Ode to Hatred towards Battlefield 4

You know what? 9 out of 10.

The graphics are in place and in perfect order. You’ll laugh, but on PC the picture is even better than on PS4 and Xbox One. Neither the first console nor the second will have a resolution of 1920×1080, so today we are walking around and enjoying the graphics and the feeling of our own superiority over those who have yet to spend $400 on a new console and another $60 on the game itself.

Everything around is jumping and exploding so much that you just can’t help but turn all the settings down to zero so that there are no random textures and lights flickering in multiplayer. But in the single-player campaign, you can see all sorts of things. There are tourist views, there is drama. The first cards are about how you have to get out of a sinking jeep by shooting the windshield and sacrificing three of your comrades to Poseidon… well, you’ve seen that in every trailer for the game, you know. After a couple of seconds, your partners for the prologue needs will resurrect with Tarantino-style Vincents and engage in introductory battles. Then the carousel will only pick up speed.

And the multiplayer, what a sight it is! There you can perform those signature tricks, play with new devices, shoot through walls, and traditionally tell the whole internet how many times you slept with whose mothers without taking a break from the game last night and woke up this morning before going to school! Each map is a separate story, each respawn is full of new anecdotes.

And achievements, achievements. Throughout the first week – and probably beyond – a gamer is showered with a golden rain of multiplayer achievements, progress bars, and other bonuses. That’s why it’s not Lord-10-out-of-10: since the previous part of Battlefield, the project has been using a positively impossible system of launching the game from the browser. Maybe if you’re still using this crap from BF3, you don’t even notice it anymore. But when a new person buys BF4, they first have to download Origin – okay, a half-empty naked Steam from Electronic Arts, not scary – then log in and set up a profile on the BF profiles website, then find the game mode you want on the same website, and only then will your signal “IT’S TIME TO START ALREADY” be sent back in reverse order – with synchronization in Origin – and maybe you’ll end up somewhere on the map.

But upon arrival, there are milk rivers and jelly shores described above. Everything is cool-cool-cool. I hate Battlefield 4.

***

BF4 is like some kind of classic Hell, where digital demons systematically torment a gamer who longs for normal plasma guns.

Take this starting scene, for example. Maybe it’s just me being a horrible person, but when I shot the glass of a sinking car, I didn’t feel any emotions other than joy. Hooray, this time they won’t let me run around without annoying bot teammates and a soap opera on the radio. Goodbye, polygonal losers, rest in the depths of the sea, I’m going to play the campaign.

And then, from around the corner, comes this: “Hey, buddy, you rushed it,” and the holy trinity of computer teammates resurrects, I’m sure, precisely with the goal of taking away that feeling of joy and freedom. And also to drag you through the second attempt called “Cinematicity.”

Cinematicity in games is a controversial thing. When the camera flies around cheerfully and the display is filled with an atmospheric palette, it’s very cool, but all these movie-like things are not worth a damn without their own virtuoso maneuvers. Here’s how you can do it: you can write a headshot while jumping from the third floor into an underground parking lot, or you can have a skyscraper explode on the horizon and “press A to dodge the debris.” You know yourself what is interesting and what is not, but here’s the thing: no one has taken away the automatic rifles from the bots yet, and without scripted circus acts in the single-player about Modern Warfare, there would be nothing to do at all. That’s why sometimes air support will come to you, then two abstract Taliban will teleport behind you, then the camera will get drunk again.

Amazingly, there are games like Quake 3 Arena, where there was no single player mode at all, but instead it immediately started with multiplayer mayhem. Only projects of not very high quality follow this pattern, while in games with a big budget and AAA titles, they still force-feed you a story and put you in yet another corridor-labyrinth. At the same time, subtly poking you with a pitchfork and reminding you that the Devil is in the details.

The interface of BF4 is simply mocking me. For once, they showed classic 100 hit points, but only so that after being wounded for 67, you still get regeneration in the corner, sadistically grinning. Honest life bars, like in Dead Space, are they the only ones left?

Because of this infamous health regeneration, multiplayer terminators run around in my personal hell. You join a random server and see that everyone’s statistics are just statistics, but there is also Him. Horror on the veteran wings of two in the morning in Moscow. He knows where noobs will never throw a grenade, he will fight off a pompous assault on a fortified area, but then he will find each and every one of you. He is your archangel of victory/archdemon of defeat, he simply bathes in regeneration and technical superiority. Tell me later about the disgusting mechanics of jumps and rocket jumps.

And the lowest point is when you realize that BF4 has a ton of different modes, a bunch of gimmicks, hectares of maps, and digging into all of this is much more interesting than actually getting kills. Wow, they’ve packed so much content in here! Here we have Chinese training grounds, there you parachute from a helicopter, on the third map there’s a mode called “four teams, each for themselves,” and there seems to be no end to this happiness. But the nature of the game is such that it’s easier and more enjoyable to jump around like a crazy noob on servers, switching classes on the fly, than to bother with anything at all. Why? It’s all just a stupid game of hide and seek or a brawl, depending on whether you’re stomping the map with your feet or settled in a tank.

You can spend hours and days playing BF4; it’s like some kind of trance, where it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, there’s action on big maps, suspense on small ones, and achievements everywhere. Your senses are in sync, the game is great, and then you either give in or go play something more human.

P.S. And also, don’t play Call of Duty: Ghosts, it’s just the same as the ninth one. Battlefield and Call of Duty are so different, yet equally mentally disturbing. Like a regular cheeseburger and a double cheeseburger from a well-known fast food chain. Well, okay, you can give it a ten with a wagging tail, muhaha.

P.P.S. And also, Origin still doesn’t allow taking screenshots; the internet suggests launching Origin through Steam for screenshots. Perverts.