For context, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was well-known for how extensive its maps were when it came to allowing players to destroy buildings and objects. A running gag when it came to playing the 2010 shooter was that a dedicated-enough player could level an entire map. Since then, however, Battlefield games have toned down the destructibility of their environments, including immediate follow-up Battlefield 3, as well as more recent titles like Battlefield 5 and Battlefield 2042. With Battlefield 6, however, it looks like DICE wants to go back to Bad Company 2-styled destructible environments.

“When you look for excellence in our legacy, [Bad Company 2] is where you find it,” Chubb said in an interview with PCGamer. “That game particularly delivered on a level of fidelity and a sort of intimate destructive experience. Blasting out a single wall, bringing down a partial building, or entire buildings. It was comprehensive, and it felt like the identity of that game more than anything else. We know that was kind of missing from our last game, and we really wanted to go back to that.”

Quite a few details about Battlefield 6 have been coming out leading up to the first open beta period that will be kicking off on August 9. Producer Alexia Christofi had previously confirmed that the online shooter will feature more than 40 different weapons across various types that players can play around with. She had also revealed more details about how crossplay will work when the game comes out, noting that console players will still be kept in a console-only matchmaking pool even with the setting enabled. The pool will only expand to include PCs if the player has been facing difficulty in finding a match.

Christofi has also revealed some details about the server browser that will be available in Battlefield 6 through the Portals option in its main menu. This server browser will allow players to find, filter out, and join servers that not only form communities based on the same players frequently joining, but will also allow players to get full benefits of the game’s progression system.

More recently, EA has also revealed details about the anti-cheat system that Battlefield 6 will use on PC. The system – a new version of EA’s Vanguard Anticheat – will need PC players to enable Secure Boot through their BIOS/UEFI settings to ensure that things like kernel-level cheats that start up before even the operating system can’t be enabled.

Battlefield 6 is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on October 10.

Halo 2

You could make a case for any Halo game featuring on this rundown – Halo 3 for its gameplay, Halo 4 for its writing and character development, Halo: Combat Evolved, where it all began. But Halo 2 gets the nod here because it has all those standout elements but additionally its easily the most varied in terms of locations visited, with each locale itself superbly designed. The introduction of Arbiter Thel ‘Vadamee as a playable character not only put new weapons into our hands, but greatly expanded Halo’s lore too, presenting deeper purpose underlining Covenant motivations.

]]> 600361 https://gamingbolt.com/30-amazing-fps-games-you-need-to-play-2023-edition Wed, 16 Aug 2023 12:02:31 +0000 https://gamingbolt.com/?p=561576 The first-person shooter genre is one of the oldest in the medium of video games, yet it remains extremely relevant and popular to this date. Over the last three decades or so, fans have gotten the opportunity to experience a ton of amazing games of this ilk and this feature is a celebration of the best of the best. So, join us as we run down 30 of the best first-person shooter games of all time.

Resident Evil Village

The Resident Evil series has seen its fair share of remakes in the form of the stellar Resident Evil 2 and the disappointing Resident Evil 3, but it has consistently delivered high-quality follow-ups. These include Resident Evil 7 and its follow-up Village, the latter of which represent the best of what the series offers. Resident Evil Village majestically swerves from one kind of horror to the next without any hiccups, and the action keeps pace with the changing scenery and shifting mechanics. The core gameplay of shooting down zombies is much faster than Resident Evil 7, but it retains the heft and groundedness of a survival horror game that comes together to make it one of the best in its class.

While Battlefield 1943 was a multiplayer-focused title and will be essentially lost forever with this move, Battlefield: Bad Company and Bad Company 2 will still have their offline game modes available, which includes their single-player campaigns.

Battlefield 1943 was released as a digital-only game on the PS3 and Xbox 360, and was the first time console players could fight on the Wake Island map, which was originally only available on PC Battlefield games. It was the third Battlefield to be released on consoles.

While Battlefield: Bad Company was available only on the PS3 and Xbox 360, it was the first game to introduce the Gold Rush mode, which is now regarded as a staple for the Battlefield multiplayer experience in its current form known as Rush. Both Bad Company games also had a greater emphasis on their narratives, featuring a single group of soldiers from the eponymous Bad Company.

Both of them – especially Bad Company 2 – stood out because of how different they were from what one usually expects a Battlefield game to be like, and yet both of them managed to retain most of the franchise’s key strengths. 

But it’s been ten years since Bad Company 2 came out, and Battlefield has gone back to doing what it did best. With both Battlefield 1 and Battlefield 5, the series made very clear statements- that historical fiction is what it wants to be focusing on right now, and that it wants to go back to the grounded and realistic tone that older games in the series used to have. With the current direction it is headed in, and given how long it’s been since we heard even a peep about the Bad Company sub-series, is there any possibility at all that DICE will ever make a Battlefield: Bad Company 3? 

Well, there’s always a possibility. It’s not like DICE have roundly ignored that particular brand over the years. As infrequent and intermittent as they are, they do, every now and then, talk about Bad Company, and the possibility of going back to it some day (maybe). All the way back in 2011, DICE said that they hadn’t killed the Bad Company sub-series, and implied that a Bad Company 3 wasn’t out of the question. 

A year later, DICE once again expressed their love for the Bad Company games, and said that though they had nothing to announce, they would be foolish to kill off a brand that good. A year after that, in 2013, the studio made it clear once again that they did not have the time or resources to work on Bad Company alongside everything else they were working on, the series was by no means dead. And those are not the only times people at DICE have expressed interest in perhaps one day returning to the sub-series.

I know what you’re thinking though- developer quotes are all well and good, but they don’t mean nearly as much as business practices do. And that’s certainly what EA’s primary concern is with any of their brands, especially one as big as Battlefield– business. And that is completely correct. Even the aforementioned quotes make it pretty clear that though several people at DICE have a soft spot in their hearts for the Bad Company games, DICE and EA as business entities don’t prioritize that brand a great deal.

They keep thinking about it, sure, and of course they’re not going to say that they will never make a Bad Company game ever again – because what if they do – but it’s abundantly clear that that’s pretty far down the pecking order on their list of priorities. Charting Battlefield’s history in the last decade makes it clear that if there is something else that the series can do instead of another Bad Company game, it will do it. There’s also the fact that in the ridiculously competitive market of the military shooter genre, Bad Company might not have the sort of awareness and cache that EA wants it to have.

So does that mean that EA and DICE are never going to return to Bad Company 3? It seems unlikely right now that they will. Again, it’s clear that if they have to choose between pushing resources into a Bad Company 3 or a straight up Battlefield 6, they will definitely choose the latter, especially at the onset of a new console generation. But then again, they might not- just look at Hardline, which was clearly a side project that EA figured there was an audience for. In a similar situation Bad Company 3 is certainly something they could turn to. 

Something else EA have to consider – and most likely will be considering – is the competition. More specifically, Call of Duty. Activision’s behemoth franchise has seen a veritably resurgence in recent years, and in the instance of Call of Duty: WW2, they followed a very similar philosophy- banking on nostalgia. In both instances, they went about that very differently, but at the end of the day, that’s what they did. In fact, if rumours are to be believed, this year’s Call of Duty is going to do that as well with something of a Black Ops reboot.

After Battlefield 1 and 5 – both of which were very similar games – the series needs to shake things up again, it can either do so by changing the setting (and going with a modern setting in this scenario), or by trying to recreate one of its older success stories… or it can do both, and go with a new Bad Company game. We do know that Battlefield’s next game is in the works, that it’ll be releasing for the PS5 and Xbox Series X, and that it’ll be releasing in 2021. And it’s worth pointing out that neither EA nor DICE have specifically said anything about the nature of this game. It’s very possible that they try to shake things up with something that differs from the series’ recent output.

For now, admittedly, we don’t have anything but largely non-committal developer quotes (and old ones at that) and speculation – and most of all, hopes and dreams – to go on when we talk about a Bad Company revival, but it’s clear that there’s strong demand for it. The Bad Company games have a strong and dedicated fanbase to this day. On top of their excellent shooting and tight gunplay – which every Battlefield game needs to have – they also had some really good squad-based ideas that we haven’t seen in the series since, not to mention their character-driven stories (with really good characters, at that), and they revelled in failing to take themselves seriously.

We get far too many military shooters these days which are completely dour and grim – which is great, especially when they do that well – but there was a unique, irreplaceable charm to the Bad Company games’ flippant attitude and lighthearted tone that many people still yearn for. Whether or not EA and DICE decide to tackle something like that again any time soon remains to be seen, and it’s an inescapable truth that that decision will – first and foremost – be driven by business factors. But we really, really hope that we haven’t seen the last of Bad Company yet- and that it makes a comeback sooner rather than later.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

October’s Games With Gold on Xbox Live includes a relatively new IP with Frima’s Chariot available for free on the Xbox One. As an ID@Xbox title, it will replace Super Time Force when October begins.

The heavy hitters on the Xbox 360 though. From October 1st, Xbox Live Gold subscribers on the Xbox 360 will be able to download Battlefield: Bad Company 2. It will be available up until the 15th – the very next day, Vigil Games’ Darksiders 2 will be available for free until October 31st. Considering that both games have garnered a good amount of critical appreciation – besides Battlefield: Bad Company 2 having arguably the best campaign in the series till date – this is an excellent deal.

Things will begin heating up for the Xbox One as Forza Horizon 2 debuts on September 30th and Sunset Overdrive is out next month. What are your thoughts on the Xbox One at this point? Let us know in the comments.

DICE is currently hiring people to work on current gen and next gen games using the FrostBite engine. We’re guessing that this is Battlefield: Bad Company 3 they’re working on, since they have mentioned it several times before.

According to the job ad, DICE is looking to hire a Senior Software Developer who would be “a core part of an AAA game team where you will work with the Frostbite engine tech.”

The job ad also mentions that tasks for the hired employee would be “implementing new features and workflows for content creators, keeping track of performance and memory and optimizing for current- and next gen.”

Experience with the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, “deep knowledge in at least one game engine related area”, “excellent debugging skills”, “excellent C/C++ knowledge and used to working on large projects & codebases” and a few other are some of the requirements for this job.

As I said, my money’s on Battlefield: Bad Company 3.

Stay tuned for more info.

DICE has hinted at the fact that they will develop Bad Company 3 sometime in the future, and reaffirmed the fact that DICE hasn’t given on the more quirky sub-series yet too.

And with the Battlefield series performing so well lately, with BF3 selling 5 million units in just a week and becoming the fastest selling game and the biggest launch ever in EA’s history, it’s only logical to think that we’ll be seeing more of the series very soon.

So you might be interested in knowing that the name “Battlefield: Bad Company 3” has popped on a person’s CV. “Provided video game prototype, design and demo feedback on various AAA titles including the Battlefield: Bad Company 3, Dead Space 2, Devil May Cry 5 and other unannounced titles,” it says.

Now, this may very well be a typo. Maybe he wanted to write Bad Company 2, but wrote “3” instead. Or maybe he meant Battlefield 3. And with DICE just having finished development on Battlefield 3, and probably working on Mirror’s Edge 2 as well, it seems inconceivable that Bad Company 3 is already in development.

But what do you people think? Might it be that DICE has already started working on BF:BC3? Tell us in your comments below.

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DICE producer Patrick Liu said sometime ago that the studio would definitely like to return to the Bad Company sub-series, and that “we’ll probably see” a Bad Company 3. Now, in an interview with The Guardian, he has stated that DICE hasn’t killed the Bad Company series, and that they will continue working on it.

When asked about the future of the much acclaimed console sub-series of the Battlefield franchise, Liu said: “Well, we haven’t killed Bad Company! But we can only make so many games. Be patient – there might be something else coming up…”

But he also emphasized that DICE does not want to make Battlefield an annual series, and the studio doesn’t want to outsource the series to any other developer either.

“We always have a couple of projects going on,” he continues. “Some of them die, but some are more fruitful. We don’t have any plans to make Battlefield an annual title – we want to make it ourselves we don’t want anyone else doing it! And no studio can make an annual franchise by themselves – well, the sports titles can but they’re a very different breed.”

Battlefield 3, the first main installment in the series since 2005, releases later this month for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. Stay tuned for more info.

In an interview with Strategy Informer, when DICE’s producer Patrick Liu was asked if we would ever see the four lovable characters in the Bad Company games anytime soon again, he said that he didn’t know for sure, but that DICE would probably work on a new Bad Company game sometime in the future.

“I don’t know definitely, we don’t have any plans right now, but they are very loveable characters,” he said. “A lot of the guys at DICE love them so we will probably see them again. “

This is a little inconsistent with what DICE said some time ago about being ‘ashamed’ of Bad Company 2, so much so that he cannot even bring himself to boot up the game. But who cares? Bad Company 3? Fingers crossed!