Did Someone Break the Savegame?

I wouldn't confess to being a great gamer. I wouldn't even consider myself to be hardcore (at gaming, anyway ... another story), but when I play games on the console I always pump up the difficulty to the hardest. This is not from some deep seated masochistic desire to inflict pain on myself (the pain I like to inflict for other reasons), but generally if you are going the 'softer' difficulty options then you really aren't interested in playing the game, you are just interested in saying that you finished the game.

I picked up Battlefield Bad Company last week after not really reading anything about the game. I had seen an early trailer of the game and then put the game in the "it's EA, avoid if possible" pile. I put the game in, pumped up the difficulty and started playing. For once I was surprised by the game. It was quite obviously using the battlefield engine and the game feigned being of the open world variety, but the dialogue was excellent and the story a little different from your usual.

It wasn't until I had died a couple of times that I realised that there was something inherently wrong with the savegame function. So wrong that the game stopped being challenging. So wrong that I even thought at times that the game could be as bad as Frontline Fuel of War and that is pretty bad. It wasn't completely apparent at first and took a couple of reloads to work out what was going on with the savegame but the way this feature has been implemented the challange of playing the game on the hardest difficulty has been completely removed from the game.

Usually with a savegame or checkpoint after you die the game reverts you back to the point at which there was a save or checkpoint. That means that everything in the game is as it was when the save occurred. All of the enemies that you have killed are revived. All of the damage that you have done is repaired. Your health is restored to the level that it was at the save point. Which means that you have to replay through the section that you have just played again in the hope that you don't make the same mistake that made you perish in the first place.

I don't mind this. I like the challenge. It may make some games repetitive, but they are difficult to complete. Battlefield Bad Company does not implement its save feature in this way. As you play the game there is a message displayed that lets you know that a save has taken place. The game is then not saved at this point. The location where you are when this save takes place is saved. What then happens is that when you die you are taken to this location. Everything in the game world is as it was when you died. This means enemies that you killed just before you died but after the save point are still dead. You enter the game world with your team at the location where you died. Suddenly they are trying to work their way back to your save position. This in itself is strange. So, the game world does not revert back to the save point. It stays as it was.

This has created,in many ways, a completely meaningless difficulty system. While the enemies may be more difficult to kill the game itself is not more difficult to complete. The save function is obselete and, somewhat, is not really a "save game" function. It is a save location function as the game does not save. It may save if you reload, but not if you die.

Considering the game took years to develop and play test. At what point in time did someone think this function was a good idea? Is this just a major developer catering entirely for the casual game market? Why is it that we, as gamers, cannot choose the type of save game that is enforced on us in order to make the game play more the way we would like?

I was really looking forward to this being an enjoyable game, even though it was published by EA, and yet I come away from it with the same entirely empty feeling that I felt as I play Frontline Fuel of War.