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An open letter to my computer controlled squad-mates in Battlefield: Bad Company. I wrote a very similar letter to my computer controlled squad mates in Call of Duty 4. |
Dear highly trained B-company squad mates,
Thank you for standing around randomly while the tank was outside shooting at me. Why you are standing there with that javelin rocket launcher on your shoulder in the middle of the road, doing nothing, while the tank pummels me with its main cannon and heavy machine gun, i’ll never know.
Ooops! The tank killed me!
But that’s a good thing, you see, as now I am transported 3/4 of a mile away back to the last save point, safe from the killer tank. But hey! Here you guys come, running back from the firefight, where you could have been productive, to stand around by me again.
Oh, it looks like that tank followed you all the way here! Let me get out my mortar strike thing and call in a…oops, killed by the tank again. And now i respawn right here next to the tank! How fortunate! Oh wait, ITS ONLY SHOOTING AT ME.
Ok, i’ll take out the tank myself guys, thanks for covering me so well. Lets run the 3/4 of mile back to the area where we first found the tank.
…3 minutes later, after running all the way back…
A helicopter! Raining bullets from the sky This will be fun…. yay, teleported back the 3/4 of a mile i just ran!
Thanks for running all the way back here to hang out with me! And thanks for bringing that helicopter with you!
Your friend,
John
I gave up on bad company before i finished the main storyline. I don’t do that often, but in this case i just couldn’t keep pushing through. Having to spend 3 minutes running back to an area then getting killed and doing it over was plain stupid. The other 3 main characters were basically useless (at least on hard), killing almost nothing. And since they didn’t really get hurt, i didn’t care about them. After just playing through Rainbow 6: Vegas 2, where you have control over what your squad does, bad company was annoying because the squad was useless. They’d say stuff like “here come some reds”, and then you had no idea where they were or where they were coming from. They wouldn’t show up on the radar, they wouldn’t say “from the north” or anything to give you an indication of what they were seeing, making it completely pointless. There’s a guy with a javelin or some other shoulder fired rocket, but whenever we saw a tank or other armor, he’d just stand there like an idiot. More than once i saw one of the guys standing right next to an enemy, pointing a weapon at him, while the enemy fired and hit me repeatedly. I would have been fine with the save system if it had a been a little more consistent. Sometimes there’d be a save spot within a few hundred yards of the last one. Other times, it would be a 2 minute ride in a golf cart, and then i’d get killed, and teleported back, with the stupid golf cart back where i died; so now its a 5 minute run. I got in the habit of just driving whatever vehicle as fast/far as possible right into the middle of a whole bunch of enemies in the hope that there’d be a save point there, so i’d keep respawning in the tank or whatever i was in.
The left trigger to aim wasn’t very useful with some weapons either. Movement and running had a camera shake thing going on, which got real annoying when running for 5 minutes to get back into the action.
The multi-player was more fun to me than the single player, to tell you the truth. It still didn’t feel as polished as Call of Duty 4, but had some interesting things.
The destructible environments was pretty cool, and will probably be the one thing that all the other games start doing. Although i swear that you couldn’t open doors, you had to blow them up, or blow a hole in the wall to get in somewhere. Yay, grenades instead of doorknobs!
