Why BC2 Dedicated Servers Aren’t Serious Business

There’s been a lot of grumbling lately in the PC community over dedicated servers for Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Mainly, the complaints are that dedicated severs must be rented from DICE, with the ability to mod them completely removed. Isolating Bad Company 2 by itself, it certainly seems like they are pulling another Modern Warfare 2 and using this system as a way to force PC gamers to buy DLC. But this isn’t the first time a Battlefield game has featured this.

Battlefield 2 essentially used the same system. In order to gain XP to unlock weapons on BF2, you had to play on a ranked server. In order to acquire a ranked server, you had to buy one from EA. While modding and 3rd party dedicated servers were allowed in Battlefield 2, they were rare and hardly used due to the lack of XP.

I understand the opposition to this system of acquiring dedicated servers, especially after MW2. The Frostbite engine seems like an extremely powerful choice for modding. And the fact that DICE said they aren’t doing this for profit is laughably absurd. But this system is nothing new, and shouldn’t come across as a surprise to any Battlefield veterans. Who knows, maybe the console will be hacked and all sorts of modded servers will pop up.

The open beta for PC is starting January 28th; let’s hope it isn’t an awful laggy mess. Bad Company 2 is going to inevitably be compared to MW2 at every corner. Bad Company 2 can’t afford to look bad in comparison.

Who am I kidding, its EA. They can afford to screw anything up.