Battlefield 4 – Single Player

In a way I think it was all planned. After the initial reviews hit, lavishing the multiplayer but damning the single player, I think EA/DICE decided to release a patch which would cause the multiplayer to cease working properly. This in turn made me play their single player campaign, something I really had no intention of doing before, based on my experience with Battlefield 3.

So last night I hunkered down, with a couple of beers and plenty of snus, and went for it. Normally notplayed does not do reviews of titles we have played (the clue is in the name), but for this game I’ll make an exception. Not because it is so horribly bad or of such outstanding brilliance, but because it is distinctly average and so has plenty of things that can, IMO quite easily, be addressed.

This could be a lengthy post. It probably also contains some (minor) spoilers. So if you have any intention of ever playing the single player and want to avoid hints to the story, don’t read on.

There is so much to say about the single player element of the game it’s kind of hard to organize my thoughts in the right order. So it’s best to get a few things out of the way first, the good things, and keep those in mind at all times when reading this.

When it comes to actual hands on gameplay, the movement of the character, the camera work, the feeling of the gun through the controller as well as audio and music, Battlefield 4 has no peers. In my opinion it is second to none in its class. Picking up a weapon, moving through the environment, engaging enemies feels and sounds amazing. When the game goes down to these basics, and that’s all that’s happening, it can provide moments (sometimes longer moments) of pure joy.

Some of the areas that felt great were in the hotel tower in Shanghai, parts of the Airfield mission, the escape in the snow capped mountains and parts of Tashgar. I really just enjoyed shooting stuff.

Sadly though that’s really where the good stuff ends (for the most part). Battlefield 4 tries to do a lot of things, but in most cases it falls way short of the mark.

Probably one of my favorite moments of the game was a minor support cut scene at the end of mission, Tashgar, and that in itself is quite sad. It is only 18 hours since i played it and already i forgot most of what was going on (some multiplayer matches i remember for a long time). The scene also highlights a key problem with the game (and other games like it). (no real spoilers in the support scene)

The scene is done in game, the character has full movement. I think the reason it was a great moment for me was that it came as a “reward” for a great gameplay section and made excellent use of the main theme while highlighting on one of the things Battlefield is known for: fantastic vehicles. And thus my analysis begins.

Character and Story

The story makes no sense. No sense at all. Something happened in China and for some reason Russia sides with the new Chinese leadership and for some reason the US is at war. There is some Chinese person involved that I rescue in the second mission but even in the end I don’t know who he is. The war seems to be fought entirely by a captain, his US Marines amphibious carrier and a squad of 4 marines.

The main character, the character the player takes over, is one of those marines. By a twist of fate you (the player) end up in charge of the squad. But throughout the game you never once utter a word. You don’t give commands, you don’t stop your squad mates from arguing (which happens all the time), you never talk to your superior and you never answer questions, you are asked, directly.

If you watched the clip above, watch it again. Now consider that you are Recker, the person the major is congratulating. She comes off her helicopter, says “Great job Recker!” but she is in fact addressing Irish, one of your subordinates. The entire conversation is with him, the player merely a spectator.

In short – at no time in the game do I ever form any kind of connection with my character. I can’t do what I would want to do (i.e. stop my subordinates from arguing, talk to my superiors and answer questions).

Yet there are plenty of moments where my character edges to the brink of death, only to step back from it at the last moment. The narrative designers at DICE clearly want me to feel something for this walking gun on screen. They want me to feel excited and scared, angry and relieved. I lost count how many times I got knocked down, knocked unconscious, dragged under water (SPOILER: once with an entire fucking massive dam, concrete, metal, water and all, on top of me), only to wake up later and be ok. Believability aside, I simply feel nothing. Not because these moments are not excellently scripted and show some fantastic tech, but simply because I do not give a rats ass about my character. Because the character is never actually developed.

On a side note it is funny that so much time and effort has gone into near death moments for the main character, but no thought seems to have gone into reactions of my squad mates to me expiring in the heat of battle. Not even a little VO quip of “Recker is down! FUCK!” or even a “Thank fuck that ass bit it – now I am in charge!” – nothing. For the 5 seconds it takes to fade to black and load the last checkpoint, my squad carries on as if nothing had happened (which basically means they just stand around and argue – more to AI later).

There seems to be this need in FPS war games to have a “special” character the player takes over. Designers seem to feel the need to develop this character and give him meaning. I can understand this with games like Bioshock or Wolfenstein – but in games like CoD and BF, this makes no sense at all. That war is global and most of the campaigns take place in many different (exotic) locations. In my mind realism gets bent to fuck trying to explain how my character got to all these locations and that one squad can make such a big difference in such a large war.

It is a clear example of game(play) bending to the need of narrative and in this case the narrative is thin to begin with. What you end up with is a jumbled together mess that does not really connect and banks on the fact that the average gamer gets distracted by the big movie moments and the action.

Well the average gamer does not engage in the single player of BF4. I don’t have the actual numbers, though I bet DICE and EA do, but on my friends list on the 360 (and I have a lot of people on there, and a lot of them bought the game) there are only 3 who played the single player and I am the only one who finished it.

So I would question the cost vs. value investment that EA/DICE have done with the single player. In a desperate attempt to out-CoD CoD, they created even bigger cinematic moments, even more near death experiences and scripted rail events.  And for whatever reason, they did a poor job of it.

So, you might ask, ZeGerman, if you are so super smart, what exactly would you do differently?

I am glad you asked! Here is what I would do:

-          Don’t worry about characters. Games like this will never manage to create a meaningful character the player can relate to.

-          Don’t worry about narrative. At least narrative related to characters. Don’t tell the story of an individual or a squad.

What I would do is find a great premise for a contemporary large scale war (personally I would love to see a Soviet invasion of Europe during the height of the cold war – similar to Red Storm Rising) and tell the story of individual BATTLES, not people. The war itself is the narrative, told in briefings of generals and politicians. Imagine getting briefings akin to what RTS games do. Bookend each battle with a nice cut scene and you got yourself a story element. Similar to RTS games, this story can be told from BOTH sides, not only giving more background, more depth and knowledge about the war, but also providing the player with choice and replay value. Imagine playing BF4 as both the US and China. See the war from both sides. See how each battle won and lost changes the outcome of the war. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Remember this?

Gameplay and AI

As I said above in some cases BF4 actually is quite enjoyable. Brief moments of great gunplay, driving a tank, sneaking around a LAV and planting C4 or a mine – all these really are elements present in the multiplayer, and thus highly enjoyable. Another thing done well in BF4 is the points and weapons caches. Throughout the game you get points, very similar to the ones you get in multiplayer, and upon reaching certain scores new weapons are unlocked. The player is able to switch weapons several times in a map at weapons caches, liberally placed in all missions. Great stuff!! However, as with everything in this game, it could have been so much more!

The single player never really leverages the key strengths of the franchise:

-          Open maps with multiple routings

-          Multiple classes

-          Vehicles

-          Destruction

-          Character/weapons progression

Imagine the example I gave above, a war in Europe, battles in various areas being the missions for the player. Imagine these battles have different setups and available resources in each location. A battle in Germany for example might be on predominantly open and flat terrain, primarily fought out with tanks. A battle on Iceland, to take control of the NATO submarine warning system, is primarily fought by paratroopers, on rocky ground with light helicopter support. A battle in the Austrian Alps is foot soldiers only, camouflaged to melt into the snowy background. In Turkey, Special Forces battle through the streets of an ancient village, only infantry fighting vehicles in support, but airdrops coming in periodically.

Each side has tickets (same as in multiplayer), and whichever side runs out of tickets first loses that battle. There are no check points. If the player dies, he spawns back at the base, able to change class and/or take one of the available vehicles and re-join the fight. Locations, terrain, interface, assets – all are based on the multiplayer and sharing is not only encouraged but a ground rule.

Take it a step further. Character, weapons and vehicle progression is shared with multiplayer. Points I get for a class while completing single player battles, help me rank up my multiplayer characters. Weapons I unlock in either game mode are available in the other. This way one game mode can help me out, and help me get better, in the other.

Feel daunted by multiplayer because you bought the game 6 months late? Don’t worry – play the single player, learn the maps, rank up, unlock weapons and then be better prepared for playing against real people – use everything you unlocked.  Stuck in a hard part of single player? Play the map on multiplayer, learn it, rank up, unlock weapons, perhaps even leave yourself some supplies if you win a multiplayer match on that particular map, then go back and use the gained stuff to your advantage to progress in single player.

It does not stop there – constructing the game this way can lead to seamless 4 (or more) player co-op. Similar to Diablo 3, drop in/drop out co-op is possible on any battle. The underlying tech is there. The ingredients are all there really. The knowledge to pull it off is there. The focus just seems to be elsewhere. The focus is still with these bombastic single player war games that last 5 hours, which are forgotten once they are completed (if they are completed at all) and which are completely disconnected from the multiplayer component.

One thing is missing though, a key thing to make this work: AI

To put it nicely, the AI (both enemy and squad) in BF4 is atrocious. I could give you a lot of lengthy explanations about this, but I think this video sums it up better:

In my opinion, that is where EA/DICE should invest. Enough with all this narrative, cinematic bollocks. Enough of trying to shoehorn gameplay into a jumbled up mess of a story, involving one character or squad. It does not work. It worked for games like the early CoDs because they followed an actual war progress and thus were limited geographically and also tied to a longer timeline (i.e. it makes sense for one squad to do the Omaha beach landing and storm across the Rhein – there was 10 months in between the 2 events and only about 500 miles).

Telling a story about a large scale (even global) war is great, and it certainly provides a lot of materials for maps, different locations and gameplay and of course DLC, but it makes little to no sense to have 1 person be active in all theatres of war, it makes no sense to ship one squad to do all these tasks.

Battlefield 4 shines when it is all down to the basics of its gameplay. It falls apart when narrative and squad relations are introduced. Waiting by a locked door for my squad to arrive only to hear another quip about a burger bar in New York takes me out of the action and immersion, right back to my living room, making me painfully aware that I spilled beer over my favorite t-shirt during the last, intense, fire fight.

Is all this easy? No, it’s not. Of course it is not. But in my opinion creating something like the suggestion above can save a chunk of time and money in one area (cinematic, narrative driven single player), which can be focused on another (AI) and in the end there would be an overall Battlefield package, which could redefine the experience. It could have something for everyone, and you could play the game however you wanted, always contributing to an overall progression.

Playing the multiplayer for Battlefield 4 (when it works) makes me forget time. The single player makes me consciously aware that I probably wasted away 5 hours of my time and got little in return.

PS: EA/DICE – feel free to use any and all of the above suggestions for BF5. There is no need to pay me, and I won’t sue you for stealing ideas. Do me a favor though and send me a free copy of the game, perhaps consider a “Thank You” credit. You are welcome!