Interview with DICE about the Bad Company 2 -> BF3 switch

[BaronVonRotterdam]

How was hardcore mode received? Was there a broad adoption?

I think it goes in waves, and it’s also about your daily form. How are you playing? How do you feel today? How fast are you? I think the hardcore game mode is a brilliant idea, and we could probably turn it up a notch to make it even more hardcore in the future because people are willing to try it out. It’s the same game, but you turn it up to 11…You want that layer of complexity that you can just add on top of whatever game mode you have. It’s a good way of seeing the same game through a new angle.

It was great to be able to squad up in the pre-game lobby, but limiting it to the four people in one squad was troublesome for larger groups who wanted to play together. Are you changing your approach for Battlefield 3?

Well, yes. It’s actually a very crucial part of the game. We’re thinking a lot about squads and team play – making that even more accessible. Like you said, squads are really easy to set up, but how can you take that further? We have some really cool things that we’ll show later when it comes to dictating how you play with friends.

Call of Duty and Halo both have it, but with the crazy things that happen in Battlefield matches, no game is better suited to having a theater mode. What are you thoughts on that?

We have functionality on our end that can capture movies. The hard part of course is our dedication to creating non-cheatable games contradicts the whole idea of doing that because we are running dedicated servers on everything and that actually makes it harder. We’re definitely looking into ways of delivering our version of this functionality, but I can’t give away any details.

What are your plans for co-op? Will you be able to play through the campaign with friends?

We will have a co-op mode. I won’t go into exact details about if it’s going to be connected to this or that, but we will have a co-op mode in the box.


During the summer you released the one-off Onslaught mode for Bad Company 2. How did you feel it was received?

Okay. Only okay. Onslaught was an experiment on our side to see what we could do with our technology on existing code more or less. There was very little code change to the game because it was more or less supposed to be a little quirky mod for Bad Company 2. It was actually received better than we thought. We now know much better what is needed, and of course we have better tools that are designed to do these things. I can honestly say that we can now do whatever we want to do, and the choices we have made for the game are based on what we want rather than what we have.


One of the more controversial additions to Bad Company 2 was the killcam – snipers especially whined about it. Are you keeping it for Battlefield 3?

We still think that some kind of giveaway camera, no matter what it is, is something that you should be able to have. And you should have the opportunity to turn it off and play a game without it. I think it’s not all bad. And again, if you look at how we reason when we build a game there should always be a way to counter something, and if you’re a good sniper you know that you’re now on camera, which means that you should move.

Jets are coming back in Battlefield 3. How are you dealing with the maps to give them room to maneuver?

We’re building bigger maps. Then again, the games are about fun so if you have a Mach 2 jet on one of our maps you would pass it in 0.2 seconds. You still need to design the game to fit. It can’t be as slow as a chopper, but then again it can’t be Mach 2 so there’s a sweet spot that we’re hitting with map scale, scale of fight, and speed of vehicles so it will actually fit. And of course there should also be a way of countering something.


Prone is coming back as well. Why the change of heart from Bad Company 2, for which you defending your reasoning to leave it out of the game?

First of all, Bad Company 2 was the spin-off. We had our own rule set. This is based on Battlefield 2, so we can go back and look at how can we solve the problem of proning, hiding in high grass, and there are a lot of ways of countering that. Muzzle flash is one of them, vapor traces are another – the bigger the gun the bigger the trace – stuff like that. And of course giving others tools to spot players and give away positions. We have more time to fiddle with those things to make them work. Prone is fun for the person proning. How fun is it to not see someone shooting you? It’s not fun at all. That’s our challenge. That’s our job to design around that and find ways to counter that.

The Bad Company 2 multiplayer maps felt more funneled, then the Vietnam expansion offered more open areas like classic Battlefield games. What approach are you adopting for Battlefield 3?

I’m glad you noticed because that’s actually what we want to do. We want to show people that we can build whatever we want, and if you want to give people variation then you should look at what you just did and then do it slightly different. That’s the motto we use all the time – you pick a map for a reason. You want to play a map for a reason because it gives you variation to gameplay, pacing, flow, action, hotspots, and also how do or don’t you use vehicles on this map.

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