If you’ve been playing games longer than 10 years, you might remember the good old server browser, which we used to connect to our favorite servers back in the day. Be it Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament, or – case in point – Battlefield Bad Company 2.
It still is one of the most beloved entries in the franchise, and it’s worth a look, especially since Battlefield 6 is on the horizon.
On September 9th, players reported the servers went live again for the aged multiplayer shooter, after an unexplained outage the past week.
This has reignited a conversation that has been raging in forums a while; the importance of real server browsers in multiplayer games. There is a case to be made for the ease of access of matchmaking in modern shooters, but the community control and preservation of older titles, as well as the freedom to be able to play the way your community wants to, cannot be denied.
Why Is Bad Company 2 a Good Argument for Server Browsers?
Even 15 years after its release, the shooter still has an active fanbase.
The maps are still a masterclass design-wise, offering tight chokepoints, and wide open areas to duke it out, and the construction system was the cherry on top of it all.
Even more important, so that the server browser remains an intact way of life for many multiplayer shooters, even if matchmaking has surpassed it 90% of the time. Playing games like that is a stark reminder of how far the genre has come, but we wish that this way of playing games didn’t die out.
The amount of customization is unparalleled, and in our opinion, that’s part of the reason many games lived as long as they did.
Server Browsers Deserve a Comeback
We get it, modern matchmaking is primarily designed for convenience. Click a button, get dropped into a game, repeat. But convenience comes at the cost of choice. In the days of server browsers, you could pick where to play, what rules to follow, and which communities to join.
That flexibility created loyalty – not just to the game, but to the groups of people who played it.
Bad Company 2’s resurrection underscores why that model worked. When servers are visible, community-driven, and sometimes even player-hosted, games can outlive publisher support. Without them, titles risk disappearing entirely once the plug is pulled. And let’s face it, the reason matchmaking has surpassed server browsers in this way is to create a “meta” and for companies to determine how their game is supposed to be played at a certain point in time.
