Battlefield Vs. Call of Duty: The Useless War
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Call of Duty, on the other hand, has always focused more on the story; the scenes are entirely scripted and force the players to follow a specific pathway. If they see an enemy facing the opposite direction, they have to knife them, and failure to do what the game suggests results in a mission failure. The freedom of choice is removed - the player loses their discretion - and the game becomes a much more closed environment, drawing attention towards the characters themselves and the situations more as movie scenes and not sandboxes. This idea of tactics and choices stretches into multiplayer, as well. Battlefield multiplayer has always been set in large maps with enormous amounts of interactivity and accessibility, in which players can take up positions in towers or buildings and snipe their opponents, or they can jump in a tank and wreak havoc in the streets. They can stick with this play-style the entire match, as the multiplayer is generally much slower-paced. Because of the massively-sized maps that players are battling on, Battlefield multiplayer has a more realistic feel in the fact that players can choose a loadout and stick with it. If they play recon, they can stay at the back of the battle and pick off enemies without worrying about being knifed every three seconds. The flipside to this is Call of Duty's multiplayer: fast-paced, heart-pounding action is perhaps the easiest way to describe it. Maps are smaller, more intimate creations; players are on foot the entire time and are moving every single moment. In CoD matches, players who stay still for even a few seconds are killed. Unlike Battlefield, there are no "sides" to the maps; players spawn wherever there is a "safe" zone, which can result in several members of the same team spawning in completely different areas on the same map. This spices up the match, adding variety and unpredictability: a multiplayer match in CoD is never guaranteed to play through the same way due to the fact that locations and players are constantly changing, and a player's gaming style has to adapt depending on the people they are competing with. There are strong similarities between both games, a lot of which can be argued as "rip-offs" of the opposite game. For example, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has a general storyline strikingly similar to that of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and on the contrary, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 seems like a contemporary remake of Battlefield: 2142. When two leading military FPS games like Call of Duty and Battlefield are both successful and equally popular, it is hard not to imagine fans competing against each other in defense of whatever game they support. It is this case when there are any competing games within the same genre, for example: Grand Theft Auto vs. Saint's Row Hitman vs. Assassin's Creed Bioshock vs. Fallout InFamous vs. Prototype However it always seems that CoD and Battlefield get themselves into the biggest - and perhaps most vicious - debates. From professional game reviewers like those at IGN, GameInformer, Gamespot and G4 to your average gamers like those that stalk the GameFAQs forums, heated arguments over which series is better can be found.