I picked up both Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 (for Xbox 360) on their respective launch dates. I was excited to play both with Battlefield offering something new for me and Modern Warfare was the next title in a series of games that I quite enjoy. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with both games in the two months or so that they have been out, and I find my copy of Modern Warfare 3 sitting on the shelf more often than not as I play Battlefield several hours each week having a blast. This post isn’t an argument as to why Battlefield is the superior game to Modern Warfare, it’s why Battlefield is the superior game for me.
The Call of Duty franchise has been a mainstay in my console since the original Modern Warfare and I have picked up each title since, enjoying hopping online and playing with friends. It was a nice change of pace from my go-to FPS title, Halo. I was excited for the Call of Duty franchises return to Modern Warfare and as soon as I picked it up I was anxious to get hope and hop online and get to the online playing. I spent several days with the game playing Team Deathmatch and other game types online. It was fun, but I found myself a bit bored and a bit frustrated.
The maps seems to have no rhyme or reason to them and are essentially just mazes of buildings to run through hoping you are the first guy to pull the trigger when you turn a corner and come face to face with a member of the opposite team. In all previous titles in the CoD series I have not used shotguns more than I have in MW3, but I found they were the most useful for this type of game play and found my game improving after I settled on the fact this was the best tactic. Then there are the kill streak rewards. Constantly throughout every game played there is some sort of ridiculous kill streak being used, raining hell fire down from overhead padding the kill-death ratios of those who called upon them. I use them myself obviously, but there is something slightly less satisfying knowing that your 27-3 K/D spread was mostly due to calling in an AI chopper to do away with all the poor guys that didn’t equip the proper class to hide them on the map. Not every second of every match needs to be filled with bombing runs, attack helicopters and other over-the-top attacks covering the map in explosions decimating the other team to keep me interested, but perhaps this is needed for younger gamers than myself. After a few days it occurred to me that this was just like all the other Call of Duty games: Chasing red dots on the map to build up enough kills to unleash a killstreak reward. It just wasn’t as fun as it used to be.
A few weeks prior to MW3, Battlefield 3 dropped. I had played and enjoyed the beta and was eager to hop into the full game. My experience with the Battlefield series was limited to playing the single player campaign in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, but I was looking forward to something new and what I found really impressed me. Air and ground vehicles for support, four classes to provide a role to play to support your team, no ridiculous kill streak rewards and most importantly: a first person shooter game that encourages team work by rewarding you for it. My friends and I immediately took a shine to the Rush game type and jumped into it feet first. Here was a game where the point wasn’t to try to get an amazing kill-death spread, but to work as a team towards the objective. You could score just as many points as the guy who got 25 kills in the game if you were distributing ammo, healing team mates, repairing vehicles, and accomplishing the objectives. Sniper rifles didn’t shoot perfectly straight over a mile distance – you had to account for bullet drop due to gravity and shotguns won’t instantly kill you from fifty feet away.
When I get online to play a video game with friends, I want to play with them, not just be playing the same game as them and Battlefield promoted this. It wasn’t long until within our squad we had all taken on our own roles and were great at working together tackling objectives. If one needed more ammo, there was someone to supply it; if a man went down, there was a medic to revive them; if a tank was damaged an engineer was on hand to repair it and keep it moving. Over and over again we found ourselves in epic battles holding down an objective, all working together and warding off wave after wave of attacks as buildings crumble around us thanks to the awesome Frostbite 2 engine.
Battlefield changed my idea of what a FPS could and should be. No longer was it just about getting an awesome kill/death ratio as you chase red dots around a map, now it was about team work, tactics, skill and working towards a common objective on expansive, exciting maps. Here we are now over two months after both titles have come out and Battlefield has rarely left my console – and when it has it’s been to play Sonic Generations, Batman: Arkham City, or Marvel vs. Capcom 3 not Modern Warfare 3. My desire to jump in to MW3 has pretty much dropped to non-existent, especially as more and more of my online gaming friends convert over to Battlefield. The fact of the matter is that Activision has been pushing out the same game under the Call of Duty umbrella year after year, never really changing much, never trying to introduce something new. There are millions of Call of Duty fans who love the game as is, so this formula seems to work for now, but for me Battlefield offers something new, engaging and expansive that keeps me coming back for more.
For the time being I’m considering myself done with the Call of Duty franchise. Perhaps in the next few years Call of Duty will come out with a new game that completely changes the FPS landscape once again, but right now I know I can get $30 store credit at my local gaming store. That seems more worth it to me than holding onto a game that will do little more than sit on my shelf collecting dust as I defend my base against waves of enemies descending upon me at Damavand Peak.