I’ve written a bit this week on both the enormous success of Activision’s first-person shooter franchise Call of Duty and on the newly revealed,gender-balanced Call of Duty: Ghosts multiplayer.
Now EA and DICE have released a series of videos of Battlefield 4 player “testimonials” accompanied by footage of some pretty crazy-looking gameplay in the game’s sprawling multiplayer mode.
To be honest, it looks pretty good—a step up even from 2011′s Battlefield 3.
I’ve actually been consistently impressed by what we’ve seen out of Battlefield 4 since I attended the big unveiling of that game in San Francisco earlier this year.
Of course, the reveal demo was running on a monster gaming PC well out of the budget reach of most gamers and far, far more powerful than the Xbox One or PS4.
What the final release product will look like by comparison remains to be seen.
Here are
the testimonials, which could be viewed as a sort of shot across the bow at Call of Duty Ghostsmultiplayer, revealed just two days ago.
The timing, in any case, would suggest as much.
So here we have a massive map, helicopters you can pilot, tanks you can “ride away into the sunset” on—it’s all very sprawling and huge and full of buildings crashing into the bay and so forth.
In the Call of Duty: Ghosts multiplayer we see something very different. Maps are more confined, environments and structures not as destructible, and you don’t get vehicles.
There’s a more contained, skirmishy feel to it, just like every other year, whereas Battlefield has always been about “battlefields” rather than “maps.”
I could go on and on about ways these games are different, but it would bore all of us so I won’t.
Here’s the Ghosts multiplayer again:
The two games, just like every other year we’ve seen them release together, are extremely different in spite of the fact that they’re both military shooters. This is a good thing.
We can debate which is better all day long, but it won’t make a difference to the players loyal to either series (let alone those cross-over types who play both!)
If you want a competitive shooter that pits soldiers against soldiers in relatively confined maps, you’ll stick with Call of Duty. If you want big levels with all sorts of vehicles, you’ll go with Battlefield (or possibly Halo.)
I guess that while there’s always talk of the one vs. the other, to me it seems like the two franchises are actually targeting different audiences.
I guess that while there’s always talk of the one vs. the other, to me it seems like the two franchises are actually targeting different audiences.
I hope they both continue to do so, rather than try to ape the other. For instance, the Battlefield 4 single-player game has become more similar to aCall of Duty campaign, and from what I can tell this appears to be true of the upcoming entry.
Meanwhile, there were moments in the multiplayer Ghosts reveal that showed off some destructible buildings, calling to mind the Battlefield games.
I’d honestly prefer it if these games did more to innovate rather than trade ideas back and forth like Android and iOS or Windows and Mac.
Then again, I think the fabled “Call of Duty market” is just that: a fable, that many publishers tell themselves is a real thing. Call of Duty has cornered its own demographic, and other companies need to work on cornering their own, too. There isn’t some mainstream audience out there just itching for the next big shooter. There are a dozen non-mainstream audiences, however, but they’re each after something different. Call of Duty is one of them, Battlefieldis another, but there plenty more.
As far as I’m concerned, Battlefield is a pretty good of why copy-catting as a strategy rarely works. I don’t think Battlefield 4 is a huge threat to Ghosts not because I have any idea which is better, but because I know they’re different enough that players buy them to fill different gaming tastes/needs/desires. Unless one is a terrible game or abandons everything that its former players loved about it. That happens sometimes too.
Rather than crafting a multiplayer game that simply attempts to one-up Call of Duty, Battlefield has always had its own distinct flavor of competition.
Upcoming games like Bungie’s Destiny and Respawn’s Titanfall (published by Activision and EA respectively) appear to be at the very least trying to insert new gameplay ideas into the mix.
And maybe the advent of these new games—and perhaps even the scrappy rise of some smaller franchise on PC—will change the annual debate soon enough anyways. Maybe we’ll be asking who can tap into that lucrative, mythicalDestiny market, or if Titanfall can finally break their arch-nemesis’ sales numbers.
Then there’s the free-to-play DUST 514 on PS3, a game designed to play as companion to the sci-fi sandbox MMO EVE Online. This is more of a persistent battlefield style game. Planetside 2 is an epic shooter in its own right, occupying the oddly sparse FPS-MMO niche.
So there’s lots of different types of shooters, and each finds its own success bydifferentiating itself rather than copying someone else. At least, that’s the ideal we should be striving for.
Which of these games is better is, once again, left to the eye of the beholder. Or maybe it’s just up to what we feel like playing at any given time.
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