14 DAY TRIAL // DICE and its Battlefield Bad Company 2 are beginning to make a trend out of doing everything that Infinity Ward did with Modern Warfare 2, but in reverse. When IW said that it would remove dedicated servers, DICE jumped out and announced that it wouldn't, and when the MW2 servers got limited to 9 vs. 9, Bad Company was explicitly detailed as supporting a more classic multiplayer experience.
Overall, if Infinity decided to slap around the PC gamers, DICE has begun to cuddle them and bandage their wounds. What it's doing isn't bad at all, since it's not really hurting anyone, and there are no injured parties. The console gamers get what they've always gotten and so do the PC ones. It's just that cynicism and a skeptical nature make us wonder if this is true loyalty and dedication or just devious PR.
Battlefield Bad Company was a console exclusive, but its developers have decided to bring its sequel to the PC as well. One of the general concerns with this type of scenario is that, usually, games ported to the PC are just that, ports, not proper, genuine PC titles. The controls are awkward and frustrating, the menu is a maze and the overall experience is somewhat false. But Bad Company 2 promises to have none of that, and remembers that the game started out on the PC, not on the consoles, and it will behave like a proper PC title.
Gordon Van Dyke of DICE talked to IncGamers and said that, "On the PC, it's a PC version, which is getting that same treatment, and then also a little bit more as PC users are generally used to a different type of experience than console users are, and we recognize that and we want to make sure that we give that to the PC market and give the console market more." The game will also have one of the most popular and useful features that the consoles can't provide: a toolset.
The problem is that as the title's engine is still a fledgeling and releasing a developer's kit for the community is "really, really complicated" at this time. "Once we start getting there and the engine gets to a level where we can release tools that are easy for our own guys to use, and then easy for people publicly, then we'll get into that and we'll really start to focus on it. But it's definitely not something that we're like, 'oh, we won't do that' " Van Dyke added. The game is expected to arrive in March 2010, so, until then, the developer still has some time to get everything right.