DICE: Using PC as BF3 lead platform is “helping us make a better console game”

By Stephany Nunneley

Battlefield 3 executive producer Patrick Bach is of the belief that consoles are holding development of PC games back, due to what he feels is an outdated focus by other developers.

Speaking in an interview over on Nvidia’s GeForce website, Bach believes using consoles as the lead platform in development is the “biggest problem we have today.”

“Most games are actually still based on the same core idea that the consoles are your focus, the superior platform or something,” he said. “I don’t know why. That was the truth five years ago, but the world has moved on. PCs are way more powerful than the consoles today and there are actually almost zero games out there that actually use the benefits of this.

“So for our target of what we want to hit, we are now using the more powerful platform to try and prove what we see gaming being in the future rather than using the lowest common denominator, instead of developing it for the consoles and then just adding higher resolution textures and anti-aliasing for the PC version. We’re doing it the other way around, we start with the highest-end technology that we can come up with and then scale it back to the consoles.”

Bach said that by using PC as Battlefield 3’s lead platform, console versions of the game will look better as well.

“In theory you could argue that you’re building it for a more powerful platform and that it will look crappy on consoles. That’s not the case because when you build the target high, you can then pick and choose from the target and ask what actually creates this picture and then pick the best things from that and turn that into your console solution.

“The other thing that is very interesting is that since you’re building the engine based on the knowledge that you will release it on the consoles, you actually streamline the whole technology to be able to scale back to the weaker platforms. So in the end, by, you know, painting this high-end target, you actually set a new bar and then when you scale it back.

“I think people will be surprised to see how good it looks on the consoles. We can’t show it right now, because we’re aiming to use the PC to set the bar, but it’s actually helping us make a better console game.”

Battlefield 3 is out later this year on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.

Thanks, BigDownload.