Sick of blowing out walls and knocking over trees in the pursuit/defense of those same gold crates over and over again in Battlefield: Bad Company? Now you can download a free update that modifies four of the existing maps to play like old-fashioned free-ranging Battlefield games. You remember those, right? The ones they used to make while companies like Epic (Unreal 2004 and Unreal 3), Splash Damage (Quake Wars), Kaos Studios (Frontlines), and Valve (Team Fortress 2) figured out how good multiplayer design channels players into conflict rather than simply dumping them onto a map and turning them loose?

I guess it's a bit like a cool new shooter patching in a vanilla deathmatch mode after the fact because that's just what some people are used to. Fair enough. Give players what they want. But to me, Bad Company was an overdue evolution of the Battlefield model, and I didn't miss one whit the frustration of a chasing lone wolves around a wide-open field of capture flags.