When I call Battlefield
4's story dumb, I don't do so with ire or spite in my heart. Battlefield
4's story is affably dumb, a big smiling lummox who's a good time to hang
out with. It's not dumb in the fashion
of a Call of Duty game, filled with
bombastic, stupid set pieces. I mean, it
has those. It turns almost entirely on
them, but they're not delivered with quite the self satisfied Michael Bay-esque
grandeur or smarm that many games fall back on.
The broad moments, and there are a lot of broad moments, have a kind of
humanness to them. That's where the
strength of the game's storytelling lies, its quiet enduring consideration of
humanity and of brief, tense moments of bravery and sacrifice.
That these elements are set against a backdrop of explosions
and bombastic, nonsensical action alloys them somewhat. The first set of "oh shit" moments
revolve around the death of your squad's leader, with a series of lead-ups that
prominently feature buildings collapsing and vehicles exploding. The end result is strange - you're being
asked to confront the mentality of a man faced with death in a time of crisis,
a man largely unconcerned with his own survival, against the set pieces and
action of a genre that normally dedicate themselves to making you feel like
some sort of crazy superman. In that
particular example, there's something that really, really works about the whole
array.
In other, later levels, not so much. In fact, nearly all of the set-pieces felt
far more convoluted then the first one.
The second level, which involves a fleet of junks following you out to
an aircraft carrier where the people piloting those boats are, in turn, taken
aboard, and pointlessly excoriated by the soldiers on this aircraft carrier was
particularly crazy, with heavy handed bits o dialogue mixed in with some
strangely melodramatic voice acting from Michael Kenneth Williams - much love for
Williams, he's strangely utilized here, with his menace cut and given a sort of
childish, spoiled air. His character,
Irish, spends most of the game after that first level skulking about how
following orders can sometimes be unpleasant, and throwing temper tantrums at
various officers who ask him to complete missions with less-than-perfect
intelligence.
There are also meaningless bits of dumbness, like the
elaborate prison break scene which constituted one of the more enjoyable set
pieces but, in its set-up and execution, made almost zero sense and relied on a
series of epically strange coincidences.
The end of the prison break scene, which involves a totally
underdeveloped character being sacrificed so that others could live, felt more
random than dramatic, however. And
perhaps that's where Battlefield 4's
dumbness comes in handy: it lacks the particular exploitative edge that Call of Duty presents its players
with. There aren't scenes where you're
forced to mime being dead or being shot arbitrarily before returning to
superherodom. There are just buttons,
usually oriented around the beginning and the end of each level, that involve
screaming "AHHHHH!" proceeded or followed by bits of expository
dialogue.
The end result is stupid, to be sure, but by and large it
keeps its hands of the gameplay of Battlefield
4. Perhaps that's where that
affability comes from. A Call of Duty's
single player game is all about bombast interrupting the course of play,
altering the nature of the game itself so that something can be expressed in a
given moment. Battlefield 4's single player
game is more about presenting the experience of playing Battlefield 4 with a
narrative backing. There's a sense of
epicness, inherent to Battlefield 4's
engine and play, but it's wrapped up awkwardly in a story you can largely
ignore, which, somehow, struck me as more pleasant.
It's worth noting that the arcade style play of the single
player campaign is also worthwhile. Iterations
on scoring reward unconventional types of play, as well as the more
conventional "pick your headshots" approach, and an interactive
scoreboard that constantly forces you into comparison with your friends is a
nice touch. There's something rewarding
about beating your friends at a meaningless contest, and the application of
arbitrary scoring systems to first person shooters, either to promote a
particular kind of play or simply to call attention to an existent play model,
can be pretty incredible. The first Modern Warfare game was actually pretty
exceptional in that regard, and featured a spiffy Arcade Mode system after the
game had been completed. There are also
iterations on "scored shooting" like The Club, but Battlefield's
reliance of plot, and the integration of rewards into its scoring system, sets
it aside. There's something distinct
about the way all these familiar elements are presented, adjacent to one
another.
So when I call Battlefield
4's single player story affably dumb, this is sort of what I'm talking
about. It's stupid, the story itself I
mean. It doesn't make a whole lot of
sense, it relies on readymade setpieces placed adjacent to one another and then
unraveled in a way you're likely to see coming a ways away. But the gameplay itself, and the odd sort of
pabulum moments saturating the grandeur and scale and stupidity (like a three
minute conversation about threesomes that occurs while waiting for an elevator
in one mission between two characters) is compelling in an unexpected way. Usually, dumb things are undone by their own
dumbness. Battlefield 4's single player game is like an exceptionally stupid
puppy. It's fun, it's always there,
sometimes getting in the way, but the end result of its tail wagging shenanigans
is a good time. Sure, maybe it'll piss
on something you own, and maybe its movements won't make total sense, but the
experience, as a whole, has something strangely compelling tying it all
together, a consideration of game that is oddly well suited to the Battlefield 4 structure surrounding it.
No comments:
Post a Comment