Battlefield: A Disappearing Legacy 

Bad news: Battlefield 3, 4 and Hardline for 360/PS3 will be shut down on November 7, 2024. End of an era. This makes sense given that the 360 store will be shutting down and thus rent-a-server will no longer function, so the little money these titles were still generating will be gone. Hopefully we'll see some sort of revival happen one day, though it'll probably be PS3 only if it does.

I feel like the worst part about the slow decay and death of Battlefield servers is that not every game will recieve the fan support that even some lesser remembered CoD titles, like Ghosts or AW did. Or, that EA, like Activision before them, will shut down any chance of it, salting the digital earth.

At some point, it stops being piracy and starts being game preservation. It’s a shame companies refuse to see it this way, especially for “dead” games and games they no longer have official servers for

1943 is still one of the prettiest games especially for the time. It was so colorful for a military shooter.

Important to note that bf4 only got an ingame server browser after a long time post release in order to "unify" it with the other newer titles. Hardline also got this treatment

God, i remember the day Battlefield 3 went online, I got up early before class to play an hour of it cause I was so hyped. Its so weird to think it's going to be gone within the next couple years.

Your BF3 mini experience is basically how mine was. Three people I didn't know in my squad, on 360, sweating it out, a lot more shit talking, but I am not good at shooters and was much worse holding a controller so we just owned. Even with its quirks and having way fewer unlocks I prefer (PC) BF4 to BF3 but I've a lot of nostalgia for BF3. Edit: That's not a date I ever wanted to hear announced.

Battlefield 1 will always be my favorite multiplayer game. Never cared if i did good or bad. I was just fully immersed

I've never been a massive shooter person, but I remember playing a few Battlefield titles from time-to-time like Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3, and found it to usually be a pretty decent experience. It always pains to see fan favourites essentially become heavily forgotten to time with no plans for their legacies to remain, because to the massive studios, "they're old, why should we keep these up? We want them to play our newer titles." ... Despite how much these older games hold such resonance and fond memories with players, and how the newer titles just fail to deliver the same amount of entertainment. God bless the longtime fans who will likely reverse engineer these titles so they will have a way to keep resonating with longtime players, and potentially even future players who never got the chance to experience it first-time around. Hopefully it will be something that actually catches on over time... Great video as always, Kacey. :)

No matter how many videos jack frags does saying its all ok now and they fixed it. RIP BF

Seeing people still keeping Warfighter's multiplayer alive made me audibly gasp. I loved its multiplayer, despite all the jank and it not being very good. Oh and that PGA Tour battlefield map is fantastic. Never knew about this.

This is why every single game should have dedicated servers (user hostable).

1943 was by far my favorite BF multiplayer experience with BC2 coming in a close second.

That last part of the video, about doing our part to save the games we love. I feel that. I've been playing a lot of old games lately, mostly maintained and expanded upon by their passionate communities. Unreal Tournament (literally buried by Epic), Doom, Quake, Stalker, WH40K:Dawn of War, SW:Galaxy at War... I am increasingly feeling like I need to do something to give back to the community of some game, in some way. I will try to find some community project, or mod, that I can contribute to.

The simple reason EA shuts down old game servers is that they're stopping you from buying their new games, loot boxes etc. But Battlefield has really lost its identity, even more so when Medal of Honor also went modern. So EA had two franchises pretty much aping Call of Duty. Bad Company 1 and BF3 were really the pinnacle for me, loved the gallows humour of bad company, and EA really had a thing with destructible environments, but it's just so watered down now. EA really should consider a remake/remaster of an earlier title.

15:12 I believe the bf3 one even requires it. You have to link your origin account to play in the first place which is also probably how they haven't gotten into trouble.

Warsaw reveamped is coming soon to BF4! Just like VU, but much more ambitious! Honestly, I wish DICE never abandoned AI bots or dedicated offline mode for multiplayer mode, just so these games are not tied to PVP multiplayer -- being to experience toxic players, server admins, and other harmful shenanigan

23:05 If Battlefield Hardline were released in our time, it would be a popular game with many players playing

wait what? @1:50 there are projects to revive BC1 on the ps3 like some other projects? Can someone link me to this, im really interested. good vid btw :)

At this point I'm just grateful we have the memories of solid online gaming. I don't think it's ever coming back so I feel bad for kids that will never know how fun it could be.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 can be played on unofficial servers via Project Rome the same people behind Venice Unleashed for Battlefield 3, if you create an account, and sign in. You are able to import your stats from the EA retail version into Project Rome.

i miss battlefield hardline i always felt like it was supposed to be a seperate game in pre production but had the battlefield name slapped on it which lead to people having greater expectations from it than it was could achieve.

I miss the destructible environments from BF Bad Company 1-2, it created some of the most memorable gaming moments during my childhood.

Beautiful final little message at the end of the video. I absolutely adore playing obscure, weird and dead video multiplayer games. Maybe even ports of popular video games that receive any of those 3 titles. They’re sometimes portals to meeting some of the greatest of people you’ll ever meet. There’s a funny sense of community when you play dead games, seeing repeated usernames and the likes. Huge charm. It’s up to us to save these types of games, and I’m glad there’s people out there willing to do their part until the day they officially die (and then revive). Great video Kacey!

PLEASE do the golf highlights That looks so silly and fun lmao

BFBC2 heavy metal 24/7 still being up sent me into a laugh/cry spiral

My theory is that EA wants to close BC2 servers to get more people to install 2042 for portal.

I dont want battlefield to go the way of medal of honor

Re: BFV and BF1, some modders have actually managed to get private dedicated servers working, similar to SWBF2s Kyber I don't expect it to take off for BF1 but I would guess there's a decent chance with BFV that it can take off as we'd be able to do our own server side anti cheat

battlefield was such a breath of fresh air for anyone who was big in the Military shooter genre at its 2010s peak. Cod fans looked on in envy at Battlefield's huge scale combat and teamwork mechanics.

Sadly bf 1943 will be being shutdown tomorrow for good and that was my very first bf i have played i will miss it 😢

3:50 in 2011 DICE said that they canceled the PC port of Battlefield 1943 and the co-op mode for Bad Company 2 Onslaught Mode

After the massive success of BF1 and the disappointing reception of Infinite Warfare they had the chance of a lifetime to take the throne. And they threw it all away as if that was the plan all along…

Back in the day, my 360's disc drive shit the bed. Around that time, Bad Company 2 was a free game of the month with Gold. So no joke, the only online shooter I played (besides Gotham City Imposters) for probably 6 months was Bad Company 2 (in 2014). I fell in love with that game and if not for that perfect storm of events, I might not have ever played it. So hats off to Bad Company 2 and everyone that played it and developed it.

Bad company 2 will always be one of my favourite games of all time. Everything from the maps, classes, weapon variety and of course the unique sound for each gun. Pretty sure it’s the last battlefield game you could destroy the objective with C4 when playing RUSH I had so much fun driving a jeep covered with C4 and telling my friend to blow them up as I touched the objective (but not get off so they don’t have time to kill me) sigh good times.

I haven't played much BF other than BF1 in the past few years, but I still loved to see this video drop just to see you back uploading again! Love your content girl, you create such fascinating deep dives in a way that's so accessible!

After I watch a battlefield video essay, I tell myself this is the last one I’ll watch. Then a new battlefield video essay comes out, and I can’t help but watch the new insights on how my favorite series has offed itself.

great video but for BF1 and BFV’s server browsers you just need to click empty slots (none) (1-5) and thats it lol

I played 1943 for 16 years on and off on ps3. It was an easy fun arcadeish shooter to quickly get a quick dopamine fix. On December 8, i logged in, managed to get in two rounds on full servers, the third round was not to be, never to load again. After googling i was crushed to have learned that that was the day, the moment, ea shut it down for good. Glad i was there to the end lol.

I'm very surprised about your experience with BFV. I've reinstalled it recently when all the big sales happened and I've been having a blast. Opened the game, went into the server browser, instantly saw full servers and then I just started playing. There was one match when someone was wallhacking and they were promptly reported on the server's discord and booted out (granted, I am EU so maybe we just have it that good here, shout out to the BOB servers). That's it. No more cheaters encountered. Really fun gameplay, a good mix of maps on several full servers, people often actually cooperating to win. And all of this running quite smoothly at 50-80 fps on a 1060 6GB (barely above minimum requirements) bottlenecked by my basically ancient at this point i5-4690k (2!!! generations older than the CPU from official minimal requirements) It's a no-brainer recommendation for me if you want to experience a proper Battlefield game without the clunkiness of the older titles or the shortcomings and bloat of the newer title.

It’s sad to know that no one talks about Battlefield 1942, Battlefield Vietnam, or Battlefield 2142.

I remember ponqzii from BF 3 (360). Crazy to see his name here

I need to stress that you were searching the server browser incorrectly in Battlefield V. You need to select the none, 1-5 or 6-10 free slot option because that refers to the amount of FREE slots there are. Most servers you'll find with players are actually completely full, with only a few servers having 1-10 free slots. That is why you could not find any players in the browser.

Glad to see you back, been missing seeing you upload

I'm glad the trolls are mostly on the Xbox version of BC1 just played my last match of BC1 on PS3 last night and everyone was playing the objective it's a shame to see one of my favourite battlefield games finally die it was a bitter sweet feeling seeing how my favourite franchise went from being one of the best shooters competing with cod to trying to copy it RIP battlefield

18:00 South America has a strong battlefield community on older games, my fav servers on bf4 and bf1 are both run by Brazilian clans

I complained about historical accuracy because they said it was going to respect the roots. Still haven't played it, still never will, and may its early death be mocked for all eternity. May the dont like it dont buy be cemented in gaming hall of infamy, or the studios of words they probably regret.

I recognise so many gamertags from this video! I'm currently making an achievements related video on the bad company games but for context on conquest lobbies being locked down by people - since the Battlefield Bad Company 1 & 2 servers were shutting down and one of the final achievements for BC1 is earn *10,002* kills in multiplayer (because another developer already made a 10,001 kills joke top one up Gears of War's Seriously...) Many achievement/trophy hunters myself included set up lobbies for a few hours each day to get both the awards and kills achievements because road-killing 50 people over in a BOAT when 90% of the water on every map is well away from the action was not going to happen legitimately. Surprisingly, Gold Rush was always very active but it had different issues, namely the top 100 odd rated players who never stopped playing the game and would purposely crash and grief people if a match wasn't going their way as you saw - it was a wild ride!

This was an awesome video, also that Golf segment had me shocked, really cool

So sad. I grew up with 1943 and all the others after it. I regularly played it on PS3 up until its shutdown. The community on PS3 was very active, there was almost always full games. It doesn't make sense to me why they'd shut it down. As for the Bad Company games, Bad company 1 was good, but I LOVED Bad company 2, especially its Vietnam DLC. I'd play it right after I got home from school. When I got on again around a year ago it was dead. Its like having a large part of your childhood taken away from you. Battlefield 3's campaign mission where you take off on the aircraft carrier was amazing. The graphics and sound design were something else. It might as well be an art thats how good it was.

Great video. I find so much nostalgia in those older games.

What a well made video! I really enjoyed your content and covering what's going on in the respective games

ive been playing bf1 on my series X, i was unaware of the 120fps updtae until recently. its been awesome coming back to get and getting immersed in these huge battles

I was one of the top players on BF1 Xbox One until I was banned and I just have to say that BF1 was a breath of fresh air. It made me feel like I was playing BF3 at times with the movement and gun play. BF1 and BF3 were just masterpieces.

8:26 casual flex but ok In all seriousness though, this was a blast going through the nostalgia of these older games. Such a shame EA is shutting down some of the older servers, and essentially making relive these memories impossible.

Doing our part to save the games we love hits hard shortly after the official death of Gundam Evolution. That game hooked it's claws into me like the BF3 beta on Xbox 360 back in the day and it's awesome to see efforts to make it playable be worked on through Side 7. As much as you can't explicitly say what kind of projects are keeping these old Battlefields alive, I'm definitely not alone when I say thank you for even bringing that idea to my attention at all! One of them even having MOH Warfighter being available REALLY peaks my interest since I was apparently one of the few who loved that one! Gonna wake up tomorrow and poke about for some of this, and once again it's you who pushed me to take a look. Thanks as always!

Bad Company 1 was amazing. First shooter game I bought (when I was 12) I remember using my PS3 and hooking it up to my box TV and setting the PS3 next to my window to steal the neighbors WiFi because it was left unprotected lol. I came to find that games mulitiplayer my favorite mulitplayer of all time. I came to be truly one of the best in the world at that game and even bought the Xbox One X just for the backwards compatibility before I ultimately sold it for a PS5. BFBC2 was great and took clan battling in a much better direction as did BF3. If you were on Playstation you might recognize some of the experiences getting spawn trapped by a clan by someone that just buzzes around spawn with a helicopter. Good times. Thanks for the content and keep it up.

Don't mess with the Big Pimpers man, Fabian a real one for that

BF: BC up until BF3 on the 360 was my peak time as a BF fan. I thoroughly enjoyed each game in their prime, and it pains me to see both Bad Company titles and especially 1943, my personal favorite of the three, sunsetting. I hate that game companies are doing this now when it's clear that maintenance costs really shouldn't be that high. Just release the server-hosting tools at this point if you can't be fucked. It's bullshit. Great vid though, Kacey, was fun playing Halo with you last night :)

Awesome video! I actually really like Battlefield 4's Battlelog. Flipping though past games, previous players, stats, seeing unlocks and challenges without having to open the game was great for me. It's so strange amazing multiplayer games like these just disappear, so much work and community just gone, thanks for documenting your experiences.

Also that BC1 soundtrack brought back sooooo much nostalgia and why i love the song "Fortunate Son" so much. My next tattoo might be of the smiley face grenade too it was that awesome of a game.

Ironically enough, I usually tag the ”1-5” or more often ”none” to get to the servers that are actually populated in BF4 and BF1. However, it is indeed a bit harder to get results from in BFV as you mentioned. But it does work sometimes.

I remember when they closed BF2 servers back then, there were still full servers with lots of players

Great video! Battlefield is super nostalgic for me and I spent years of my childhood playing these games. So sad to see what has become of it

It's bizarre to see how DICE/EA not only are erasing the actual game design template they used in the earlier BF games; classes that were designed to have major differences in how they play, and their strengths, (swapped out for the CoD-ification of all classes) as well as erasing their old games PERIOD. Such a shame.

Janky thing about BF5 matchmaking is that it doesn't search for a server. It tries to gather a group of people into a squad and then send that squad into a server. A way to get around this and make matchmaking faster is to create your own private squad from the menu, click on matchmaking and then join a squad when in game.

I played bad Company 2 for the last 4 months or maybe more in PS3, I very often found full games 12v12 or 4v4v4v4 in team Deathmatch. Just because you didn't find so much people in PC doesnt mean that the game wasn't alive because bad Company 2 was more alive than the last 2/3 Battlefield games

Does anyone know the name of the client mentioned at 16:43? Since trying to Google it down is not exactly easy.

a couple years ago i got Hardline on sale, and as soon as I saw there "was nobody playing" i uninstalled and got a refund. Many such cases!

Bf3 was my first intro to the series and omg i absolutely got hooked on it. I remember running around noshahar canals on tdm and just pwning players with the usas 12 with frag rounds lmao op metro on rush were the golden days when i played on my ps3 😢😢

Im honestly going to defend Battlelog till the day I die. While the "social" shit was completely unnecesary, the ability to set up loadouts without being constantly rushed because the map is about to start, looking at my stats, waiting in queues to join the servers i frequently played on while being able to do whatever i wanted to do instead of looking at "Youre 20th in queue" was the best thing.

14:00 It's a sad that Battlefield 3 is played less than Battlefield 4. BF 3 is better in some aspects. I like more BF3 Maps they better than in bf 4 If Electronic Arts will close BF3 then we have Venice Unleashed which will work

Bungie did it best when they released the final patch for Halo CE. They fixed the GameSpy master server issue, and stripped the DRM out of the game.

High quality and well produced video! Amazing job! I loved bad company 2, I need to go play it again but I'll say I never had as good an experiences, memories with friends, game and DLC updates as I did with BF3. Probably the best "game life cycle" I've ever experienced

18:20 I would PAY for the upkeep and maintenance service of having multiplayer game servers that wipe the hard drives of confirmed cheaters.

This is such thorough coverage of the game and platforms. Great stuff!

The highested rated BF on Metacritic Battlefield 2 was delisted in 2014 along with numerous other BF games *due to Gamespy going down but still like Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft released World In Conflict for free w/ Master Server fo;es). I dobut they'll take down BF3 for a very long time but sad to see franchise history just being lost so recklessly. I can play CoD 1 on PC online, won't even be able to do the same with BC2 or any BF title before that.

What are the names of the other server systems he mentions for BF3? I only knew Battlelog until now.

Great video as always i would of liked more talk about the physics destruction, also back when bad company 1 and 2 came out majority of games on console where 30fps i got used to how clunky it was.

How do you think bf2 fans feel about the newer games? Just gotta get use to change just apart of getting older

Just started playing bf4 again after years & it’s been amazing

Thank you for this comprehensive look at the state of each Battlefield game. The franchise has been a big part of my gaming life and it’s sad to see EAs utter disrespect of fans with server shutdowns of the old games with no real alternatives. And I have encountered MLG Hobo Joe and friends a while back on BC1.

Venice when it launched was so popular, I think lack of game updates and RU-vidrs keeping it active killed it but it might make a comeback someday?

The only reason i can't play bad company 2 on PC since the launch of BF3, because for some reason the game kicks me out after a few seconds in a match, years waiting for a fix, and looking around forums for a solution that works, and nothing, i would gladly be playing it to this day, but i sadly can't.

that BC1 main menu music at around 1:40 made me exhale sharply, forgot about that song

A couple of years after their launch was enough for East Asia BF3 PC servers to just... not host DLC maps and modes. I feel the memory about how often you could actually use the DLC you paid for differs a lot based on what region you live in. If they wanted to do anything interesting with 2042 Portal they'd port the DLC maps and modes from 3 and earlier.

'42, Vietnam, BF2, BF2142, after that it felt like it was slowly going back the other way - albeit with a shinier ass

I completely agree. I can't believe they just shut down the servers for these games and won't even allow you to purchase these games from them anymore either. A new low for this franchise. And especially for games like Bad Company 2 that made their franchise popular in the first place

Great video, longtime BF fan. What was the song playing in the background around the 32 minute mark?

Would be amazing to have Collection like Halo MCC with older titles of BF, MoH and Army of Two, all in one game with one matchmaking. Vanilla can be from Codename Eagle to BFBC2, then add the rest later with seasons etc.

I'ma need those golf highlights!! sounds like a blast!

4, 1, and 5 are masterpieces the nostalgia hits hard that the servers are pretty dead now you can occasionally get into a good game on battlefield 1 but 4 is really old so it's pretty hard 5 isn't too bad you can usually find a few full servers on there but it's dwindling every day 😢

The cure for a gambling addiction is hitting BF5’s refresh server button until you find the populated servers.

Fun fact, back on the Xbox 360 if you uninstalled the update files and dlc, you could actually play on servers running on the launch version of the game. Idk if it's still possible anymore but yanno, there's something for the wiki

The movement in BFV is goated and I will never understand why they didn’t put it in 2042. If it’s some sort of technical limitation related to the wingsuit, grapple or slide that softens the blow, but I’m still mad about it.

Bad Company 2 and 2142 were peak BF for me.

Battlefield 3 and Battlefield Hardline are playable on PS3 since all active servers are private and hackers get banned quickly. Battlefield 4 on PS3 has the biggest problem with hackers since non-moderated EA servers are popular on there.

Great video! Really speaks to the times we are in regarding games preservation. A lot of our childhood games being multiplayer, means that their ability to exist is tied to some arbitrary profit metric at companies that stopped caring about the kinds of video games we do at least a decade ago. Videos like these are necessary to bring awareness to the topic since it's something almost entirely unique to video games as a medium. This on top of increasing anti-piracy rhetoric, primarily regarding emulation, frightens me about the future of video games past. Without emulation, especially as physical hardware ages, the worst case scenario is losing huge swaths of video game history to companies that either don't care about their past, or only care so much as to what they can drip feed their audiences with services like Nintendo's virtual consoles or hoarding the IP for name recognition. All the work done by our community, with things like the aforementioned custom launchers, emulation, back-doored servers, mods, etc, are why we still have a history we can physically visit. We need to speak up against the companies that wish to let that die so they can make a little more money, or worse, wish to steal that history and sell it back to us. Also shout out to to Wario Puzzle 1 from Mario Picross at 16:43, one of the best tracks to ever grace a video game!

Oh god I remember making a logo on Battlelog for hardline back in the day

Unrelated to the Battlefield stuff but the DotM gameplay at 1:58 caught my eye, what did you run to get that?