Elias stared at his ancient laptop, the kind that hummed like a jet engine just opening a spreadsheet. His friends were already deep in the jungles of Valparaiso, their voices crackling over headsets about "collapsing buildings" and "the best sound design in history." They were playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 , and Elias was being left behind. "Just download it," his friend Miller urged.
The single-player campaign remains playable if you have the game installed, though it was always intended to be a shorter experience compared to the multiplayer
The year was 2010, and the digital battlefield was calling.
You still need to run the redist installers once per PC, but after that, the game plays from the external drive without a full installation.