DICE has explained to Edge how it is trying to cater to both the single and multiplayer camps with its latest installment in the Battlefield series, and one of the ways the team is doing this, is by making the “product bigger.”
Speaking in an interview with Edge, executive producer Patrick Bach as well as lead multiplayer designer Lars Gustavsson, said the team learned what players want and don’t want through the development of the Bad Company series, and incorporated these lessons into BF3.
“Most people that hate singleplayer are the ones that love multiplayer,” said Bach. “That’s fine – you don’t have to play it! We want the product to cater for the people who do like single-player and also the people who like multiplayer – and we are adding co-op, too – trying to fill the gaps all the way from the hardcore full-on Conquest mode, to the narrative-driven singleplayer. People just have to understand that we aren’t taking people away from one thing or the other. We’re just making the product bigger.
“Now we are going back to the core series, we’re throwing away everything that has to do with the tone of the Bad Company series, and creating a completely new tone and narrative based on the more authentic focus we had of Battlefield 2.”
“Through the Bad Company splinter branch, we learnt so much about what our audience wants and doesn’t want; we’ve accepted the fact that people are different and want to play differently,” added Gustavsson. “Even though I stubbornly said that Battlefield is always about teamplay, vehicles and big maps, not everyone agrees – not even everyone at the studio.
“We have so much more input in the design process, that we are really happy to be able to cater to everyone. We can provide a good lone wolf experience. We set up our kits to allow for that powerful teamplay unit, but separately they need to be able to stand on their own. We can cater for singleplayer, coop, multiplayer – we can give you the range from lone wolves who hate vehicles to, at the other end of the scale, all out war in Conquest with jets flying overhead.
“Single-player and multiplayer both have their own needs, but in the end I feel it’s utterly important that it feels like the same game. There’s no better way of proving your singleplayer run-and-gun experience than seeing what it feels like against a live human opponent in multiplayer. But we’re more than willing to make differences to deliver the best experience in each. For example, in multiplayer, we do an additional pass for animation. In singleplayer you don’t mind if a guard up on a balcony does a nice Hollywood death animation when you shoot him – stumbling around a bit before falling over. While in multiplayer it needs to be a one-to-one correlation between action and result.”
You an read the interview with both DICE fellas through the links.
BF3 is out this October on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.
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