Destructable Environments

I've had my hat firmly in the Call of Duty ring for years, so the Battlefield: Bad Company series has pretty much passed me by until now. After seeing BC2 available for a mere £10 at my local game store I decided to give it a go, and I'm really glad I did. Up until now my only experience with destructible environments as a gameplay mechanism has been through the Red Faction series, but it makes such an impact on the multiplayer in Bad Company 2 that I'm astonished that people haven't been raving about it more loudly.

You see, one of my major gripes in all competitive online games these days is camping. People who stay crouched in windows or on roofs are the single biggest problem that I encounter online, especially with COD being full of people hiding in corners with the 'Ghost' perk on and silencers on their weapons, making for an extremely tedious experience. No problem in BC2, just jump in a tank and level the whole building! It's absolutely brilliant fun and I've found it so refreshing to be able to dictate what can and can't be used as cover by advancing enemies. The feeling you get when an enemy runs into a doorway only for you to lob at RPG round into the wall and kill them anyway is just exhilarating.

However one of the most interesting implications of this feature is found during objective gametypes, such as 'Rush'. If a team is finding it difficult to reach and arm the specific objective (usually located within a building) due to a particularly stubborn opposition team they can simply choose to level the building entirely, destroying the objective in the process. It would be interesting to see how this would translate into other games, for example imagine being able to blast a hole in the base walls during CTF games on Halo Reach, or destroying critical cover in Gears of War? It would be interesting to see how developers could utilise this feature in ways to impact more heavily on gameplay and level design in future titles.

DICE have implemented this feature in a way that makes it a key element of Battlefield's core gameplay. Given that we've already seen entire buildings collapse in footage of the sequel (such as the E3 demo) I can't wait to see how this dynamic has been expanded and refined for Battlefield 3 when it releases in September.