Ideas for making Battlefield campaigns interesting again

@Blackidus The implication here is that Battlefield campaigns were ever consistently interesting in the first place - they haven't been. Hell, I'd go so far as to say that they were never really "good," much less "great."

The first 4 games in the franchise were Multiplayer only with the only single player content being playing against rudimentary bots on the regular MP maps. Bad Company 1 was the first in the franchise to have a full single player campaign (aside from the console version of BF2, which itself barely resembled BF at all and was mostly about a "soldier swapping" gimmick) and I'll argue until I'm dead that it was the only game in the franchise to have a legitimate good or interesting story. Instead of being about saving the world or being the lynchpin in a war between the US and Russia, Bad Company 1's story was just about cleaning up Haggard's mess when he goes AWOL to steal some rich dude's gold (hence why the Rush mode was originally called "Gold Rush" and why we fought over gold caches, not Mcom stations).

While Bad Company 2 gets some praise for it's humor (because most players never got to experience BC1 because it was not only a disc-based console exclusive, but it released before the major FPS boom on the platforms), said humor was drastically toned down to the point of only really being present in the names of some trophies and some dialogue exchanges with the SP characters, and the story was no longer some silly adventure but a serious story about how B Company discovered a WWII-era superweapon and prevented a Russian extremist from detonating it over the US before ending on a cliffhanger involving the RU military invading the US ala Red Dawn.

After that we got BF3 and the series immediately started seeing criticisms about how the campaigns felt lifeless and generic. The humor from the BC games was completely gone as DICE decided that BF3 has to be super self-serious, and the campaign's story was once again a generic war hero story that wouldn't feel remotely out of place with the typical CoD campaign from the time (in fact, CoD MW3 was basically the same thing with just as little likability in the characters).

BF4's broken campaign only compounded the complaints of the series's story being overly generic and a massive waste of time (only made worse by the mountain of game and progression breaking bugs that never got fixed).

It's always fun to come back to game forums/communities a few installments later to see the things that were complained about at the launch of the games that came out 10+ years ago being pined for by users making posts today.

> Solo/co-op gameplay wich brings the class system from multiplayer into the campaign with it the squad and teamplay aspect.

That's not going to happen because it requires DICE be able to program bots that actually follow orders and can acknowledge the presence of the player in ways other than "shoot at them." If BF2042's Portal Mode is any indication, DICE can't get bots to play the game well to save their lives.

> You need to play as a squad/team to make it through missions, no one-man-army style gameplay.

And this won't happen because "one-man-army style gameplay" is what Battlefield is these days and has been marching down that path since EA bought DICE in 2006. Ever wonder why you could beat BC1, BC2, BF3, BF4, BF1, BFHL, and BFV's campaigns without ever having to worry about anything but your health and ammo supply? It's because hardcore, squad-based tactical shooters stopped being the most popular form of FPS on consoles since Halo and CoD4 proved that far more people are interested in such "war hero power fantasy" games than they are in tactical shooters at all.

> The campaign starts with you choosing a class to play, or start of a mission if you choose to replay a specific mission (or story, this would work as war stories as well).

This bit just sounds like it would require way too much work from DICE because they'd have to figure out how to make every mission playable with each of the different kits rather than what they've been doing; which is letting players use whatever weapons they want and giving them the gadgets they need to tackle obstacles as they're presented (there's a reason you get AT weapons handed to you before a tank shows up in every story; they don't want the tank to halt the player's progress because the causal gamers who make up the majority of sales/players don't like anything that slows them down). Just as well, there's the prevailing belief among game developers that the player must accomplish everything in a game - that the mark of a good companion AI is that they support the player but never take the spotlight away from them (in other words, the AI can help clear the way for you to completely an objective, but they can't do it themselves because it takes agency from the player).


What you seem to be looking for is a game like SOCOM, but if we're being honest, that franchise is long dead for a reason - when it was a strict tactical shooter with an emphasis on squad-coordination (even giving you AI squadmates to command in SP), the franchise averaged a few million sales per installment, and when Sony tried to change it to make it more appealing to CoD's massive playerbase, the OG community wanted nothing to do with it (and casuals didn't buy it because PSN was out for the month it launched), and when it sold and reviewed like garbage, Sony pulled the plug on the whole dev studio - having decided that there was no way to get a non-power fantasy shooter to sell well (which hasn't exactly proven untrue in recent years as games like Squad, Arma, and Insurgency lag massively behind CoD, BF, and Halo, which are all super casual power fantasies.



Honestly, BF would do best with not having the campaign, as 2042 didn't, but not diverting that saved money into another side-mode that most players won't touch - just pump all of the budget into refining the traditional BF experience, making tons of content for the game, and properly bug testing/fixing it BEFORE release, not months afterwards.