Battlefield Bad Company 2 saw a burst of somewhat unexpected sunny publicity last year thanks to Infinity Ward’s decision to scrap dedicated servers for Modern Warfare 2 on PC. DICE’s Gordon Van Dyke was quick to reassure official forum posters that his game would tick all the boxes on server support, to considerable applause.

Bad Company 2 online has more going for it than a sound network backbone, of course. According to producer Karl-Magnus Troedsson (whom we accosted at a recent preview shindig), the franchise’s approach to team play “has always been deeper” than that of most rivals – and remains deeper today.

Asked if there was anything he felt other multiplayer shooters were doing wrong, Troedsson replied: “Well I wouldn’t say ‘wrong’ – I don’t want to judge people, other games like that. But for us – multiplayer, online play, we’ve been doing that since Battlefield 1942, and to us it’s open environments, it’s sandbox, it’s team play.

“Because team play – what we’ve done in Battlefield for a long time is team play,” he went on. “You play as squads, you play teams, it’s very important. A lot of the other shooters are still actually in team deathmatch mode – they have tons of different game modes, but they all one way or another are just people playing to get the maximum score.

“This game is deeper, and Battlefield has always been deeper, and that’s due a lot to the gameplay. Like for instance you can heal each other, you can give each other ammo, you can revive each other – we’ve got the shock paddles in now.”

We find this claim a little dubious, to be honest. Among other current generation highlights, Killzone 2, Left 4 Dead and Gears of War have all done compelling things with player revival, healing and ammo sharing. 1942 may have been a trend-setter, but Battlefield faces stiffer competition nowadays. What do you think?

The game’s out on 2nd March in North America and 5th March in Europe.

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