Getting Started with Battlefield: Bad Company 2
This page is all about the game Battlefield: Bad Company 2, mostly the PC version. There is an official manual here; here we give fixes for various bugs and provide additional information. This introduction is for the original release of the game, the April 21, 2010 patch's fixes have not been folded in yet.
last updated April 20, 2010
Contents
Clearing All Joystick Commands
The game drops you into the middle of things. Playing through the single-player mode will slowly teach you the basics, but if you want to just jump into multiplayer, here you go. There are numerous bugs to fix first, and more still that may hold you up. If you get stuck after working through this document, EA and DICE know of these issues, and talk about fixes here. Another compilation is given here. Search on the PC Forum for a solution.
At the initial screen hit escape to get to the menus. Let's look at Options first.
You can pass on touching these, but let's go through the important ones. First go to the Settings page. There are some controls you can invert, such as vertical fly and vertical look. If you find yourself doing the opposite of what the game expects, set these. There are plenty of other options; for now, the main one is to set the resolution as high as you can. You may also need to change the "Overall Quality" setting, depending on your graphics card. Finally, set "Your Sound System" appropriately. Picking "headphones" can help performance. Other performance tips can be found here and here.
Note that in theory "Enemy Team Voiceover" and "Voiceover Language" settings should do something, but right now no matter how they're set, you'll hear Russians speaking Russian and Americans speaking English. However, there is a fix that worked for me, it gets the Russians to speak English with an accent: see my post here.
Now go to "On Foot". You can change whatever you want, just click on a key and type what character you want instead. Oddly, there are keys that are considered "already assigned", even though not listed, e.g. "Z". Note: in single-player mode it "expects" the original keybind for some cinematic actions, which is a bug. For example, if you bound "V" for the middle mouse button, to use your knife, for the "take out the guard" part of the single-player game you'll fail the mission if you use "V"; you must use middle mouse.
For mouse button assignment, left-click on the box and then carefully click the button to assign, without moving. If you move the mouse a tiny bit, you'll be asked if you want to reassign the mouse movement to this action; you want to cancel. Ideas: if your mouse has side buttons, you could use these to cycle through weapons, or spot enemies ("Q"), or reload.
"In Vehicle" is pretty good as-is. I'd assign say "X" to the "Vehicle Specialization", but I tend to dislike middle-mouse. Assigning usually doesn't hurt, since either the key or mouse button then works.
Note that you don't have to save options, they immediately take effect, even during a game. If you do hit "Reset All", this truly resets all settings, on all option pages.
Some people like to change the field of view. By doing so, you can see more of what is going on along your periphery, though at a loss of size of everything overall. Read about how to change it here (short version: change the "FOV" line in settings.ini to whatever you like, 78 is about the maximum). There are other performance setting tips here, for example.
The original keybinds are tough on the left pinky, as you need to hold down left-shift and left-control to do the most common actions, sprint and crouch. I recommend trying out the AutoHotkey script. This lets you start sprinting and not need to hold down left-shift (or double-tap "W"), and by pressing "C" once you stay in a crouch. It also makes it possible to have the right-mouse be held down to zoom, instead of treating it as a toggle, as many players are used to this functionality. Download it here, unzip, read the README (you can customize it), and run the .exe file just before (or while) playing. The newest version only affects the game itself, no other applications. Note: sometimes the right-click hold gets stuck in the zoomed mode, i.e., reversed. I find a quick double-click or reloading my weapon fixes this. Ultimately, though, I just turned this particular feature off.
The joystick assignment part of the interface, as well as the mouse assignment area, is currently a bit broken. That said, do the basics first before starting the game up: look in the Device Manager to make sure your joystick is visible, is working, and has the latest driver and software (for the latter you'll need to go to the manufacturer's website). Also, to start, unplug any other USB devices (beyond the mouse), as these can get misidentified as the joystick.
If you plug in a joystick you'll often find your soldier is spinning in place. In Options you probably want to unassign the joystick actions associated with being on foot or in a ground vehicle. By default, the joystick is bound to various foot and vehicle actions.
Go to Options, On Foot. Select a joystick binding by left-clicking on it. The "Escape" key should clear a binding, but doesn't. The only way to clear out a binding for the joystick or mouse at this point, short of editing the .dbx file (more on that in a moment), is to click on a binding and set it to the same as some other button. So to clear all the joystick commands except one, choose a button on your joystick that you don't use. For every assigned joystick command, left-click on it and then click this joystick button again to assign it. After the second time you do this you'll be asked "please confirm", since it's already assigned. By confirming that you do, you'll clear out the previous binding. At the end you'll have just one binding assigned. If you really want to get rid of this last joystick setting, read the next section.
By far joystick setup is the buggiest part of the game. It nonetheless is possible to set up your joystick. To test that your joystick works, plug it in, start up BF:BC2, and join an Isla Inocentes multiplayer game of Rush on a server with no people on it (e.g. "0/32"), as an attacker (see the next section about joining servers if you need help). You'll start at a base with two helicopters and a UAV, perfect for experimentation and practice.
Jump in a helicopter, press F1 if need be to become the pilot. Hold down W to ascend, and keep your hand off the mouse. If your helicopter starts to spin (probably to the right), then you need to rebind the Yaw controls. To do so, first, you need to be alive (sometimes it works when you're dead), so that "Escape" gets you to options. Hit the "Escape" key to get to the Options menu, and select "As Pilot". Under the Joystick column, Yaw Left and Yaw Right probably say AXIS1 X. Click on either box and then grab your joystick and twist to the left or right (sadly, it doesn't matter; there will be another step to fix the Yaw direction, in a minute). It should now say AXIS1 Y.
Try flying the other helicopter. Again hold down W to ascend. Now try gently moving the joystick forward for a second or two. Did you move forward? Then you're in luck, your pitch control is working fine. If not, the fix is simple. Again, make sure you're alive, then hit Escape. Go to Options and select "Settings". In the upper left is "Invert Controls". Check the box (or uncheck it, if checked) that says "Vertical Fly". The sense should now be reversed and you should be able to move forward by pushing forward. Note that you don't want to continually push forward. An angle on your heads-up display of 0 to -20 is plenty for starters, more than that will often drive you into the ground or off the map.
Now to check roll and yaw. Moving the joystick left and right should slide the helicopter left and right ("strafing"). Use the "C" key to change your view to see the effect a bit more. Roll seems to work fine for most people, as the AXIS0 X binding is reasonable. If yours fails, try rebinding, similar to how Yaw was rebound above. Yaw is the way to change the direction your helicopter is pointing. While in the air and steady, around 0 degrees pitch, twist the joystick to the left (if your joystick doesn't twist, or even if it does, you can fly using the A and D keys instead). If you went left when you twisted left, congratulations, you're done. If you instead went right, like many of us, you'll need to either use your joystick's software to reverse the yaw (Logitech joysticks can do this, as this post describes), or you can edit your BF:BC2 settings file.
Here's the procedure to edit your settings file:
· Exit the game.
· Find your BF:BC2 input settings directory. On Vista and Windows 7 this is C:\Users\[YourUserName]\Documents\BFBC2\input
· Backup these files to somewhere safe, in case you screw up! Mark the backup files "read only" (right click the files and select "Properties") to doubly protect yourself.
· Use a text editor, e.g. Notepad, to edit the air.dbx file.
Look for the line that says:
<field name="Axis">IDA_Axis1Y</field>
Alternately, it might say "IDA_Axis1X", if you didn't have to fix the spinning yaw problem. Basically, it'll match whatever your joystick's yaw axis setting is in the "As Pilot" options page.
Two lines below this there will be a line that says:
<field name="ScaleValue">1</field>
Change this to read:
<field name="ScaleValue">-1</field>
Save the air.dbx file and when you run the game the direction should be reversed.
You might also want to assign the left and right thumb buttons to W and S, so that you can easily ascend and descend with just the joystick. You can bind the throttle (the lever on the base of your joystick) to these, but this affects the UAV, too, so I recommend against it. Alternately, bind it and move it to the neutral position so it does not affect the UAV. You may find this control is also reversed; if so, do the procedure above, but search for the IDA_Axis1X string instead and reverse its ScaleValue. You might also want to assign the left and right thumb buttons to W and S, so that you can easily ascend and descend with just the joystick. You can bind the throttle (the lever on the base of your joystick) to these, but this affects the UAV, too, so I recommend against it. Alternately, bind it and move it to the neutral position so it does not affect the UAV. You may find this control is also reversed; if so, do the procedure above, but search for the IDA_Axis1X string instead and reverse its ScaleValue. You should find this line about 15 lines after the word "ConceptMoveFB" in air.dbx. If this doesn't make sense, try Fellblade's original directions. That said, it has been found that if the throttle reports as a slider, there seems to be nothing that can be done.
Still stuck? There is more on individual joysticks on this page.
Earlier I explained how to un-bind all but one joystick command for your soldier and vehicle commands. You can use a text editor to remove that last joystick command from the infantry.dbx and land.dbx files, if they are bothering you, OCD person that you are. Look for lines that contain:
type="GameSharedResources.PadInputActionData"
Each defines a joystick command. A few lines down you'll see text like this:
<field name="Button">IDB_Rtrigger</field>
or some other similar text. If you see an IDB_* string, change it to to IDB_Undefined, like this:
<field name="Button">IDB_Undefined</field>
Later on down, you'll see text like this inside joystick (PadInput) commands, with the string IDA_*:
<field name="Axis">IDA_Axis0Y</field>
Change this in a similar fashion to:
<field name="Axis">IDA_Undefined</field>
Save. Now all joystick button bindings for that dbx file are cleared out. If you did use the method to clear joystick bindings described earlier, there should really be only one IDB_* button to clear out by hand in each file.
Simple way: go to the Main page, then under Multiplayer try "Join Now". It sometimes works, just be patient; if all dialogs go away, just try again. If you randomly disconnect during a game, note the scroll at the bottom of the screen about uninstalling the beta and getting the latest Punkbuster software; get it here. If you are still having problems, visit the forums; see the list at the end of this page.
You can also look at the list of all servers. This can take an incredibly long time to fully update, so either cancel and decide what you want, or else be patient. I also recommend logging in separately, before looking at the servers. By cancelling you can choose what map or game type you want. Normally you also want to check all the boxes on the right, so that you find games with ranking, with punkbuster, not full nor empty, etc. The Punkbuster box is unreliable; I've clicked the box and then joined servers that had punkbuster off.
Once you have a list of servers, scroll through and pick a game that appeals. By clicking at the top of a column, you can sort. Sorting by players is probably the most useful (click it twice). It's a bit random how the map names are sorted (they are grouped, though). Ping is usually not shown on many systems, which is a bug. You can fix this defect as follows (Windows 7 instructions; see this thread if you really get stuck):
· If running on Steam, right click on the game and select "Create desktop shortcut".
· Right-click on this icon on your desktop and choose "Properties".
· Go to the "Compatibility" tab and check "Run this program as an administrator" near the bottom. Hit "OK".
· Go to Start | Control Panel and select "System and Security".
· In the Action Center (first thing listed) pick "Change User Account Control settings".
· Slide the slider to the bottom, "Never notify".
Servers with names including "HC" or "Hardcore" set the hardcore mode, increasing weapon damage and spawn times, and turning off such elements as auto-healing, the crosshairs, HUDs, ammo display, the minimap display, the kill cam, etc.
Note the "V" down arrow to the right of each server's name. You can check the server's settings. "On" for all settings is the most "information rich". Most servers turn off friendly fire, i.e., it will be set to 0, to limit griefers. Shooting your teammates will then cause exclamations but no damage. You can add a server to your favorites list so it will be easier to find in the future; note the separate tab for these, as well as the history tab, where you can (more naturally) add a server to your favorites. There is a bug that limits the number of favorites to 6.
Note there's also a Friends menu selectable on the far left, to let you invite friends by their login names. There is a bug where 20 friends is about the limit, and another bug that you can successfully invite friends only if both of you are in the lobby of the game at the same time (you'll be able to invite, but it may not be received otherwise).
Hit the big JOIN box. When you join, you're often asked if you want to join a squad. Say "yes".
You could spend some time adding nearby servers to your favorites and trying them out. There seems to be a bug where after a few servers are shown, the rest are grayed out. That said, it's still a handy feature.
There are a few key things to realize about the spawn screen. Going from left to right, first there's the map display. Below the map is a list of places and squadmates with which you can spawn; click on one, or click on a spawn spot or green squadmate on the map itself. You can also switch sides when spawning; use "Escape" to check the balance before spawning, "Tab" while alive. Note you can quit a game (by using Escape) only when you're alive.
Next over is switching squads. A larger squad is a happier squad. To the right of that are the four classes. Note that you can click on the weapons and gadgets in each class to choose amongst them; as you progress, more choices will unlock. Each time you join a different server your choices are reset, annoyingly enough. Note that you must also choose which of the unlocked gadgets you want to use, for each class; by default, you choose nothing. I find it easiest to set up all classes once before joining the battle.
You've joined - now what? Well, it depends on the game. There are four types of games:
· Conquest: as with previous Battlefield games, each side attempts to capture and hold the various control points on the map. When you're inside the flag's radius you'll hear a ticking noise, meaning you're converting it. The more teammates in the radius, the faster the ticking and conversion. You can both see the flag change, and your progress (and what flags are owned) is also shown in the tickets display. Tickets are how many lives each side has left before the game ends, so please do try to avoid getting killed. Owning more control points generally causes the other side to slowly lose replacements, a.k.a. "tickets", and also can give additional vehicles when a control point is held long enough. Look for the ticket count for each side. A foghorn sounds when one side is down to its last few tickets.
· Rush: one side attacks, the other defends. Depending on the map, there is a series of 4 or 5 pairs of locations to defend, one after the other, each time labeled "A" and "B". At each location is an "M-COM station". As the attacker, hold down "E" at this station to arm explosives. A red light will flash. The defenders then have about 35 seconds to disarm the console by holding down "E" next to it. An alternate way to destroy a station is with 12 C4 charges, or to collapse the stone building on it (if it's in one). Note that the defenders have infinite tickets (so as a defender your goal truly is to protect the stations - your life doesn't matter); the attackers lose if they run out of tickets before "A" and "B" are destroyed. If both are destroyed, then the next pair becomes active and the ticket count is reset for the attackers.
· Squad Deathmatch: 4 squads fight, whichever squad kills the most wins.
· Squad Rush: one squad attacks, the other defends a rush location.
A run through all the commands.
WASD - Move, of course. Mouse Left-Click - Fire. Mouse Right-Click - Toggle to aim gun (i.e., zoom in), if available; detonates C4.
E - Enter/exit vehicle, pick up kit from a dead soldier, arm/disarm device (hold it down) in a Rush battle.
Q - Spot, request ride, medic, ammo, repairs; you basically look at the class of soldier or vehicle and hit Q. You can also use it on objectives. Spotting enemies helps both you and your team and earns you points if they're killed while spotted. Sometimes Q doesn't work, we're still figuring it out. Press it all the time!
M - Map, showing squad, teammates, vehicles and emplacements, control points, and spotted enemies.
Tab - Check teams, stats, etc. Note that while you are dead (about to spawn), you use "Escape" instead. So, no, you can't leave the game if you're dead.
Escape - While alive (and sometimes while dead, it seems to vary), escape game to quit, change options, etc.
Enter - While alive, go to menu to choose to suicide or switch teams, or modify kits (for future spawns).
J - Chat all.
K - Chat team.
L - Chat squad.
Left Alt Key - hold down to use microphone and talk to squadmates.
PrintScrn - copy a single screenshot to the clipboard. Paste to a free image viewer like Irfanview. If you get a blank screen, or you want more than one screenshot in a session, you have two options: use Alt-Enter to put the game into windowed mode (where PrintScreen should work fine), or turn on FRAPS before starting the game and use F10 to capture shots (F11 to toggle off frame rate display).
1-5 - Select weapon or gadget.
9,0 and Mousewheel - Select previous/next weapon or gadget.
R - Reload. You reload by ammo amount, not clips.
F - Throw grenade.
Left Shift Key - Run while it and W are both held down. Another way to get into run mode is to click W once and then quickly press down W again and hold it down.
Left Control Key - Crouch while it's held down. There is no way to go prone.
Middle Mouse - Knife attack. You get dogtags for kills (bragging rights, that's all). The knife can also cut through chain-link fences.
Space - jump, or if in air, deploy parachute. You can even deploy your parachute while jumping off a building.
F1-F5 - Change position in vehicle, if available.
C - Change camera viewing angle.
V - Snap View, giving you a quick look behind your vehicle.
Middle Mouse - Use vehicle's special ability, e.g., smoke, if you've unlocked and selected it.
WS - for helicopters, up and down; for the UAV (the little computer console you can enter and control this mini-helicopter, a "V" inside a square icon on your maps), forward and back.
RF - for the UAV only, up and down.
Arrow Keys - for helicopters, pitch up/down, roll left/right. It's easier to use the mouse.
C - Change camera viewing angle.
Mouse Right-Click - for helicopters, use specialization. (TBD - must be an attack helicopter thing...)
Left Control Key - Free look, i.e., while holding it down you can use your mouse to look around and not affect movement.
At this point you know enough to have a clue as to what to do when you join a game. If you want to test weapons out, learn how to drive, etc., you can join an empty server. Isla Inocentes is good for learning about aircraft, as the attacker there are two helicopters and a UAV. Panama has a light and heavy tank as the spawn point.
Beyond that, you'll learn. Here are some tidbits to get you started:
· Normally, keep moving. Beyond snipers picking you off if you stay still, a moving target is harder for anyone to kill, due to the mechanics of lag. Also, they can't stab you if they can't catch you.
· No, there's no health bar for your soldier, you just have to guess how damaged you are from your screen's appearance. Medics can see damage in others (but not themselves). Unlike other Battlefield games, you do heal over time. Vehicle damage is shown.
· Experience comes from killing, helping (assisting killing, spotting, healing, repairing), and capturing/defending, among other things. Each class has its own unlocks, as well as vehicle unlocks; only while earning experience with those classes or in a vehicle do you get class experience.
· You can climb better by looking down at your feet.
· You can steer the parachute as you come down, try WASD and the mouse.
· Medics: wounded soldiers show up on your minimap and HUD as "+", dead ones (assuming you have unlocked the paddles) as large lightning bolt icons. Reviving people does increase your number of tickets.
· You can deploy only one medkit or ammo resupply kit at a time; when you throw down a new one, the old one disappears. Same goes with the Recon spotting balls.
· Information on how many weapons work and on times for various operations is available from me here. More starting info here, thought it's meant for the console version.
· EA's official forums on the game. The PC forum is particularly useful for solving problems. Particularly valuable are the sticky topics here.
· EA's UK forums are also useful, often containing interesting posts not on the U.S. forums. The PC forum is again good for problem solving.
· BadCompanyTwo.com tracks important news about the game. I subscribe as an RSS feed.
· Planet Battlefield's forums, again with a PC forum. Much less traffic, but there if you want it.
· Wikia's Bad Company 2 wiki, anyone can edit.
· Battletracker, where you can sign up and track your statistics, if you're so inclined.
· BF Editor forum for modding and understanding the underlying files.
Fellblade, X-President, royic, TheRaider, and many others for their posts and articles, helping to make this page.
Please let me know of any corrections and additions.