The Commander feature in Battlefield 2 lets a player have complete command over his squad, but the role won’t be included in Battlefield 3. DICE has explained the reasoning behind the exclusion, with the developer admitting that it was “a bit flawed”.
The shooter’s general manager Karl Magnus Troedsson had this to say at the Eurogamer Expo:
When the dev team sat down and thought about this, the Commander role was a very important and hot topic in the studio I have to say. Some people wanted us to implement it in the absolute same way as we had before; some of us wanted us to reinvigorate how we do it. I don’t know how many people have tried to play as a Commander in Battlefield 2, but it’s kind of a strange experience. Everyone agrees that that actual role of the Commander is very, very cool. But the problem is that only one person per team could play it, and it was always the highest ranking one.
But even for the people that played as a Commander, the first thing they did was what? They ran off to a corner somewhere and lay down there and tried to hide so the Spec Ops guy wouldn’t find them when he was going to blow up the installations. They basically spent the whole match lying on the ground on some obscure corner of the map, hoping not to get knifed in the back and trying to support people.
Troedsson concluded:
That’s why the idea that we’ve had, the team-play elements of the Commander mode that we really like, we have tried to push down to the squads and the squad leaders. We’ve tried to push this down into the squads so they can both fill the roles that the Commander had, but then also be an active soldier on the battlefield.
Although the role of Commander hasn’t made the cut in Battlefield 3, the game still offers squad leaders who can solely order artillery strikes. Troedsson also confirmed the ability for squad leaders to order a mortar strike which is only acquired as a multiplayer unlock.
