One of the reasons why many Battlefield fans still consider Bad Company 2 their favourite multiplayer game in the series is its atmosphere.
By atmosphere, I mean the game’s general mood—the emotions it usually conveys through sound, visuals, gameplay, and story.
Bad Company 2’s multiplayer doesn’t have any explicit story and I have written about its gameplay elsewhere, so this post will mainly cover sound and visuals.
This game’s atmosphere is special. Recent games have better tech but they often lack the strength and focus of Bad Company 2’s atmosphere. Even games with strong atmospheres rarely approach the particular type of atmosphere BC2 has. If you’ve ever played it, you know what I mean.
In this post, I will try to answer what makes Bad Company 2’s atmosphere so potent and unique, focusing mainly on its sound and visual design.
Visuals
Bad Company 2’s visuals are realistic but not quite photo-realistic. Its graphics are still decent by today’s standards but they obviously bare the limitations of the PS3 and Xbox 360. Textures are a little blurry, geometry is noticeably angular, and environmental details such as buildings, terrain, and decals are repetitious and simplistic.
Yet Bad Company 2 employs its resources effectively. Dust, snow, leaves, smoke, sand, and mist fill the air. Smoke and dust linger long after being kicked up by explosions, collapsing buildings, and heavy weapons fire. The air has depth, often textured so thick you could almost choke on it. Bad Company 2’s battlefields are dense with literal atmospheric effects.
Even today, few games let anything linger in the air long. Air in games tends to be crystal clear, even in shooters. Perhaps developers are afraid of obscuring vision, or perhaps they don’t understand how important air pollution is in conveying a sense of reality in a warzone. To see what I mean, check out this video for a comparison between Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 2042.
Though Battlefield 2042 is technically superior, Bad Company 2’s atmospheric effects more effectively convey an authentic battlefield ambience. The haste with which Battlefield 2042 clears up its airspace (perhaps to save resources for its 126-player matches) leaves the maps feeling uncannily sterile.
Though Bad Company 2’s destruction mechanics are simplistic—with buildings made of square chunks, verses 2042’s dynamic destruction system—Bad Company 2’s particle effects accentuate the damage wrought by modern weaponry more effectively than 2042, where lacklustre effects consistently undermine its efforts to depict the terrible beauty of warfare.
Bad Company 2’s effects are also warmly coloured (except on the snow levels). Dust, smoke, and kicked-up dirt are rendered in deep browns, oranges, and charcoal greys. Bad Company 2’s effects are pleasant to look at, even cosy—more on that later.
Bad Company 2’s effects are often exaggerated. Gunfire produces large flashes of yellow fire and big puffs of gun smoke. Explosions are thick and heavy and generate dense clouds of dust that drift in the breeze. Bullet impacts kick up plumes of dust and grit and leave behind large holes. Windows, fences, bits of walls, and other objects explode in huge chunks. Even the weapon models are massive, like boltguns from 40K.
All this accentuates the most beautiful and destructive parts of combat–the fire of weapons and the destruction they inflict. Hefty doses of feedback make players feel powerful, yet the ability of other players to cause the same level of destruction impresses upon everyone the magnitude of the danger they are all in.
A BC2 battlefield is both a mesmerising and sobering sight.
Sound
Weapons are loud but games often fail to convey this. Bad Company’s weapons aren’t loud either. In fact, they’re surprisingly soft. But through the game’s masterful use of echoes, its weapons produce the impression of being loud without actually blowing out players’ ears.
Echoes linger after a weapon is fired. The longer you listen, the more the echoes drift away until your crack of gunfire is echoing off distant hills. The auditory aftereffect of firing a weapon is thereby simulated, accentuating the impression of power each gunshot gives without resorting to blasting your ears with loud noises.
The actual sound of BC2’s weapons is stylised to make them pleasing to the ear. Unlike many games, where firearms sound flat or harsh, Bad Company 2’s weapons make it a pleasure to listen to the roar of gunfire. You could go to sleep listening to the sound of Bad Company weapons fire and the echoes clattering off distant hills (not that I ever have … I’m just saying).
This quality applies to practically every sound in the game. Explosions, vehicles, voice acting, ambience, music—Bad Company 2’s audioscape is surprisingly relaxing. It conveys a version of warfare that is authentic yet stylised in such a way as to soften the harsh edges of realistic battlefield noise.
Sometimes, when playing, I’ll stop and look out across the map, and listen to the pleasant rumble of explosions, the groan of collapsing buildings, the rustle of crumbling walls, the soft hiss of bullet impacts, yelling soldiers, the whine of tanks, the hum of humvees, the growl of quadbikes, and thump and crackle gunfire—everything producing faint lingering echoes that trail far off into the distance, giving the landscape an even more expansive sense of scale than the actual playable maps provide.
During what should be the game’s loudest moments, such as when an explosion detonates right next to you, the game’s sound actually drops. For a moment, all sound is muffled, seemingly distant, and underlined by a faint warble. Most games that replicate tinnitus, like CSGO, play a high-pitched whine that is unpleasant to listen to. BC2’s rendition of tinnitus is brief, soft, and relatively low-pitched.
The sudden drop in volume during loud moments gives the impression that the noise surrounding the player is so great that it is deafening. The loudest noises are implied, letting players imagine them without actually enduring them.
Bad Company 2 thus preserves the softness and pleasantness of its soundscape while simultaneously conveying the impression of a deafeningly noisy battlefield.
Battlefield ASMR
Bad Company 2’s atmosphere is defined by its visual beauty and surprisingly pleasant audio. Its atmosphere is rich and vibrant, full of effects that exaggerate the tremendous destructive power that defines the gameplay experience. From the moment the first shot is fired, each match is transformed into a beautiful scene of destruction and gratifying sound. The game not only immerses you in the role of a soldier—it relaxes you into it.
Bad Company 2’s atmosphere perfectly fits the game’s casual gameplay experience. This atmosphere is one of Bad Company 2’s greatest and enduring achievements. It is such a hard thing to explain—and I’m not sure I’ve done it justice here—that I don’t expect DICE to recreate this experience anytime soon, if ever.