“Battlefield: Bad Company”: Humor Limits Its Appeal, Says DICE

A game tries to be funny in a sea of too-serious games and it's a bad thing?

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Complex Original

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There’s a famous joke about Calvin Coolidge. Allegedly Coolidge once attended a dinner party when one of the guests, a woman sitting next to him, tried to get the laconic president to talk to him; the woman told Coolidge he must to talk to her, because she had a bet with a friend that she could more than two words out of him.

“You lose,” the president deadpanned.

While you may or may not find that joke hilarious, it’s generally true that humor is in the eye of the beholder. It turns out this was a problem for Battlefield: Bad Company, DICE’s comedic-tinged, tongue-in-cheekish cousin to the ultra serious Battlefield proper.


Speaking to OXM UK in a recent interview, Battlefield 4’s executive producer Patrick Bach said that the use of humor makes Bad Company a tougher sell, because humor can be pretty polarizing.

“When we did the original Bad Company and the sequel, we got a lot of criticism. Why would I play this? It's not a serious shooter, I don't care about this,” Bach said in the interview. “I want a serious shooter with a more hard-boiled angle. And we thought it was fun! We loved it.”

While Bach said that Bad Company isn’t dead per se, production of proper series is just more of a guaranteed thing, at least for the time being. (At least it’s not becoming annualized.)

“Humor is very personal,” he said, “Some people love it, some people hate it."

Bombast aside, you’d think that Bad Company’s personality would help it stand out against an already-crowded marketplace of stony-faced, no-nonsense shooters, Battlefield N+1 included. (Isn’t that the ideology behind the buddy cop movie, or otherwise injecting humor into action films?) It’s nice to have a serious war story, in theory, but Bad Company is something the industry could probably use more of, if only for the sake of variety.

Read the rest of Bach’s interview via the link below.

Via OXM UK

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