Brothers in Arms: Furious 4
Desecrating the BIA name – & we’re Furious about it
by exterminat
©2011 Nicholas Laborde
The Electronic Entertainment Expo is the biggest and most anticipated event of the gaming year.
It brings happiness, sadness, anticipation, excitement, and as always, disappointment.
At the Ubisoft conference, the infamous Randy Pitchford walked on stage and discussed how he and the team at Gearbox have reinvented WW2 shooters… and how they’re going to do it again.
We then saw the reveal trailer (below), which speaks for itself.
Furious 4
My immediate reaction to this was “… what the [obscenity]?!”
I mean… really? REALLY?
Brothers in Arms has been a tactical, emotional, authentic World War Two series. We’ve spent years playing as Matt Baker, commanding his squad through hell and back.
We jumped into D-Day. We made it through France. We made it across Hell’s Highway.
We’ve lost soldiers along the way, and made some of the best friends, like Hartsock.
And now, the new title is nothing like Brothers in Arms at all. It’s as if Inglorious Basterds and Team Fortress 2 got drunk and made a very strange baby.
Gearbox, we, the BIA fans, demand an explanation for this. You left Hell’s Highway at a cliffhanger ending, even putting “TO BE CONTINUED.” And this is what we get?
Objectivity
That's not Sergeant Baker...
From a purely objective point of view and disregarding everything the series has accomplished in terms of storytelling, Furious 4 looks like it could be a very fun, entertaining game; maybe even a huge cooperative hit!
But the fact that they left the previous title on a cliffhanger ending, and basically saying that it would be continued, and then this is shown as the next iteration… it all piles up to make me a very distressed Brothers in Arms fan. And I am not the only one.
In all fairness, we have not seen any gameplay yet. Knowing Gearbox, it could be half of the game for all that we know; the continuation of the Hell’s Highway story, and then Furious 4 as a way of saying “Thanks for waiting, here’s something different!”
Of course, that would suggest we live in a perfect world where everything is logical and goes according to plan. We can only wait and find out more.
Patience is a virtue
I, as stated, am a huge Brothers in Arms fan. I do want to play this game, because it looks very interesting and peaks my curiosity in a strange way.
That is me wanting to play it for the fact that it’s a game.
What deters me is how they have decided to use this new game under the Brothers in Arms moniker. Why could they not have come up with a new series name, or just called it Furious 4? It could be possibly because they want to release it under an established name in order to attract more attention, because if it wasn’t under the BIA name, I probably would not have any remote interest in the game.
Hopefully Gearbox gives us some explanation in a swift manner… otherwise, their sales may be drastically affected.
What do you think? Is Furious 4 desecrating the Brothers In Arms name, or is it a saving grace?
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©2011 Nicholas Laborde
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Filed under: 3rd Party Games, Console gaming, E3 2011, Editorial, Events, Game Impressions, Game Industry News, Gaming Videos, Industry News, New Game Information, New Xbox 360 Games, PS3 News, Xbox 360, Xbox 360 News Tagged: | "Operation Market Garden", brothers in arms, Brothers in Arms Furious 4, electronic entertainment expo, Furious 4, Inglourious Basterds, Matt Baker, Randy Pitchford, Ubisoft, World War II
For me, the original BIA sequel is dead. Thank you morons. Spending three years making this s***, is quite an achievement. Hope to meet you along the Hell’s Highway…
wasn’t the whole point of bia that it was a very historically accurate, dramatic FPS set in WWII with a goal of doing justice to that history through a character driven narrative and graphic realism?
i doubt the french living in carentan today will paint the town with “furious 4″ posters like they did for hill 30…
this is a sick money grab that rapes the whole reason i played bia in the first place… this violence-glorifying garbage is so disingenuous to the franchise, and thereby the whole “war is hell” point of said franchise’s character, it has completely turned me off of the whole thing… unless they scrap where they were going with this piece of shit and finish the original games…
…and don’t even get me started on how i immediately felt that “hell’s highway” was pulling away from the history the game is based on with it’s “recon point”, two or three paragraph burps of the real history. a close second to the characters and their stories was how the game fit into that history, imo. that is what was really moving about the game – the real history of the real men on all sides who fought and died in WWII… not some damn tomahawk-throwing, groin-electrocuting, inglorious bastards-wannabe. …and how are they going to fit in the squad firing tactics? probably not at all…
the point wasn’t how much gore and violence we could squeeze in there, but how terrible all that gore and violence is, how men react under that pressure, and REALISM.
**** i’m pissed!
Seeing as how all of you have finished the game BIA:Furious 4…..
If Gearbox would have pumped out yet another BIA cookie cutter sequel you would have attacked with hammer and pipes, but they could see that BIA and every other WWII FPS are growing stale, so to try and pump life into a dying genre they are taking a chance.
We as gamers are spoiled. We ask for variety and innovation,but when we get it we complain that we want our old back. If a company pumps out yet another FPS such as Medal of honor, COD and Halo we stand in line and continue to give these companies our money for the same crap every 12 months.
I support Gearbox in there decision to take it in a different direction. As a gamer of 31 years finding games that will keep my interest for years to come are few and far between. If you frown upon the change speak with your dollars, but for every Gearbox there are 20 Activision’s that will continue to cater to the lowest comment denominator.
While I agree with you with regards to producing something that a great deal of gamers want, these days, I disagree with bastardising an existing title in order to achieve that aim.
They could well have simply created a new IP, but that would mean going down the whole creating a concpet and establishing a working model and gaining approval, even if it is in-house. Which all game developers have to do even if the game developer is just part of the actual publishing company. There’s a process all games must go through, which ads time and costs ontop of it.
That aside, If WWII games are getting stale, it’s not with the huge number that love those games, and there’s never enough of them IF they are done right.
Having the capital and technology as Gearbox do at their disposal, they could well have created something along the lones of a Medal Of Honor, new Battlefield feel and look about the WWII arena. There’s many places in WWII that need telling, just like there’s plenty of places and stories to unfold in modernday history events for shooter to use and explore.
Create a game that appeals to the masses, and still work towards furnishing the market with a proper followup.
Imagin if the writer of Harry Potter allowed the film makers to change the movie, and or the games to something akin to a hack-n-slash, with the members of the cast totting guns and chainsaws, which are now used in BIA F4 btw, There’d be such an uproar you’d hear it on to[p of Mt Everest. Same thing applies here.
I do also agree that gamers are way too spoilt with games these days, but a series, which has been established with several iterations, should not be cast aside by changing directions mid-stream. It’s the sign of a lazy developer taking advantage of a bubble in gaming fashion. And as we all know, bubbles burst, but tried and true styles continue on through troubled times.
Creating a new IP for such a game would sell millions, knowing the Epic crew, but now Gearbox is part of Epics umbrella, it’s methods have changes, and not all for the better I might ad.
I have to agree with everyone here, and all supporters of the BIA lovers ‘worldwide’ . . . . Gearbox have been ‘infected’ with the “Gears-Virus’ and taken it across to all their games.
Randy has been severely infected with the Gears-Gene and it’s lead to a huge outbreak of Gears-everythingobia . .
But on a serious note, I AM serious. It seems that unless a game coming from Epic, Gearbox or similar publisher/developers doesn’t have some macarbe or inane style of gameplay and storyline, if there IS a storyline, then it doesn’t get to be made, or deemed fit for gamer consumption.
News flash to the heads behind Epic and Gearbox etc . . . we do NOT all want mindless gun-fodder gameplay, based and aimed squarely at the Multiplayer crowds who have no minds anyhow.
You could turn out fodder to them with a gun and a huge map, and they’d be happy.
Get back to what you USED to do well, make excellent war based games based on some level of fact and history, yet accessible to the gamers worldwide.
You’ve lost a solid supporter here, that’s for sure, not only on this title, but on ALL other future titles, incl the new Gears Of War, which look basically more of the same anyhow. No surprise there eh.
I agree with you. BIA had great organisation of your team to flank etc. enemies. You got to control your squad, which was (and is) pretty unique in a shooter.
The only problem I had with the last game was that it took place during Market Garden, which had been done to death in previous WW2 games. There are lots of WW2 battlefields that haven’t been done yet, especially dating before America entered the war.
This new direction has me stunned and shaking my head in dismay. If this is what the ‘market’ wants now- games that one up each other in gory silliness – then I’ll just stick to my Uncharted and Assassin’s Creed. At least they still do well and are fun adventures without the gratuitous rubbish.
I had to check the calendar and see if we were April 1st. BiA 3 was a massive disappointment (overly linear, broken multi-player) but I was still looking forward to the sequel because of the story… but now? BiA is officially over for me.