One of the bigger games that was looking forward to in this mini-gaming season at the moment was the EA published Battlefield: Bad Company 2. After the largely disappointing blockbuster late last year that was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, i was looking forward to a game that actually respected the PC gaming community enough in order to at least continue with the previously taken-for-granted staple of having dedicated servers for online multiplayer.
However in the past I haven't exactly had great experiences with past EA published games, and also disappointingly, it has somewhat continued with this title. Simple bugs like having certain graphics settings not apply without having to manually change and reset resolutions were the most irritating. It's typical EA-type bugs, and you think it wouldn't kill them to do a decent job at QA since they are one of the biggest game publishers in the world with billions in revenue.
The single player is also somewhat short, and not that engaging. If I had to, i'd still probably rate MW2 as a better single-player game over BC2.
However probably the biggest compliment that i can give BC2 is that it has gotten me into playing an online multiplayer FPS combat game. I've previously avoided the genre, instead preferring other FPS titles for online play like Unreal Tournament and Team Fortress.
It seems like DICE (the developers) actually give half a toss about the PC gaming community, and recognise that it is a different and unique platform as opposed the consoles. Their support of dedicated servers and games of larger than 18 players is at least a basic acknowledgement of this (and they've jabbed Infinity Ward and Activision for MW2's lack of such a staple PC 'feature').
As a result, i never touched the MW2 multiplayer almost on principle, but also for many other reasons, BC2 offers a much greater multiplayer experience and is a far superior multiplayer game than MW2, even though the single-player doesn't quite match up.
I've been enjoying playing online for the past week or so, and whilst i don't think it'll quite match up to UT3's enjoyability in it's day, it is quite fun. However, bugs still plague this portion of the game too: you can't see server ping times unless you run the game as an administrator (i didn't know pinging was an administrative privilege :P), and the in-squad voice chat is extremely unreliable.
I think you're selling it short a bit here, I think it's a good sequel, albiet short. I enjoyed it heaps but i think they focused a lot on the multiplayer applications of the game, the single player game is a great continuation from the first, but i hope they bring back some more humor for a third installment, if they make a third installment
Yes, it is a very multiplayer-focused game (and i'm loving the multiplayer), but it isn't really much of a single-player game.
But that said, I haven;t played the original game (mainly because of my religious objections to FPSs on consoles)
first game is great and considerably longer when compared to this one, funny too. In this one they seem to have matured the characters, so they've lost some of the humor that made the first one so good