Battlefield: Bad Company

Battlefield: Bad Company launched in June 2008 simultaneously for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, bringing a new approach to DICE's series - instead of a purely serious military conflict, it offered the story of a squad of mercenary soldiers with dark humor and a bombastic singleplayer campaign the series had previously lacked on consoles. The game's key selling point remained extensive environmental destruction built on the Frostbite engine, which let players shoot through building walls, level entire structures, and change the tactical situation on the battlefield on the fly.

Both console versions launched the same day and were very close in both content and technical terms - Battlefield: Bad Company was in fact developed as a console title with no planned PC version, which was unusual for the Battlefield series, since up to that point it had primarily positioned itself as a PC affair with titles like Battlefield 1942 or Battlefield 2. Differences between the Xbox 360 and PS3 releases were minimal and mainly involved small technical details, loading time length, and the use of trophies instead of achievements.

Only the sequel Bad Company 2, two years later, brought the series back to PC, while the first game remained an exclusively console affair of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generation and is still only available on those two platforms today.

The lack of a PC version was unusual at the time especially because Battlefield had a strong historical fan base of multiplayer battles on computers - but DICE decided to focus Bad Company purely on a console audience with a simpler, more accessible campaign centered on a buddy squad of characters.

The console release thus functioned more like an experiment in how the series could behave outside its traditional PC home - the emphasis on destruction and the B-movie humor of the mercenary squad proved to be a successful direction that DICE went on to further develop in the subsequent Bad Company entries, this time with a full PC version alongside both consoles.

Why play it: For its emphasis on destructible environments and the B-movie humor of the mercenary squad, which proved to be a successful direction developed further in later entries, Bad Company is worth trying as a console experiment outside of PC.