15 Years Ago, Battlefield's Finest Hour Closed With A Historic Bang

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is widely considered one of the best entries in the ongoing multiplayer shooter series and for good reason. It followed up on the 2009 game with another excellent and surprisingly funny shooter campaign. It expanded the original’s multiplayer suite with even better maps and more realistic environmental destruction. And it doubled down on the original’s successful push to make Battlefield a franchise that worked as well on console as it did on PC.

As fondly remembered as Bad Company 2 is, there’s one part of the game’s legacy that’s often overlooked. In December 2010, nine months after the game’s release, developer DICE released one of the most ambitious expansions for a game the public had ever seen up to that point. Bad Company 2: Vietnam was a brand new multiplayer game released within the universally acclaimed title, one that lent the shooter a content-rich second lease on life for a fraction of the price of a proper sequel.

Bad Company 2: Vietnam is a multiplayer-only expansion that trades in the modern combat of the main game for a stylishly gritty period-appropriate warfare. Gone were the open, U.S. and Middle Eastern open fields of the original maps, and in were the dense, lush jungles of the Southeast Asian theater. Most infantry used scopeless standard issue rifles instead of the kitted-out automatics of the base game, forcing close quarters combat into this new part of the game. The addition of new weapons like the powerful flamethrower added the perfect solution for flushing enemies out of hiding spots and keeping them at bay.

In total, the expansion contained five new maps, six new vehicles, and 15 new weapons for players to use, all for just $15. The expansion’s presentation went a long way in making Vietnam feel like it was well worth the asking price. The sounds and voiceovers players would hear in-game were all brand new and recorded specifically for this DLC. It even had its own 49-song soundtrack featuring songs from the period. Hearing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” blare over the radio while riding shotgun in a helicopter with squadmates really sold the idea that this was an entirely new experience. It turned an already excellent multiplayer suite on its head in the coolest way possible.

As fantastic as it was, there were a couple of shortcomings that had little to do with its quality. Bad Company 2: Vietnam splintered the game’s community. As cheap as $15 was for what players were getting, an expansion of this size was an oddity in the multiplayer space. With vanilla Bad Company 2 being as strong as it was, I distinctly remember the lobbies for this expansion being a little thinner than I would have liked within a year of its launch.

Which brings me to the expansion’s other drawback: the timing of its release. As a cash-strapped teenage Battlefield fan, choosing between a $15 expansion for a game I already own and a full-priced Call of Duty was as easy a choice as there ever was. However, I was in the minority. Fall of 2010 saw the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops, kicking off what would arguably become the franchise’s most beloved spinoff. As fantastic as Vietnam was, it was a blip compared to the freshness of a new and very well-received Call of Duty subseries.

Despite its fate, Bad Company 2: Vietnam was a stunning example of a developer providing a whole lot of bang for their buck and building tremendous goodwill in the process. Today, we’ve seen the biggest publishers in the world try to pass off DLC content or multiplayer-only games as a full $70 retail release. Looking back just 15 years and seeing how much $15 got you for one of the biggest games of that year is a stark reminder of how far we’ve fallen.

Bad Company 2: Vietnam was an excellent close to one of the series' most beloved chapters, and one of the best values we’d ever seen in that era of multiplayer video games.