Fresh off of somehow managing to dump 8 or 9 hours into the recent Battlefield 6 open beta, with all of the claims of it being something of a “return to form” after the lackluster performance of the last two games, I started to wonder exactly what that “form” is, or at least what people really mean when they say that sort of thing. While it may mean something similar to a majority of people, it’s totally subjective, I’m sure, and that conclusion has led me to reflecting a lot on my own time with the Battlefield series.
“Hitchting a ride to the frontline in the BF6 open beta.”
While I’ve mentioned it once or twice here over the years, I’ve never gone into my absolute adoration for Battlefield 1942. One fateful day a co-worker who I occasionally ran into, and probably the only gamer I knew of at that place, was telling me all about how he’d just started playing this new “Battlefield” game and was talking about how you could do anything from crew a tank, fly a plane, or even captain a battleship in these massive, crazy online battles. This sounded a lot like World War II Online, which I’d been intrigued by but was always intimidated by due to its reputation for having clunky, simulation-like controls, but he assured me that it played more like a typical first person shooter. I was skeptical but curious. After doing a bit research I concluded that I just had to try it out, and picked up the game in something around November 2002. It was apparently a good recommendation, as I put an unspeakable amount of time into its multiplayer between 2002 and 2003, and even recruited a lot of other friends and co-workers to the cause. While I played a ton of mostly asynchronous “door” games like Legend of the Red Dragon on dial-up BBSes, Doom modem to modem, and Quake on the Internet in the 90s, apart from the very different Ultima Online, BF1942 was the first online game I was utterly obsessed with.
I was partial to infantry roles and focused on *gasp* playing the objectives, which in its default Conquest game mode, was kind of the point. I’m not a total dork though – I always enjoyed abusing tanks when one happened to be available too, of course. I also remember going out and buying a new flight stick so I could better handle the game’s relatively simple but fun to fly aircraft, and while I was never the best pilot out there (to this day, there are some people that have legitimately scary levels of skill when it comes to flying in these games) I more or less mastered the bonus Coral Sea map and would consistently clean house on it. F4U Corsairs and Zeros winding around those hilly islands is a core gaming memory for me, and I even made my own dog fighting map, filled end to end with huge mountains and massive valleys to make those kinds of pursuits even more fun. It also inspired me to take one of my first stabs at video editing, putting together a video of me dog fighting on Coral Sea in the pre-YouTube days. Unfortunately I’d have to strip out the sick Iron Maiden soundtrack if I were to upload it anywhere, plus the video quality is likely beyond abysmal by today’s standards.
“Flying through a canyon (sideways) in my crappy BF1942 map.”
Probably reading about it on a Battlefield forum or a gaming news site, I ended up joining a semi-private tournament community called Battle for Europe. The basic idea behind BFE (and the other communities I’m about to mention) was actually kind of simple – add a persistent, progressive campaign around Battlefield 1942’s already huge battles. The fact that the game included maps representing battles all around World War II and players could pick from axis and allied forces meant all you’d need to do is organize regular matches, keep track of losses and victories, and tie it all together with a Risk-like campaign map. It was a great idea, though it might sound quaint these days since persistent player progression is now fairly standard, and while the Battlefield series may not have any sort of long term campaign progression, other games like Foxhole and the aforementioned World War II Online have done this to varying degrees too. (Editor’s note: For posterity, it’s worth noting that BFE was probably better known for applying this concept to other World War II games released around that time such as Day of Defeat and Call of Duty, and ran for several years after this.)
The battles themselves were absolutely epic! We filled out the 64 player slots on our server, plus extra observers, and had a ton of people on standby. How did we account for having more than 64 people in the community who wanted to play? Easy! We made the matches last as long as possible and ran these battles all day. Literally hours on end, with the idea that players could tag in and out, ultimately supporting a lot more players, and across multiple timezones to boot. As a whole our player base represented a wide variety of skill levels, though of course most of the types of people who’d join a dedicated community like this were at least above average, and the battles would be correspondingly vicious. While not quite a “milsim” or realism community of the sort that would later become popular with a variety of military shooters, we also had a player ranking system in which players could advance, as well as take on particular roles which, given the limited number of vehicles and need for a well balanced roster, was also a must. Leadership was especially vital if your side actually wanted to win, and I soon found myself being promoted to a squad leader, and then to an NCO role where I was in charge of something like 50 players. Speaking of, strategy was an interesting aspect of these long matches, as unlike a typical clan versus clan league or tournament match, there was way more than enough time for the other side to figure out exactly what you were doing and adjust to it, which made active leadership all that more important.
“Creeping up to an enemy spawn in a BF1942 WGO match.”
The reasons were a bit hazy at the time, never mind today, but there was a growing air of discontent around much of the BFE BF1942 community leadership, and as is often the case, there were people who had their own ideas of how they could do the whole thing better waiting in the wings. Several of the more vocal community members banded together to leave BFE and “roll their own” calling it War Games Online. With many of those involved being people I liked and respected, I was asked and accepted to come along for the ride, thus becoming one of the founders and administrators of this new community. I also signed up to help with the development of our new site which we had some pretty cool ideas for, such as an interactive campaign map. While this would take some time, we went ahead and launched our first campaign as something of a proof-of-concept. I still have fairly visceral memories of at least one intense and chaotic match on one of the semi-asymmetrical Road to Rome maps, which were new at the time. Sadly the whole thing went a bit pear shaped pretty quickly due to the head of our new community suddenly stepping down. As he wanted to maintain the WGO name, the rest of the leadership council spun it off into yet another new community called Global Conflict. I was starting to play Battlefield 1942 less and less by this point thanks to other distractions (namely Planetside) and I bowed out very early into GC’s life. While I ultimately had very little influence on what Global Conflict would become, it lived on through various games and is still around in some form today, which is very cool to see.
All that, and I didn’t even mention the fantastic Desert Combat. Desert Combat was a massive total conversion mod that introduced a ton of new weapons, vehicles, and maps to the game, shifting its focus from World War II to a now very familiar modern setting. While I never played it in any organized way, I spent a huge amount of time with it, and have especially fond memories of huge, immersive tank battles in desert maps, and there was absolutely nothing like hunting ground targets in an A-10 or SU-25 on the classic BF1942 map El Alamein. (Editor’s Note: Like many old games and mods, even ones as popular as Desert Combat was, there’s little detail online about it, though I stumbled upon this excellent series of posts about the game that I can’t help but to share – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)
“I loved tank battles in BF1942 but there was nothing like Desert Combat.”
Another reason that Battlefield 1942 (and Desert Combat) is important to me is that it is a rare example of my dad really getting into a game. My dad’s taste in games has always been totally enigmatic to me. Simply put, certain seemingly random games over the years have really grabbed him, but attempts to understand his tastes and turn him onto other, similar games has usually been met with a lukewarm response at best. He’d always been a World War II nerd, and as I was still living with my parents at the time, I showed him BF1942. Not only did he think it looked cool, but he watched me play round after round, eventually asking me to let him play, which then became a regular thing. This was kicked into overdrive when I showed him Desert Combat, and one evening coming home from work to find him on my PC playing a match. My dad barely touched computers, so the fact that he figured out how to get online, start up Battlefield, and get into a match all by himself was kind of shocking to me. Some time later I built a new computer for my brother which came with the added bonus of enabling my dad and I to play together. With one of us driving/piloting and one of us gunning DC’s various helicopters, planes, and tanks, mowing down endless hordes of bots was a hell of a lot of fun.
Around the time my excitement for Battlefield 1942 started to wane Planetside came into my life and in most ways supplanted it, though there was a brief time some months later when I got a little burnt out on Planetside and decided to go back to Battlefield 1942, even trying out for a semi-sweaty clan called The Devil’s Brigade. They had kind of a template for how they’d assess potential new recruits, running me through various exercises that involved things like attacking a small bunker with multiple clan members defending it, and inversely, attempting to defend solo as they relentlessly attacked it. While my skills probably peaked before quitting to play Planetside, I was still pretty decent at the game, and it was actually kind of a thrill to be tested like that. I recall doing so-so overall, though I wasn’t exactly sure how well I was supposed to do in these scenarios, and I got quite a few kills against other members of the clan that I thought would be sure to impress, and sure enough, I was accepted. They seemed like a cool group of guys and I was really looking forward to playing with them, but I also felt like I owed my loyalty to my existing friends in my Planetside outfit, The Praetorian Guard, more than any potential new ones there, resulting in having a change of heart and regretfully bowing out of TDB before putting much time in with them at all.
“Choppers were freakin’ everywhere in Battlefield Vietnam.”
After TPG’s original stint as a Planetside outfit slowed down, we were constantly dabbling in various other games together, sometimes in a fairly organized way, but often times we’d just all just squad up and hop into public games, not really employing all that much teamwork or anything. When Battlefield Vietnam was released in 2004 I and several others in the clan were hyped enough for it to pre-order it or otherwise grab it on launch day, and we played it together as a semi-disorganized group quite a bit. Unfortunately there was something about Battlefield Vietnam that just didn’t gel right for me. I don’t know what it was – the map designs, the asymmetrical armies, the particular combination of vehicles and weapons, the helicopter controls when compared against DC’s, subtle changes to the engine, or maybe some odd mix of all of those? Of course, I know it’s one of the more fondly remembered older titles in the series so I’m not claiming to be in the right here, but I really only kept playing it to play with my friends, with a dwindling hope that maybe something would eventually click.
“Hitching a ride with my old TPG buddy Blood in BF2.”
It’s a similar story with Battlefield 2. I was extremely hyped for an official DICE take on what we got earlier with Desert Combat, especially since the guys who made DC would be helping out, and there were a lot of undeniably cool enhancements to the engine and the gameplay in general, including a new squad system, persistent player progression (which would be a staple of the series from that point on) and the introduction of the RTS-like commander mode that saw one person on each team giving orders, dropping supplies, and otherwise attempting to direct and assist the fight from afar. When the Battlefield 2 demo built around the Gulf of Oman map dropped, a few of us played it like absolute madmen and really, really dug it. When the full game was released, most of the core members of TPG dove in as well, though it ended up not hooking me to anywhere close to the level I expected it to. Looking back now, I honestly don’t remember why that was – perhaps it was a similar situation as with Battlefield Vietnam, though I also have some vague recollections of having some technical issues with the game that might have kept me from playing as much as I wanted to. As an aside, I did briefly return to BF2 years later to play with some of its bigger mods, as mentioned here.
“Look, proof that I didn’t totally suck at Battlefield 2!”
I skipped the BF2 follow-up/spin-off Battlefield 2142, despite the fact that, given my love of the similarly sci-fi heavy Planetside, you’d think I would have been all over it. In fact, to this day I’ve still never played it. Not long after this, I started cutting way back on PC gaming and focused a lot more on console gaming, particularly single player games. I’d played the demo of Battlefield 2: Modern Combat on my Xbox 360 after watching a friend play it and thinking it looked pretty cool, but skeptical of Battlefield’s place on console, it wasn’t until Battlefield: Bad Company’s single player campaign that I gave it a fair shake. I dabbled with its multiplayer as well as its Xbox Live Arcade spin-off Battlefield 1943, as mentioned here, but I was a little late to the party on that one, and my Battlefield 1942 skills didn’t survive the transition to being played on a controller in any case. I fully intended to play through BC’s sequel’s campaign as well, though it wasn’t until I found out that it had become the flavor of the month online game for a lot of my old TPG friends that I picked it up on PC and joined in.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 felt like something of a return home for me. The maps were smaller and less chaotic, with smaller player counts, yet perfectly balanced the map sizes, player counts, available vehicles, and all kinds of nifty new counters. It also focused on the more linear Rush mode over the series staple Conquest, which worked really well with that particular formula. Throw in a simple player progression and weapon unlocks system, and the awesome Destruction 2.0 and, man, it was a ton of fun. While BC2 was much more of a fun diversion for me than an obsession like with Battlefield 1942, I racked up a good 20 hours or so of multiplayer and have a lot of fond memories of playing it. I do still need to go back and play that campaign one of these days, though! As a quick aside, I recall being intrigued by the launch of Battlefield Heroes, a title that often gets left out of these kinds of retrospectives, but alas, I never actually got around to trying it. I thought it looked kind of neat though.
“Man, I miss Bad Company 2. This dude was too close to miss, though!”
Somehow, the impressive looking Battlefield 3 with its more realistic models and animations, added cinematic flare, and a post-Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare overhaul of infantry movement and gunplay didn’t reel me in when it was released a few years later. I think this is chiefly because I wasn’t gaming that much at the time, and when I was it was still usually focused on more single-player experiences on console. That, coupled with a lot of highly publicized technical issues at launch and that few if any of my friends were playing it, meant I gave it a miss entirely. The story is exactly the same for Battlefield 4 and the odd cops and robbers spin-off Battlefield Hardline. I thought all of these games looked cool, but I was increasingly feeling like the Battlefield series was no longer for me. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder what I might have missed by skipping those games, especially since 3 and 4 are always mentioned as points of comparison when discussing the series these days – I’ll probably at least go back and play through their campaigns one of these days.
Battlefield 1, however, really caught my attention, and it just so happened that I’d built a new PC around the same time as its pending release and was itching to do some legitimate PC gaming, and a lot of my old TPG friends were jumping into it too. Between that, and the fact that the game was actually really good, it was the first Battlefield game since BC2 that I spent any quality time with. It wasn’t perfect – I’d have preferred another World War II title to a Battlefield set in World War I when everyone is anachronistically running around with automatic weapons, and I generally didn’t love the weapons and vehicles as a result. Still, it had more than its fair share of uniquely awesome Battlefield series moments. Similarly to BC2, I wasn’t crazy addicted to it, but it did become my random pick up and play online game for a while there, temporarily unseating Planetside 2 from my rotation.
“Over the top, boys! Probably seconds away from death in Battlefield 1.”
Like a lot of people, I was initially very excited for Battlefield V’s long overdue return to World War II, but then very concerned when EA released the reveal trailer featuring a mismatched squad of resistance fighters rather than your typical uniformed grunts, and graphics so bright and colorful that were, compared to Battlefield 1’s often dreary environments, absolutely retina scorching. That, and the marketing of the game focused on a female sniper from the group with what looked (at a glance) to be a bionic arm, which left me scratching my head. No, I’m not going to cry about female characters and minorities like a lot of Battlefield V detractors, but it did make me question what tone DICE were going for with V. It was feeling like it might be more of a less serious, perhaps even alternative history take on World War II, and combined with the news that it would include a Battle Royale mode and some of the other details coming out, such as “Elite classes” hinting at a more hero oriented system versus the generic classes of old, it really made me skeptical of the entire game.
Randomly feeling the urge to play some Battlefield, I actually ended up picking up Battlefield V super cheap during a Steam sale just last year. I played a couple of single player campaign missions as well as put a few hours into multiplayer, and I surprisingly really enjoyed what I played. Mind you, this was after years of patches to fix the game’s issues and dial back a lot of the more controversial changes, but I can’t help but think that this game was mostly a victim of a now seemingly misguided marketing push to make the game more attractive to Fortnite Battle Royale players coupled with the ensuing hate campaign made up of gamers all too happy to leap onto the bandwagon to trash the next big EA game. I’d always intended to go back and finish the campaign and play some more multiplayer before writing about the game, and hopefully I still will one of these days.
“About to mess up some Messerschmitts in Battlefield V’s campaign.”
Somehow even more depressingly, Battlefield 2042 went right over my radar upon its release in 2021. After the somewhat troubled release of Battlefield V and a rather rocky initial reception due to a number of technical, marketing, and gameplay fumbles, including going even further down the hero shooter class rabbit hole with its new “Specialists”, it never really appeared on my radar either. At least, not until it had been patched and expanded so much that opinions on the game finally started to gradually shift, though as mentioned above, that just ended up resulting in me buying Battlefield V instead. Given that it didn’t have any sort of campaign, it’s likely that I’ll never check it out, but never say never!
So that brings us to August 2025, when rumors about Battlefield 6 started to appear, and then early but very positive sneak peak impressions and preview event impressions started to build up in short order, culminating in the announcement of an open beta. I couldn’t really ignore the hype any longer, and I decided to check out the beta, but more on that much later, when I’m hopefully talking about the game we eventually get at retail!
Believe it or not, most of these screenshots, even the really ancient ones, are mine. Apparently I don’t delete things enough!