Battlefield is back!!

And no, I don't mean the marketing shtick that BF Studios pedals when they wanna bait people to buy their new CoDField game. If you like BF6, more power to you, but this one is for the homies who've missed the Battlefield™ experience since Battlefield 2, Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 1.

I'm talking about Wardogs of course! Wardogs feels like Battlefield is finally back—not because it copies Battlefield’s spectacle, but because it seems to understand the thing that made Battlefield 2 and Bad Company 2 special in the first place: a match was supposed to feel like a journey through a war, not a sequence of gunfights. In Battlefield 2, six-man squads, squad-leader spawning, commander orders, supply drops, vehicles and huge spaces created stretches of play where simply getting your people somewhere, keeping them alive and figuring out how to attack a position was the game; Bad Company 2 simplified some of that structure, but preserved the adventure through wonderfully distinct maps, Rush’s sense of physically advancing across a landscape, needing medics on the way just to heal up, vehicles, and destruction so permissive that the route through a battle could literally change around you.

Beginning with Battlefield 3, DICE deliberately lowered the barrier to Battlefield’s more complicated teamplay systems, removed BF2’s commander role, and compacted maps in some versions to “keep the action up”—decisions that made Battlefield slicker and more immediately accessible, but also nudged it toward the modern military-shooter ideal of getting players back into individually satisfying firefights as quickly as possible. Wardogs almost runs in the opposite direction. Its enormous battlefield contains a randomized 2×2 km Control Zone; three factions have to determine how to reach and control it; transporting friendlies, reviving people, supplying teammates and holding objectives are explicitly rewarded; players can ferry supplies by helicopter, buy vehicles, construct forward operating bases and fortify chokepoints, or destroy the buildings somebody else decided to hide behind. Even the persistent cash economy gives all of those mundane acts of cooperation material value instead of treating them as charitable distractions from getting kills. And because the objective appears in different parts of a much larger world, the battlefield isn’t merely scenery wrapped around predetermined lanes: one match might become a desperate helicopter insertion, another a convoy across open country, another a squad stumbling into a town and turning it into a fortress before a third faction crashes into the fight. That is the old Battlefield magic—the quiet ride before contact, somebody unexpectedly doing something heroic or idiotic, the improvised plan that somehow works, and the feeling that you and five strangers actually went somewhere and did something together. Battlefield 1 briefly rediscovered that spirit through its atmosphere, Operations, enormous fronts and extraordinary sense of participating in a larger campaign; but Wardogs may be the first game in years that appears willing to build its entire multiplayer structure around the idea that the memorable part of a war game isn’t how continuously it can feed you combat. It’s the story of how you got to the combat in the first place.