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.

“It is a discussion about niche and mass market, I think. If you make your product more niche, you’ll get more happy fans, but that audience will be smaller – some people won’t care, some people will love it.

“When we did the original Bad Company and the sequel, we got a lot of criticism. Why would I play this? It’s not a serious shooter, I don’t care about this. I want a serious shooter with a more hard-boiled angle. And we thought it was fun! We loved it, we thought it was a great game. The narrative was amazing and the characters were amazing.

“So it’s not that we’ve buried the crew, so to speak. But it is true that for some reason if you want to make a game for the masses, you need to be more neutral when it comes to things like humour, because humour is very personal. Some people love it, some people hate it.”

Creative director Patrick Bach also talked about whether humour wouldn’t be the way to go, seeing as how characters like Nathan Drake crack a quip more than once. “He’s not really funny. He’s serious, but he’s kind of ironic. I’m happy for franchises that can do that. I think Bad Company was perhaps part of that group. I love franchises that don’t take themselves too seriously.

“I think that games in general can be anything. Sometimes you get the feeling that the community and the press only think there’s one type of game, the ultimate game, and for me it’s becoming more and more diverse, much like the movie industry, which I think is a good comparison.

“When you started out it was quite serious, because it was an expensive business to make a movie, so you’d [effectively] have this stage drama that you’d film, but then you start to add comedy to it and make money off that, and turn it into a genre, and now you have all types of genres, where it isn’t just based on comedy, drama, documentary, or whatever – it’s also how you consume those movies.”

Regardless, will this affect our chances of seeing another Bad Company game? Never say never, but it will be a while.

“My feeling is that I would love to do it. For me, when we started the company with 1942, it was really a work of passion. And then we worked our way through the era of different wars, and I loved them all, like my little babies. When it came to Bad Company, it was creative freedom; don’t take yourself too seriously.

“But trust me, the Bad Company [team] isn’t forgotten, they are just on a very long vacation. So they are out there, they’re coming back.”

Currently, DICE is busy with Battlefield 4, Mirror’s Edge and Star Wars: Battlefront, with the latter two slated to release on next gen consoles sometime in the next two years. Meanwhile, Battlefield 4 launches on October 29th in North America for current-gen, with next gen releases on Xbox One and PS4 due in November.

(Source)

According to the site, “Electronic Arts‘ hit video game Battlefield: Bad Company is headed to the small screen. Fox has put in development Bad Company, an hour-long action comedy based on EA’s bestselling video game from Alias alum John Eisendrath, Sony TV and studio-based Happy Madison.

“Written by Eisendrath, Bad Company features the main characters from the game. It follows four renegade soldiers as they exit military life and enter the private sector. But trouble is never far behind as they realize their commanding officer had used them to further the ends of a shadow unit within the government and now wants them dead to cover his tracks. Eisendrath is executive producing with Happy Madison’s Doug Robinson and EA’s Patrick Bach and Patrick O’Brien.”

But that wasn’t the only question on people’s lips. What about the fabled Bad Company franchise, providing a nice alternative to the series’ mainstay.

Troedsson commented on Bad Company’s present AWOL status, “There’s a lot of things inspiring us as to how the franchise will move on. Everything from fans’ feedback, to market research and, of course, what we want to build ourselves. It’s not just one single thing”.

“We still want to stay in this genre, the modern day as it is. We feel this is a place we can be and continue with the series. Battlefield 4 can live in this space and be very successful.”

“That doesn’t mean there might not be a Bad Company game again in the future.”

So never fret Bad Company fans. The future is still bright.

However, another crowd of gamers is wondering whatever happened to Battlefield: Bad Company. After the second game of the series – lauded for serving as a great alternative to the more mainstream Call of Duty franchise – it seemingly phased out.

In response to plans about the absence of Bad Company, community manager Ian Tornay stated on Reddit:

I can tell you that it’s not due to any lack of love for BC inside of DICE. Everyone I’ve talked to there is very proud and fond of it.

So Bad Company is still very much alive but in what shape and form we’ll see a sequel in the coming future remains to be known.

Source: Videogamer

The new add-on will have four players playing as a team, facing endless hordes of enemies who just want to put a bullet in your head, have lunch, take a quick nap in the living room and kick some ass again.

It sounds hard, but we have got some advice from the executive producer Patrick Bach on how to play this mode properly:

“Keep your squad tight and make sure to experiment with a mix of different kits. It’s all about finding the right weapon for the job. You wouldn’t try and blow up a tank with a sniper rifle – even though you CAN headshot people with the repair tool, actually.”

The Onslaught DLC was recently released on XBLA as well.

The new Downloadable Content introduces four player co-op, so that you can team up with your friends and kick some ass. The add-on also features new enhanced Valparaiso, Nelson Bay, Isla Inocentes and Atacama Desert maps. The maps have been visually enhanced as well, and to add to the element of strategy, the vehicle placements have also been changed.

“The co-op mode requires you to complete a specific objective, which demands a high level of teamwork and effective use of vehicles,” says EA.

Onslaught is availible on Xbox LIVE and PSN even right now for 800 Microsoft points and £6.80 respectively.