John Riccitiello, the chief executive at Electronic Arts, had only one hope of cracking Modern Warfare 2’s stranglehold on today’s shooter fan: the Stockholm game studio E.A. acquired in 2006 that is known as DICE.

As recently as five years ago the Swedish company’s Battlefield series was riding high. If you were a serious online PC shooter fan in the middle of the last decade, you were certainly playing Battlefield games. But then Activision swiped the market. Moving the Call of Duty games from World War II to the modern day made the games more exciting for many players.

Photo

The Call of Duty games included a robust offline component, allowing players to progress through a scripted story surrounded by computer-controlled opponents and comrades, while the most popular Battlefield games were essentially built to be played only online against other people. And players of Call of Duty were able to build a persistent online identity, so their virtual soldier would become more capable and deadly over time; earlier Battlefield warriors would almost always begin with the same abilities.

With Bad Company 2, the Battlefield series has now matched or exceeded the Call of Duty series in each of these areas.

First, modernity. Each franchise is actually quite similar in its fictional setting. In both series you play a Western soldier confronting a menace originating from the former Soviet Union.

Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.

But Bad Company 2 allows players to use a much broader range of modern military materiel, including tanks, helicopters, Humvees and other vehicles. More important, the virtual environments in Bad Company 2 are much larger and more diverse than those in Modern Warfare 2. Multiplayer battles in Modern Warfare 2 feel like chaotic arenas with people running all over the place looking out for themselves. In Bad Company 2, teamwork and voice communication are essential; the combat environments are more interesting and feel more akin to what I imagine a modern war zone to be.

Yet the biggest leap in Bad Company 2 is in its single-player campaign. It is only six or eight hours long — comparable in length to the main story in Modern Warfare 2 — and while it is not propelled by scripted set pieces as cinematic as those in the competition, Bad Company 2’s narrative glistens. The characters in Bad Company 2 — the redneck, the hippie pilot, the geek, the weathered sergeant — are profane, quirky and usually hilarious. By contrast, the characters in Modern Warfare 2 are somber, even dour. War is obviously serious business, but the characters in Bad Company 2 seem to be having a lot more fun.

And third, DICE has now fine-tuned the persistent role-playing components of the online game, by giving players a panoply of ways to advance their characters and garner recognition from other users around the world.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

One final technical note for consumers: Bad Company 2 is a game that needs to be played on a powerful PC, rather than a console, in order to be fully appreciated. I played mostly on a big rig from AMD, the chip maker, that was able to produce some of the most beautiful graphics I have seen in a shooter. Perhaps more important, the AMD machine came with an ATI Radeon HD 5870 video card that is able to support three monitors at once.

The experience of playing on three monitors, with the peripheral vision it allows, has simply been a revelation. I will continue enthusiastically to use Intel and Nvidia-equipped computers as well, but it may be impossible for me ever to return to a single-monitor setup.

As for the battle of the first-person shooters, let it rage. It is players who are reaping the benefits of this arms race between Activision and Electronic Arts. For now Bad Company 2 is on top.