So Battlefield 6 will indeed have a campaign as well as multiplayer! Battlefield 2042 was content merely to have lore, as are many FPS online shooters these days, but by all accounts Battlefield 6 is going to include a full-on single player story mode just like mama used to make. And while the brief teaser trailer we've seen doesn't show much, it feels as though the tone is pretty clear – a straightforward, "ooh-rah" military campaign about defending the beloved US of A from an endless cabal of faceless hired goons.
Which is fine! I admit I'm always a little bit amused by any story that tries to portray America as underdogs, but lord knows it wouldn't be the first time a game has asked us to suspend our disbelief on that. No, what makes me a little disappointed is that the tone looks like yet another departure from the greatest and most subversive story that Battlefield ever did: the punk genius of 2008's Battlefield Bad Company.
"Hey, how ya doing? You smell very clean"
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For those who never played it, Bad Company 1 was a singular satire and not-so-sly middle finger at the American military and much of the culture around it. Our heroes were four useless oddballs who had been assigned to the most infamously inept platoon in all of the US army, and their purpose was clear: to absorb bullets. These grunts were pure cannon fodder, and the greatest indignity was that they knew it. If they survived, that would be fine, but nobody who gave the orders would be particularly unhappy if they didn't.
It's an amusingly unheroic angle to take on modern soldiery. And sure, protagonist Preston Marlowe is a bit generic, but the other three leads are a fun time. Haggard is a good ol' boy redneck who's never happier than when he's lighting the fuse on something, Sweetwater is a terrified dork who's become infatuated with the nameless woman who relays orders down their earpiece, and long-suffering Sarge is desperately counting the days until he's finally allowed to retire, eyes fixed on the fishing boat he has waiting for him.
"Contrary to something like Modern Warfare 2, Bad Company was a comment on the casual cruelty and indifference of the army to its own soldiers, its habit of treating them like disposable drones"
It couldn't be less patriotic in theme, and I love it for that. The reason for America's war against Russia is left amusingly unclear, and there's a hint of Catch 22 in the exhausted moaning that comes out of the squad every time they're told to go and soften the defenses of yet another enemy stronghold (survival preferred, but optional).
But then they discover that the Russians are hiring mercs paid in crates of bullion, and the four realize that they have a literal golden opportunity – to grab as much treasure as they can and bolt from the front lines. After all, their own country is sending them out to die every twenty minutes with zero gratitude or justification.
The four of them going AWOL isn't even framed as a bad thing! Bumbling dumbasses though they are, the game holds up this one choice as an entirely rational one. "If somebody is trying to kill you," it seems to say, "whether it's an enemy government or your own – fuck 'em." And when the team escapes in the game's finale with a truck full of lucre and the war still rumbling on behind them, it's presented entirely as a win.
You're in Bad Company now
The cynic in me still loves all this as a counter-argument to the increasingly gung-ho patriotism that military shooters at the time were leaning into, and which has escalated so much in the years since that you can literally donate money to the US Army (surely the most underfunded of organizations) in Call of Duty's in-game store. Contrary to something like Modern Warfare 2, which came out only months later, Bad Company was a comment on the casual cruelty and indifference of the army to its own soldiers, its habit of treating them like disposable drones. Even BC1's trailers were just a series of spoof vignettes making fun of other video games that took the military too seriously, like Gears of War and Metal Gear Solid.
Bad Company 2 would come out several years later. It was fun, and had a cracking multiplayer, but in my mind its story was a misfire. Now our team felt boringly competent, the jokes were less frequent, and a narrative about stopping a Bond villain from using his superweapon on America was treated too earnestly to be funny. No longer relatable schlubs, now B-Company now felt like a C-tier A-Team, and consequently were far less interesting for it.
It's a shame that military shooters these days usually don't have any real insight to them. Oh sure, the outlandish hero shooters or sci-fi FPS games are happy to be ironic or thoughtful at times, but the era that produced Bad Company and its tonal counterpoint Spec Ops: The Line feels like it was starting to build to something more, only to never go anywhere. There was a promise of an era where you could have a budgeted contemporary shooter that was still willing to think about the world and culture that it was set in, to have vision beyond the end of your gun barrel.
When I recently spoke with the devs for Battlefield 6, they told us several times that the Bad Company era was an inspiration for the game's destruction physics – but I just hope it ends up being a template for the story too.
