News - EA reveals campaign details for Battlefield 4

[Spud1]

I'm very surprised anyone goes near single player in any of the BF games - like many here I bought BF3 purely for multiplayer and have pre ordered BF4 for the same. I did try loading up the BF3 campaign once before deciding that although better than BF2's, it was still a rather poor show compared to its contemporaries..and have not touched it again.

I can see why they need to spend money on it though, as the console versions of BF3 in particular were crippled enough online (even smaller maps, no 64 player mode etc) that you need that single player experience to sell it.

I know they have separate teams to work on each aspect of the game but part of me does wish they would focus purely on the multiplayer and give up pretending they can do SP - we'd likely get an even better game as a result.

[crossy]

I'm very surprised anyone goes near single player in any of the BF games - like many here I bought BF3 purely for multiplayer and have pre ordered BF4 for the same. I did try loading up the BF3 campaign once before deciding that although better than BF2's, it was still a rather poor show compared to its contemporaries..and have not touched it again.

I was clearing out some old emails at the weekend and came across one from EA on "Getting the best from BF3" and they were pushing the campaign as the ideal way to get some hands on practice before diving into the MP abuse.
And personally, the BF3 campaign made a lot more sense than the fractured mess that was the BOps2 one!

I can see why they need to spend money on it though, as the console versions of BF3 in particular were crippled enough online (even smaller maps, no 64 player mode etc) that you need that single player experience to sell it.

The guy in the local Gamestation recommended (strongly!) that I bought the PC version rather than the XBox version that I came in to pre-order BF3. Having a reasonable PC I followed that advice and changed to a PC pre-order. Later on I was able to get a copy on the XBox cheap and was struck how incredibly poor it was - ignoring the "low res" graphics, there were also a load of graphical glitches and some of the hit/object detection was distinctly dodgy. I've played through the PC version multiple times, but only once through on the XBox - it's just too annoying...

I know they have separate teams to work on each aspect of the game but part of me does wish they would focus purely on the multiplayer and give up pretending they can do SP - we'd likely get an even better game as a result.

But this is EA, so you know that if they dropped SP then it's unlikely that you'd see that effort transferred to multiplayer.

<rant>
The focus on online only really gets my goat - and to switch into a Saracenic mode - I'm also pretty tee'd off by the way that EA, Activision, Ubi etc want you to supply social information too - like Twitter accounts, Facebook id's etc. It's bad enough that my system has to host Origin/uPlay/etc and all the crap that comes along with PC games like Punkbuster etc, but now they want details of my contacts, people I'm interested in etc?

I remember when real care was taken with the SP modes - with detailed and engaging storylines, CoD4 (MW1) gets (rightly in my book) held up as an example of how to do it right. Now SP is (as given in the EA example above) regarded as merely a way to prepare a user to go online. Which then also leaves them wide open to be sold all that lovely DLC (map packs) or "extended" access - e.g. CoD Elite.

This means that someone who can't MP - either because they're not clanned up, or family commitments won't allow the long @night play sessions, or because their internet connection sucks - is definitely going to get short changed, (I'm in the non-clanned/other-commitments camps). For example, while CoD/MoH/BF map pack DLC is readily available, when was the last time that you heard of - for example - extra mission DLC's being available for SP? Last ones I saw were for Assassin's Creed (the awful US-based one).
</rant>

That said, BF4's destructible cover looks sweet and the details of the campaign mode that have been leaked make it look like it's going to be interesting and "worthy". Think there will be a pre-order being placed shortly, only question being whether to do it direct (with Origin), via Game, or via a supermarket deal. I'm waiting to see if there's any "just gotta have" deals on offer. Oh, and based on the experience with BF3, there's no way that I'm going to be placing that pre-order on Xbox!

At the moment though, I'm counting the days until my Saint's Row 4 pre-order is delivered (via Steam).

[dasundnc]

Nice…………

[ConnorLowe]

I generally only ever play games for multiplayer, and hardly ever play the campaigns (unless they are renowned for the SP like Halo or Gears of War).

As for BF, I feel that they should focus solely on MP rather than spending time on SP

[crossy]

I generally only ever play games for multiplayer, and hardly ever play the campaigns (unless they are renowned for the SP like Halo or Gears of War). As for BF, I feel that they should focus solely on MP rather than spending time on SP

Halo "renowned" for it's campaign - in what universe? Don't know about all the spinoffs, but the last proper Halo (Halo3) had a pretty shoddy campaign as far as I was concerned, (and even more annoyingly I went and bought one of those special editions - the one with the master chief helmet). Halo3 was so good, (sarcasm), that I never bought another Halo title after it - and don't intend to buy any of the new ones either. I played a couple of sessions of Halo MP and was very, very unimpressed - the groups I got invariably seemed to consist of solely juvenile 'merkan's whose vocab seemed to consist of at least 33% invective. BF3 on the other hand, I've had a couple of good sessions on, although domestic circumstances make it damned difficult to do anything more than about 30 minutes, and BF3's vaunted "matching" algorithm didn't impress at all.

As I said in earlier posts, EA dropping the campaign mode won't necessarily mean that the MP gets better - you can't assume that they'd move the development resources from campaign to the online play. Plus, surely you'd still need some kind of training mode for the BF newbies?

I will not buy any game thats MP only, or even one that's co-op and MP only. Plus I thought Counter Strike was the MP aficionado's game of choice?