Story and background

The game portrays a hypothetical war in the near future between three powerful factions: the United States Marines Corps (USMC), China's People's Liberation Army (PLA), and the fictional Middle Eastern Coalition (MEC). The battles, however, only feature USMC versus MEC and USMC versus China; the MEC and China are presumably allied or neutral, as they are never seen attacking each other. There is little background to the war aside from what can be gleaned from map briefings, and certain questions, such as why mutually assured destruction did not prevent the countries from attacking each other and if any of the countries retaliated using weapons of mass destruction, remain unanswered.

Unlike Battlefield 1942, the armies use modern weaponry: the Marines use well-known American weaponry such as the M1 Abrams tank and the M4 Carbine assault rifle, the Chinese use a mixture of Chinese-made copies of Soviet weapons like the Type 56, and their own latest modern weaponry, such as the QBZ-95, while the Middle Eastern Coalition uses a mix of old Soviet weapons and newer, more advanced arms from the Russian Federation, like the AK-101.

Battlefield 2 was originally scheduled to be released on March 20, 2005, but was delayed until June 21, 2005 for North America, and June 24, 2005 for Europe and Australia.
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Gameplay

The ultimate objective of "Conquest" (which until the release of patch 1.3 was Battlefield 2's only game mode) is to reduce the opposing team's "tickets", an indicator of how many respawns are available to that team. Once a team's ticket count reaches zero, the other team wins the round. Teams can speed up the loss of the other team's tickets by capturing objectives, depicted as flags in the game. Tickets will decline at a steady rate, but if more than half of the flags are captured, then the opposing teams tickets will decline more than usual.

The various infantry classes and vehicles provide a variety of methods to attack and counter the opposing team's forces, and in this way, the gameplay resembles a complex game of rock, paper, scissors.