Battlefield 3 and 4: From Tehran to Shanghai

Battlefield 3 begins in Sulaymaniyah, a city in the east of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. In March 2014, Sergeant Henry Blackburn and his Marine squad, callsign Misfit 1-3, are sent here. An ambush by the PLR, an Iranian paramilitary group, wounds Chaffin, and moments later an earthquake devastates the city. The game takes its setting from a real city, but the pin marks the city centre, not a specific street.

Location precision: The game never names a street; the pin marks Sulaymaniyah itself.

In October the story moves to Tehran. After a U.S. Navy airstrike on Mehrabad Airport, Misfit is dropped into the city to assess the damage and capture the PLR leader, Faruk Al-Bashir. Mehrabad is a real airport, opened in 1938 and still the busiest in Iran by passenger numbers. The pin marks the airport, the one Tehran landmark the plot names.

Location precision: The mission is set across Tehran; the pin marks Mehrabad Airport, the only named site.

Dying, Al-Bashir tells Blackburn that Solomon plans to detonate the stolen nukes in Paris and New York. Blackburn is by then under CIA interrogation in Queens, so Dima's Russian squad tries to stop the attack alone. It fails: the nuke detonates, killing 80,000 people. Paris is one of the real cities the game builds maps around, together with Tehran and New York. The story names no single landmark for the blast, so the pin marks the centre of the city.

Location precision: The campaign does not name a specific Paris site; the pin marks the city centre.

The Battlefield 3 finale takes place in Times Square. Blackburn and Montes chase Solomon through New York until both cars crash into the square. Solomon shoots Montes, and Blackburn kills him with a brick in the brawl, stopping the bomb. The real square is the junction of Broadway, Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan, and draws an estimated 50 million visitors a year, so you can stand where the last fight plays out.

Visitor guidance: The junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue at 42nd Street is the centre of the square.

Battlefield 4 jumps to the War of 2020. Squad Tombstone, led by Sergeant Recker, is sent to Shanghai to rescue two VIPs, one of them a woman named Hannah. The rescue works, but the squad ends up trapped in the city and has to rescue civilians. Shanghai sits on the Yangtze estuary, split by the Huangpu River. The game does not name a single address, so the pin marks the city centre.

Location precision: The campaign names the city but no street or building; the pin marks central Shanghai.

Recker and Irish are captured and held in a prison in the Kunlun Mountains for interrogation. There Recker meets a Russian prisoner called Dima, a survivor of the Paris blast. The two escape, start a mass prison riot and use the chaos to get away. A tram carrying the group out of the mountains is shot down, and Dima dies in the crash. The Kunlun range is one of the longest in Asia, over 3,000 kilometres, so the pin is only a rough marker.

Location precision: The game does not give the prison's exact location; the pin marks the Kunlun range.