Battlefield: Bad Company 2 getting four-player co-op

The day after it announced that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 had sold 5 million units, Electronic Arts has revealed a major update for the military shooter. This morning, the still financially troubled publisher said it is working on a new downloadable expansion called "Onslaught Mode" that will bring four-person cooperative play to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game. The PC edition was not mentioned. Neither was pricing for the DLC, nor whether the co-op mode would offer both online and offline play.

Much like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's Special Ops mode, Bad Company 2's Onslaught Mode features co-op play via a series of maps, and not in the single-player campaign. However, the new mode will double the number of co-op players of its competitor in the first-person shooter genre, allowing four players to team up on four different maps.

Onslaught Mode's maps are titled Atacama Desert, Valparaiso, Isla Inocentes, and Nelson Bay, and each will have a particular focus in terms of strategy. The last will be an all-infantry experience, while the first will focus on vehicular combat, adding several new unidentified machines to the game's 15-vehicle garage. The add-on will also introduce new lighting effects to developer EA DICE's proprietary Frostbite engine and will sport leaderboards for the co-op levels.

EA did not give a release date for Onslaught Mode, saying only that it was "coming soon." It will be the latest DLC for Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which focuses on B Company, a fictitious unit of expendable misfits and outcasts plucked from the US military's ranks. Destructible environments, a core component of the original game, are again front and center in Bad Company 2, thanks to further revisions to the Frostbite engine.

[UPDATE] Addressing the concerns of PC gamers, DICE associate producer Barrie Tingle posted a message on the official UK Bad Company 2 forums. He explained that the developer is still leaving the door open on a PC version of Onslaught Mode and outlined how DICE's decision to allow dedicated servers for the game created issues with a Windows version of the expansion.

"No, we haven't signed away rights to console on this," said Tingle. "The problem we have on PC is that all our servers are dedicated with providers. Changing a server from Conquest 32 players to Onslaught 4 players cuts out 28 player slots from the total amount available. This could have a dramatic effect on the PC online environment if enough servers changed to Onslaught."

He continued, "We aren't ruling out Onslaught on PC, but at this time, we are researching how to bring it to PC without affecting players who don't have Onslaught or their own server to run it on."