If there was one element that DICE and EA should have learned from top games like Modern Warfare and Halo, it is that if the heart of your game is multiplayer - you MUST keep the multiplayer experience fresh. How does Bungie and Activision do this? 4 letters M-A-P-S! Halo 3 with all of their packs have around 24 multiplayer maps for gamers to indulge in. Heck, ODST has a disc just for multiplayer maps on it. Modern Warfare 2 launched with 16 maps out of the box. The majority of those had different variants for different gametypes. On top of those 16, Activision has released 2 map packs that added 5 maps a piece to that suite. So they have around 26 maps for gamers to indulge in. Have you scrolled through your Bad Company 2 Map list lately? Do you find yourself in familiar territory every few games? Conquest and Rush (Which are the two most played) have 8 different maps you can play on. Now, if you add to that total the 5 VIP Map Packs that have been released it comes out to............ugh........wait a min...............well my calculator is saying 8. Players have 8 maps to play on and it took 5 Map Packs in order to get there? Seriously, this should be a joke. If you enjoy Squad Rush or Squad Deathmatch then you are really screwed with only 5 maps to play on. Or maybe you invested some money into the DLC which brought a totally new gametype and a total of 4 maps to that gametype. At this rate, maybe VIP Map Pack 30 will bring us closer to Halo 3 and Modern Warfare 2 numbers. This is the first VIP club I have ever been a part of where I do not feel like a Very Important Person. EA and DICE can put lipstick on a Map Pack, but everyone knows these have only been Mode Packs.
Yeah, Mode Packs should be free for those who rent and buy used, as someone with a degree in Dumbassery could make them, map packs (with new maps) should cost 1200 points with 5 maps (notice that this is fair compared to MW2's small memory maps), and since they like to rip off MW2, make one map from Bad Company 2 and the other map from a past Battlefield game, just modernized and with the new engine and such. Mode Packs are less then useless, Map Packs are great fun.
Two more things that bite my butt are that Battlefield 1943's load-up screen, the most popular Arcade game on PSN and LIVE, looking at it for information it claims "Battlefield: Bad Company 2 BETA coming soon. Pre-order for earlier access!" Now what the hell? I was sure that Bad Company 2 came out sometime in early March, yeah I know it is because my cousin played it on his birthday which is March 14th. Was that an illegal version of the game? Will the U.S. Government's Men in Black come and find me? Will the Marines label me as a terrorist? Will the Spetsnaz send an assassin after me, who will interrogate me with extreme torture? No, EA and DICE just got lazy, I'm a happy man.
The second thing is that you get the same thing on DICE which says, "We are happy that we sold so many games, however since we sold so much, our servers are full. Please wait a few weeks while we waste your time and money." Okay, now why did you make, oh let's say a hundred discs for the Xbox 360 (just bear with me) and make seventy multiplayer spots? Did you use some piece of plastic Ouija board that told you that exactly thirty people who buy it don't have Live? Even if you did (as we all know a cheap piece of plastic by Milton-Bradley is always 101% accurate), expect people to get LIVE. You should always at leasy 150% server spots for each game sold, so you sell a hundred discs, you have a hundred and fifty spots.
Now let's bring in Read Dead Redemption here. Using Wikipedia, my brain, and a calculator, in order to cover costs for what Rockstar spend on making the game, they could have made it fifty cents a copy and go even, must I say it again, it is about sixty dollars now, a hundred and twenty times as much as would be needed to break even. See how much money is spent on games, now lets say this happened for BFBC2, with their mess ups, they wouldn't deserve it.
For now that will be the end, but for anyone who says "MW2 don't deserve nothin'." If MW2 was so terrible, it wouldn't be the number one game, and MW1 wouldn't be the number 5 if they were so terrible. Bad Company 1 isn't on top ten and BFBC2 is nine.