Keith Stuart meets Bad Company’s multiplayer producer and gets some hands-on time with the latest Battlefield bruiser….

Last week, Electronic Arts held a showcase for its latest titles, jamming journalists into a small Islington studio, where we sat on an exciting revolving auditorium that juddered round to face the various game demos in turn. Each title got its own stage area, sort of like a videogame equivalent of Later With Jools Holland, although sadly, there was no jam session. There were only two titles of interest to us, the loooong awaited Mercenaries 2, which was embargoed so we can’t talk about it, and the enticing Battlefield: Bad Company.

As you may know, this is a new slant on the legendary FPS series with a heavily character-driven single player mode. Here, players take on the role of Preston Marlowe a member of the ficticious Bad Company – the guys that the US military sends in before risking the soldiers they actually care about. Together with comrades Sarge, Haggard and Sweetwater, you eventually tire of your cannon fodder status and go AWOL, apparently on a quest for gold – a la Three Kings, which along with Kelly’s Heroes is a major influence on the story. From here, it’s mission-based shooting fun all the way, your AI controlled compatriots blasting away merrily beside you, each with their own distinct skills.

But this being Battlefield, the main focus is on the 24-player online option, which features eight maps and initially one mode – Gold Rush. This is a team-based point-to-point challenge, where one side must protect boxes of gold, while the other attempts to destroy them – when the attackers clear one area of treasure chests, a new one opens up. I got a good hands-on with the Harvest Day map which spreads out over a huge area of Eastern European-influenced grassland, dotted with busted up farm buildings. The visuals seem more gritty than, say, Call of Duty 4; there’s a rougher texture to everything, giving it almost a documentary-style look, which belies the generally lighter-hearted feel of the game. Weapon handling, too, feels more authentic, with my machine gun spraying all over the shop, riddling nearby walls and shrubbery with smoking holes.

Yeah, the really big news is destructable scenery. Thanks to DICE’s advanced Frostbite engine, almost everything in the game can be blown to blackened chunks. “When we first started developing the game, it took us by surprise how much the destruction added to the game play, and the effect it has on the level design,” says multiplayer producer Jamie Keen, who I think witnessed me accidentally crushing two members of my own team to death in a jeep, but politely let it pass. “The battlefield changes so much the whole time. Emergent gameplay was a bit of a buzz phrase a couple of years ago, but this is very genuinely emergent gameplay – the situation changes constantly, you can’t just sit there and go, ‘okay I’m going to cover this area’… now you have to adapt to the way the game’s changing, because the wall that was there suddenly isn’t, opening up new avenues of fire for both attackers and defenders”.

At one point during my hands-on, a teammate got into a tank and was happily trundling along when an RPG squealed out of nowhere and blew it to pieces – where the vehicle once stood there was now a gaping hole in the ground. I hoped in – nice cover. This kind of tug of war with the scenery is fascinating, one minute you’re safely ensconced within a stone hut, firing through a small window, the next a grenade has taken off the roof. And three of the walls. There are limits placed on the destruction - “24 guys fighting in a field isn’t very interesting,” points out Keen, accurately – but he reckons 80-90% of buildings can be destroyed.

The objective-based gameplay, together with the tight maps and the squad spawn option (which, similarly to Battlefield 2, lets you join a group of three other soldiers and spawn to wherever they are) has created an intense new take on the Battlefield experience. The fights are crowded, fast and messy, there is nowhere to hide. I was concerned, though, that my preferred tactic of sneaking around the parameter of the map and attacking from behind the enemy base would be ruled out in this frenzied new combat theatre. “We don’t want to direct the combat,” reassures Keen. “We want it to remain open and sandbox-like as much as possible, so, yes, you’re going to get into these real crucibles of action around the objectives where there’s a lot of stuff going on, but at the same time it keeps that feeling of choice. You can go where you want to go and solve problems the way you want to solve them. The vehicle, weapon and gadget gameplay is updated but it’s all stuff you’ll recognize. If you played a lot of Battlefield on PC, a lot of the skills you developed are going to transfer over.”

The feel of the game varies over the course of the eight maps, too. As Keen explains, “Certain maps are geared toward certain types of play, ranging from very tight infantry play to really open vehicle gameplay, so you’ve got helicopters and boats, etc. From point-to-point some of them are 50 metres, some are 500 metres. The largest are up to 2KM.”

Keen is happy to address the two major controversies so far. EA originally proposed to charge for extra weapon downloads, but a furious reaction from gamers forced a quick backdown. The company then announced it would be providing a traditional Conquest mode as a post-release freebies download. “We tried a few ideas with the beta, but it’s really important for us to maintain a good relationship with the community – they were obviously unhappy about it and we thought it was important to react. Everything is going to be free to download.

“And of course the Conquest mode will be available for download after the release of the game. And that was a big thing that came out of the demo – people really missed the Battlefield experience that they’ve grown with. Conquest is a very different pace of gameplay, Gold Rush is a very intense point-to-point experience, Conquest is slightly more sedate but adds a lot of tactical complexity, because you have to be thinking about more than one area at one time.”

Out in June, Bad Company will be the first serious competitor to the sublime Call of Duty 4, and of course has its own built-in fanbase of veteran PC shootists. But can it tear us away from CoD? It’s a different feel, of course, the vehicle element, beautifully transported from PC, completely changes the tactics and adds in those hilarious running-over moments. From my very brief hands-on, I’m thinking DICE has taken the right route with this console translation of its precious series. I’m thinking my CoD play will be radically scaled down this summer.