Battlefield: Bad Company 2's director had big plans for a third entry in the series, with your squad reuniting for an impossible mission amid a war between Russia and the US over Alaska - Related to entry, horrible, reuniting, gore, battlefield:

Battlefield: Bad Company 2's director had big plans for a third entry in the series, with your squad reuniting for an impossible mission amid a war between Russia and the US over Alaska

Battlefield: Bad business 2 remains one of the most beloved of DICE's multiplayer shooters, thrilling players with its destructible warzones and cementing the Swedish studio's reputation for incredible audio design. Despite the game's reputation, DICE never greenlit a third entry in the spinoff series. But that didn't stop BC2's director David Goldfarb from making plans for one all the same.

Goldfarb not long ago revealed some of these plans on X (via GamesRadar) having rediscovered "the first three pages" of one of his Bad business 3 scripts. "I forgot I had the store Haggard was working in called the 'Adiosvidaniya' and now I am freaked out by how much might actually have been accurate," he writes, referring to how the script reflects Russia's apparent encroaching influence on US politics.

Haggard is the demolitions expert from Bad business 2's single-player campaign, and the comic relief of your squad. Goldfarb subsequently posted a "snippet" from his BC3 script, depicting a scene in which Haggard convinces a juvenile shoplifter to hand back the goods he stole from the convenience store Haggard works in, while his parakeet 'Miss July' chimes in with mimicked phrases.

a snippet from the bc3 script [website] 6, 2025.

The extract itself reveals little about Goldfarb's broader plans. Instead, those mainly emerge from user replies and Goldfarb's responses to them. For example, Bad firm 2 ends on a cliffhanger as the Russians invade Alaska, a point which is raised by one respondent to Goldfarb's post. "Short version is, Russia won and partially took over Alaska," Goldfarb replies.

Another user, going by the name Volt, proposes his own theory about how the rest of the story goes "So, they got kicked out of the military clearly," they write. "I'm guess[ing] there's a 'gang gets back together' for a special (impossible) mission". To which Goldfarb simply replies, "yup."

It's worth noting that this is merely Goldfarb's vision for how Bad enterprise 3's story would have gone down, similar to Marc Laidlaw's thinly veiled story summary for Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Asked whether DICE actually entertained the concept of Bad enterprise 3 as a project, Goldfarb replies, "the studio didn't, I was writing it anyway for myself."

Nonetheless, it's intriguing to hear how Bad organization 3 may have worked out, not least because it's been quite some time since we had any Battlefield at all. We did get to see a whole 10 seconds of Battlefield 6 lately, but that isn't much to sustain ourselves on. But even if a Bad organization 3 did somehow happen, it's unlikely Goldfarb would be involved. He currently heads up his own studio The Outsiders, whose most recent project was the thoroughly enjoyable rhythm FPS Metal: Hellsinger.

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Doom: The Dark Ages already sneakily revealed its 'new Marauder,' and the devs hope he'll be just as challenging, but a little less frustrating

Speaking to Doom: The Dark Ages project director Hugo Martin and producer Marty Stratton for our upcoming print issue 408 (396 in the US), I had to ask about the Marauder.

This infamous miniboss in Doom Eternal split the player base, with some loving its next-level challenge, while others decried it as an unwelcome difficulty spike. With The Dark Ages' equivalent enemy, Martin and Stratton hope to offer a similarly memorable challenge that doesn't catch players off-guard to the same extent.

"The Agadon Hunter is the new Marauder," Martin expressed when I asked him about the big guy from The Dark Ages' trailers, revealing the new enemy's name in the process.

He makes a memorable impression, a big, beefy demon dude with a fur cape, shield, and Darth Maul-but-analogue double-ended sword. He's Capra Demon-coded, looking like one of those non-plot-critical FromSoftware bosses who still manages to traumatize the player base.

"He's not based on the Marauder. He's not like, 'Big Marauder,' it's Dark Ages, so it's very different," Martin clarified. "But he's similar in that a lot of the bosses they'll challenge you in different ways. It's all about pushing: parry, dodging and weaving between projectiles.

"We take everything that you've been doing in the game up to that point. It's like it's exam time, everything else is a quiz. When you get to the boss, it's the final exam."

Marin described the Agadon Hunter as having combo attacks that we'll have to parry in sequence with the Slayer's fancy new shield⁠. Martin expressed a love and admiration for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in our conversation, and The Dark Ages' parry system sounds very similar to that game.

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Hold up your shield to block, and if you time it to within the first few frames of the animation, you'll execute an enemy-weakening parry move. To continue the metaphor, the way Martin described the Hunter's moveset reminded me of late-game Sekiro bosses like the Long Arm Centipedes or Lone Shadows.

"I watch a lot of people play," stated Martin, "And I think pretty consistently it's people who didn't understand what to do that got frustrated. People who got it, they didn't mind as much. They appreciated the challenge."

"When I think about the Marauder," Martin expressed, "Much of what he was asking you to do, the core of what he was asking you to do, in terms of shooting him and faltering him during those windows, you hadn't really done much of that in the game up to that point.

"So when the Agadon Hunter demonstrates up, or many bosses, everything he asks you to do. You've been doing the whole game."

If all goes as planned, the Hunter's parrying-centric challenge will be improved-ingrained in our muscle memory by the time we're throwing down with him. That also ties in with a wider initiative for The Dark Ages overall: A core gameplay mechanic that's meant to be more intuitive than Eternal's weapon quick-switching.

"You shouldn't be fighting the controls," Martin unveiled at a press preview ahead of Doom: The Dark Ages' developer direct trailer in January, "You should be fighting the bad guys."

To that end, the new game is focused more on combos between its new shield, melee weapons, and the guns rather than between individual firearms like in Doom Eternal. And we won't have long to find out how it all feels in the hand: Doom: The Dark Ages will launch on May 15.

Ahead of that, you can check out my full interview with Martin and Stratton in the upcoming issue 408/396 of PC Gamer's print magazine. We also discussed The Dark Ages' crazy new weapons, like the one that's constantly chewing up skulls and spitting the shards at enemies.

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The sickest gun from Doom: The Dark Ages' trailer is called the 'Skullcrusher' and does such horrible things to demons, the game's lead dev boasts id has 'the best gore in the industry'

For the cover story of PC Gamer's upcoming print issue #408 (#396 for those of us in the US), I had the chance to talk to Doom: The Dark Ages game director Hugo Martin and producer Marty Stratton about the upcoming FPS. One thing I just had to ask about was that utterly nasty gun from the trailers: The one that's constantly shoving skulls into a woodchipper and blasting the shards downrange.

"That gun started out as the Bonecrusher, and then I think, through conceptual development, became the Skullcrusher," Martin noted. "It does exactly what you think it does. It's kind of a spread minigun that you could also turn into a long range minigun."

Among previous Doom arsenals, Martin compared it to your classic chaingun, but there are a few things that differentiate it mechanically alongside its killer visual schtick. It's a much closer-range weapon than prior Doom machine guns, but makes up for this with a rate of fire and movement speed boost that builds up as you're firing the weapon.

"You'll get a speed boost, and the rate of fire will increase," Martin explained. "So it goes from this kind of heavy, slow-moving chain gun to like, you just zip it around the arena. So it gives you an advantage with movement, but you need it because it's not very long range." Both that modification, as well as an accuracy-improving choke mod we've yet to see in trailers, will be part of the gun's leveling up progression, similar to the weapons in Doom 2016 and Eternal.

"The base one that you've seen in the trailers, I kind of describe that as a weed whacker," showcased Martin. "That's what it feels like when I'm running around with it. And you've got to get close, but when you get close to guys, we've done a lot of custom tuning to the gore and the falters."

Martin compared the effect of letting it rip with the Skullcrusher at point blank to the iconic scene from Robocop with the ED-209 robot going absolutely ham on a hapless executive, holding him spasming in place with machine gun fire, squibs and practical effect gore blasting off in every direction. Martin mentioned that classic action movie fare like this has become a north star for id as it continues to tinker on the demonic dismemberment tech it first rolled out with Doom 2016.

"At this point, it's destructible demons version three, from 2016 to Eternal to now. We've got, I'd like to think, the best gore in the industry," Martin mentioned. "Our gore system is really where we spend a lot of money. So that, coupled with the falters, the incredible animations, the physics, the sound design, the blood squibs, we really create that [Robocop] moment. It feels so good with the Skullcrusher, because you'll run up to a bunch of fodder, and you're just holding them in place as their limbs come off and their bodies shake and they don't drop until you let go of the trigger."

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To be frank, that's what I'm talkin' about, baby. I'm usually more of a slow-firing, shotguns-forward Doom player, but I could watch the animation of skulls popping up and disappearing into the thresher on the Skullcrusher all damn day. It feels as well-suited to that old cartoon conveyor belt music⁠—which I just learned is "Powerhouse" by Raymond Scott⁠—as Doom's usual industrial metal soundtrack.

Slow-fire weapon lovers won't be left in the lurch, though: Producer Stratton praised the "Railspike" weapon in our interview, and you can see that gun pinning enemies to walls in The Dark Ages' first trailers. You can read the rest of our Doom: The Dark Ages story in our upcoming issue 408/396 of the PC Gamer print mag, and Doom: The Dark Ages itself will be arriving shortly after on May 15.

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