'Battlefield: Bad Company 2' Vietnam extra dated for December

(All rights reserved - Electronic Arts)

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is to receive its Vietnam expansion on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 by mid-December, with the downloadable multiplayer pack arriving on December 18 for PC users and December 21 for console owners.

It brings an additional four maps to the table, kitting players out as US Marines or members of the North Vietnamese Army, for the price of 1200 Microsoft Points, $15, €13 or £10.

Electronic Arts also announced that Bad Company 2, which is required in order to play Vietnam, will benefit from four additional multiplayer maps from December 1, free of charge to those that have registered the VIP code that comes with new copies of the game.

The extras have been timed to avoid clashes with the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops (November 9), which was set during the Cold War, and Medal of Honor (mid-October), which had the current War in Afghanistan as its backdrop.

The Vietnam war is not a new setting for video games. Among others, Conflict in Vietnam and a tie-in with the Oscar-winning film Platoon emerged in the 1980s, followed by Lost Patrol and NAM-1975 in the early '90s, and a number of flight simulators throughout the rest of the decade.

Even the Battlefield series has visited the era before, with 2004's Battlefield Vietnam, around the same time that the team behind Medal of Honor: Allied Assault produced Men of Valor, and the Vietcong series also made its mark.

Trailers for Bad Company 2 and the Vietnam expansion can be found at Youtube.com/Battlefield.