attack on specific areas of a map, once every 30 seconds or so.  With the strike, you can do a lot of damage from afar, taking out enemy vehicles, snipers or groups of opponents.  It’s a fairly quick way to get points, if you’re good at it.  There are a few trophies and patches that can be earned through using the strike, including the Big Guns trophy, which contribute towards two Xbox 360 achievements.

Apparently, some people feel entitled to use the strike themselves, to the point where they’ll kill a teammate who is using it.  I’m willing to call out one such douchebag, whose gamertag is Imperial Fleet.  This guy repeatedly killed members of the team to use the strike, sometimes even destroying the machine itself (meaning he has to wait for it to respawn).  If you look him up on Battlefield.com, he has 985 total kills, and 230 team-kills — meaning that for every four kills this guy gets, he kills a team-member in the process.  Just horrible.

Stats like these do not inspire confidence.

A player gets kicked from a round automatically if they get a score of -150, which means they killed 10 teammates without earning any positive points.  But that doesn’t seem to be enough to stop people from being jerks.  Team members should have the ability to vote against a player, and if enough people want them out, they go.  Either that, or kick them after a certain, lower number of team-kills.

3. Parachutes

One of the funnest things to do in Battlefield 2: Modern Combat was to take the helicopters across a map quickly and parachute into an objective.  Bad Company doesn’t have parachutes–meaning that you’re pretty much comitted to landing your helicopter or dying in it.  The game even has an achievement called Darwin’s Parachute, which is earned by falling from a chopper without a parachute (and dying).

So what’s the deal?  Parachutes are fun for both sides, whether you’re gliding down with one, firing off rockets as you descend, or a sniper taking the parachuters.

Helicopters in Battlefield 2: Modern Combat (left) had more options, including parachutes and space for multiple gunners and passengers. Battlefield: Bad Company (right) removes the chutes and cuts occupancy down to a pilot and a gunner.

There are updates coming–Conquest mode (the main game mode in every other Battlefield title) will be along shortly, as well as private games and clan support.

But despite this room for improvement, Bad Company is an incredibly fun (and addictive) game to play.  It’s been receiving great reviews, so if you’re not already playing it, check out more reviews and ways to buy Battlefield: Bad Company.

So that’s my take–what about yours?  What would you like to see added to Bad Company?