God almighty do I have a bone to pick with Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which I bought on release day like a mark. The game is doing quite well for EA, having already sold 2.3 million units (and projected to sell 4 million by the end of the year). So that’s ahead of expectations—it’s a hit, have a party. The thing that annoys me (and Matt, for that matter) is the game’s implementation of checkpoints. There’s not nearly enough of them, and it’s infuriating. I was very close to lighting my monitor on fire last night.
First off, why do PC games even have “checkpoints” in the year 2010? I give all the credit in the world to Dice for actually taking the time to create a PC port, but is implementing a “save anytime, anywhere” feature so hard to implement? It’s a PC game: I expect to hit F8 9 million times before I finish it.
I don’t want to hear any nonsense about how the inability to hit F8 helps create “tension” and “atmosphere.” No it doesn’t. All it does is make me want to throw my computer out the window, the re-create the scene from Office Space.
It wouldn’t be so bad if every single enemy didn’t have an RPG. It’s ridiculous: “hey, you just survived a tank coming out of the middle of nowhere, no we’re going to throw RPG-wielding bad guys at you, hope you can survive.”
I can’t survive! And because of the stupid save system, I have to replay the previous 15 minutes all over again! To quote Bill Burr, this is unacceptable.
Modern Warfare 2 used a checkpoint system, too, but its checkpoints ticked pretty much every seven seconds. It’s annoying to have to put up with checkpoints on a PC game, but at least Modern Warfare 2‘s were frequent enough that it wasn’t an issue.
So aside from the gigantic pain in the neck, yeah, the game is fun—I figure I’m about halfway through with the single-player campaign (I have no intention of playing multi-player).
Checkpoints in PC games should be outlawed. Tack that onto the healthcare bill, please.