I have been rather hooked on Battlefield Bad Company, when I saw the title in reviews and videos it just seemed like another BF2 and I wasn’t interested, but recently my brother in law was playing it and I was like “oooooh”. The game is great, it seems to have a good selection of weapons and that Battlefield feel to it, the same quality that made me love BF2 and BF2142. However after a while you start to get annoyed that certain aspects of the game are truly frustrating those aspects need to be fixed for Bad company 2, full low-down after the break…

The Knife
The knife is a horrible weapon and it is truly a weapon of latency, too many times have I been knifed by someone 10 feet away from me, or seen some chump come flying at me waving his knife whilst I fill him full of bullets for him to have easily knifed me before he dies. And last but not least when I am right next to someone, close enough to lick their neck and swing the knife for nothing to happen! Nearly every time I get knifed I shout out in agony as it was a ridiculous kill. It is overpowered as a weapon and seems only to work properly for other people. Also the knife was never so prevalent in other BF games, it was more of a rarity to knife kill, whereas in BC it’s commonplace.

Personally I think the knife should be a weapon to use when the enemy cannot see you, like when they’re stood at a window sniping and you come up behind them tactfully and take them out rather than just running into a house waving it around like a madman killing everyone in sight because you have a better ping. So here are a few ideas on the knife:

» Give it a delay so you can swing the knife if you wish but it doesn’t do much damage, but a stab takes a second or two or has a second or two cool down. I think if the stab had a cool down it would promote more tactical use of the knife and not just make it a weapon of randomness.

Spawning
I like the ideas they have implemented in Bad Company to do with spawning, instead of just spawning at a flag or base people can spawn on their squad. However spawning on squad opens up a whole host of problems as most of the time it’s a choice between spawning at your base or spawning in the middle of a field with grenades and gunfire flying at you. Secondly it is most annoying to be spawned right infront of someone not facing them and just get killed the second you spawn. Lastly it is also annoying when you’re waiting to spawn on a certain person who is in a good place only for the game to spasticly switch to someone who is in a tank which is about to blow up.

Some ways to improve spawning:
» Allow the player to choose which squad member to spawn on, showing the squad members name and where they are on the map, thus avoiding the switching and allowing you to spawn in a good place rather than a fubar one. It also means that if you’re playing with friends you can spawn on them and work closely, instead of spawning on randoms.

» When spawning at a base spawn the player in the farthest possible place from an enemy, meaning the likelyhood of being shot in the back as soon as you spawn is greatly reduced.

» When spawning, spawn facing the closest enemy. Meaning that when you spawn on someone instead of getting shot in the back and the person who you spawned on walks away scot free you have a fighting chance.

» Just a random thought… Maybe have some kind of indicator so you can tell when someone is about to spawn on you.

The rank system
It is quite literally terrible, the first rank system from 1 – 25 is woefully short, it took me about 3 days to get to rank 25 and after that it seemed pretty pointless getting points as they don’t seem to count for much in the ranking system after rank 25.

Breaking down the main problems:
» After rank 25 the rank system is mainly based on Kill/Death ratio, easily proved by having 5/8 KD ratio + 1000 points and having a red form & conversely having 100 points and 5/1 KD and being green.

» The form system seems completely unrelated to the actual rank system, I can play almost all day doing incredibly well and never having any form but green and then come next morning I’ve gone from skill rank 8 to skill rank 22. How does that even make sense?!

» The skill rank system itself is really broken, almost every time my form changes it says “congratulations you have increased in rank” with a green arrow and then demotes me 5 – 15 ranks. Conversely if I do badly it tells me I have done badly with a red arrow and promotes me 5 – 10 ranks. And again if I’ve been doing really well, getting green form the whole day it says congratulations and demotes me randomly.

To fix said issues:
» Remove the “skill” system, no computer algorithm can tell you who is better than anyone else. Someone can sit and guard the crates while the rest of the team flies off on a rampage killing and dying nowhere near the crates, maybe you get 30 points and only a few kills but you did the team a great service, it is not quantifiable in game terms though.

» Give more bonus to objective scores, base it on how many people are actually near the objective, so that if your whole team is defending near the crates give little score to each, but if there are only a few people near the crates give them a lot of bonus score. Bonus score would also be applicable to kills made inside the radius where the person themselves are not, giving snipers a boost too. It’s not a perfect solution, as I said above it’s impossible to quantify skill, but it goes some way towards it.

» Introduce a lot more point based ranks, in BF2 and BF2142 there were hundreds of ranks and pins to gain, it would take months or years to progress up that list, whereas in Bad Company there are 25 and it takes a very minimal investment of time to complete them. People’s ranks can tell you how much of a veteran they are and how much they have played rather than a random guess at what skill level they are at. It’s also something that you can carry as honour when you’re playing, a real achievement that people can see and something to work towards. Again it also means that people will try and get more score rather than just kills.

This would also invite people to use their class more to it’s abilities, I’m sick of being on a team with 10 support classes where none of them will heal me. I like the support class but people are rarely any good at playing it, 99% of the time they just drop the medkits to heal themselves.

Other stuff
Team killing is too rampant, I’m sick of people killing me when I’m on the artillery just to get on it themselves. Or killing me randomly because they think it’s fun. Or when they think it’s right to team kill you every time they see you just because they ran in front of you when you were firing. There should be the option to kick someone from the game after they kill you 2 or 3 times.

Glitches, there’s plenty of glitches including knife, mortar and artillery which put one team at a disadvantage if they don’t know the glitch or don’t want to use it out of principle.

Not sure how the host/server system works but it seems flawed. Sick of emptying entire clips into people’s heads only for them to turn around and kill me instantly with the same weapon. So maybe better controls on hosts and latency.

The photo mode system is broken! I like the idea of being able to save screenshots from Bad Company but it doesn’t work, if I press the button it tells me that the shot has been uploaded and everything but rarely are those screenshots present in my online profile, the only shots that seem to show up are the ones I accidentally took when trying to change spawn options at the second of spawn.

Do something about the specialist class, they have nice sort range weapons but the explosives are a little hit and miss, something like 70% of the time I see someone kill with explosives they kill team members too, and the amount of times I actually see people kill with explosives compares to mortar/grenade/jdam is very small.

Disclaimer: Of course this is all just my opinion, maybe other people have had a different experience of Bad Company, but these are the improvements I feel would make the game much better and less frustrating, if you disagree please let me know, of if you have any other ideas post them below! 😀