DICE boss Patrick Söderlund discussed the multi-player and single-player aspects of the upcoming Battlefield 3.
Talking in an interview with
Atomic MPC,
DICE CEO Patrick Söderlund shared some new info on the upcoming Battlefield 3, particularly the PC version of the game. Most interesting is the part where he discusses the maximum number of players the game can handle:
"
A lot of people ask us about 64 versus 128 or 256 players. Technically, we can go to 256, we’ve tried it," claims Söderlund.
"
We play tested with 128. You’ve got to make a game that’s fun to play. And, arguably, we think that the most fun you can have is when it’s between 32 and 40 players. And we’ve done substantial research into this and tested 128 and that it’s not fun. Maybe we haven't done our design work good enough, but we just feel like there's no point in going higher than 64."
Good news for PC gamers, as the latest Battlefield game released on the PC,
Battlefield: Bad Company 2, was scaled down for its multiplatform release.
Additionally, Söderlund spoke a bit about the single player campaign and how it's taking things more seriously then the previous entries in the series.
"
I think telling a story is obviously important but I think we have a lot to gain from having people that you care about in the game, that have personality that, y’know, some of them you’re gonna not like some of them you’re gonna like. And that’s the whole idea."
"
We want the characters to feel personal; we want them to have these ironic jokes between each other but not maybe as goofy as Bad Company was in some places. This will feel a lot more serious and more real."
Söderlund also revealed some bits about the destructible structures and environment show in the
Battlefield 3 gameplay video shown at GDC.
"
So if an earthquake—I don’t know if you could see—but you saw the ground crumble and crack and you saw it lifted up and we couldn’t do that in Bad Company 2. But this engine allows us to do those kinds of things. So if there’s a gigantic bomb that hits somewhere, you want to see that affecting the ground as well as the surroundings around it and buildings and all that stuff. And then you start playing in that environment and you realise how much you can destroy."
Battlefield 3 should be available at the end of 2011 for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
http://www.gamersbook.com/scene/news/battlefield-3-can-take-up-to-256-players/
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Battlefield 3 developer DICE has fired off a few rounds at its competitors, accusing other military shooters of recycling the same old formula.
"Our competitors are getting lazy," DICE general manager Karl-Magnus Troedsson told
Official PlayStation Magazine.
"They're using the same engine, the same recipe for building a game. At some point you need to take that leap. I haven't seen them take that leap since a long time ago.
"We are doing that now," he insisted. "They had better watch out. We are coming for them."
Who on earth could he be referring to? It's a wild shot in the dark, but considering all of publisher EA's
recent bluster about going head to head with Call of Duty, one obvious target springs to mind.
"Our competitors keep building very, very high tempo games," he added. "We want to tell a story with more drama curves. It's not about pumping round after round for six hours."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-03-11-battlefield-3-dev-calls-competition-lazy
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"You're almost tricking me into a position where I'm telling you about the story!" laughs Patrick Bach, Battlefield 3's senior producer. After witnessing the code in action at DICE's Stockholm HQ, I asked him about how earthquakes in the game affect the storyline, and whether this catastrophe-mechanic is in any way similar way to Spec Ops: The Line's sandstorm-sundered Dubai. But no dice.
There are inarguable business imperatives for not revealing the big secrets of your game – such as the storyline – so far ahead of its launch, especially when you're working in the most competitive genre in entertainment. And right now, trying to wheedle plot arcs out of DICE is like asking George Osborne to comment on corporate tax-dodging. So let's work with what we know: Battlefield 3 is a contemporary US-military shooter set on the Iran/Iraq border. Earthquakes are making a perfect mess of things for the US forces. And it's built using DICE's new proprietary engine, Frostbite 2.
The game is demonstrated on the PC, the dev-team's lead platform, with Bach at the helm, and charts the progress of the player and his squad-mates through the wartorn streets of Iraq. From the moment they step out of their armoured transport and receive a briefing from their commanding officer, the level of detail goes through the roof.
Materials, such as clothing, skin and weapons, are startlingly well-defined. The character animations are very human, whether your buddies are sauntering casually or crawling along on their bellies under enfilading fire. When the combat begins, the sense of bullet impact as it smacks off brickwork is so palpable, it makes you want to duck. Frostbite 2 looks ****** magnificent – on the PC, at least. CryEngine beware.
The first flashpoint occurs as the squad enters a car-packed courtyard. Iraqi militants appear on balconies above and spray the area with fire. It's a classic clusterf*** moment, with the surrounded squad diving into cover and peeking out to return fire. But it isn't until one of the militants hefts an RPG and blows a hole in the road that more interesting mechanics begin to break cover.
One of your team is caught in the blast, and curls foetally on the floor. At this point, Bach darts towards him, presses the appropriate action key, grips him under the arms and drags him into an abandoned garage on one side of the plaza.
Out of the line of fire, the soldier is patched up to rejoin the fight, and Bach hints at more such supportive actions: "These actions are as important as shooting; it's a more... real portrait of what actually happens. It's about helping others succeed, and we think that having this as a part of the single-player experience is very important".
One of the things you notice when stepping into a new environment, such as this garage, is the way the audio alters. It's echoey, but still sounds close, and somehow amplified. We're used to games adding reverb effects, or simply damping the sound a little to imply distance, but DICE's sound team goes one better. Actually, they go 84 better. After the demo, audio director Stefan Strandberg explains the process of creating Battlefield 3's soundscape.
"We need to take a scientific approach. And it's important to know that when you record stuff, there is no actual
truth to sound. There are different ways of recording it, many different kinds of microphone you can use... you can build your own reality, and that's what we do."
The sound team goes to great lengths to achieve this, and works closely with the Swedish army when they're out on manoeuvres. "On a joint venture with the Medal of Honor team to record weapon sounds, we had 84 microphones set up at different points. We had people five kilometres away up in the mountains, we had a rig down by the weapons... all these were synchronised".
The net result is that sound changes according to your relative position from the weapon, and the materials that constitute the environment around you. Strandberg then ably demonstrates this by fixing the in-engine camera to one spot in a woodland landscape, holding the fire button down and walking the onscreen soldier into the far distance. The rifle reports altered enormously as the distance grew, losing their sense of immediacy and bass-notes, and gaining that flat, echoey
clack peculiar to gunfire in woodlands.
Back to the demo. When the courtyard firefight is dealt with, the squad moves on, and in short order our man is ordered down into a network of tunnels beneath a building to defuse a bomb that intelligence has been tipped off about.
Somewhere along the line, an earth tremor is felt, and commented on over the radio: like a hint of things to come. Bach drops into a maintenance room, finds the device and begins to defuse it, when an Iraqi guard walks in on him. What follows is a hand-to-hand brawl which borders on brutal. It can't hide its QTE ways, but it's an effective shock tactic dropped into a moment of tension.
When this is done, the team takes to the rooftops, and there's a honeyed quality to the early evening sun as it plays off the sandy stonework; it implies a vivid sense of time and location. Almost immediately, they come under high-calibre sniper fire, and hit the dirt. The squad does a belly-crawl across the rooftop, while chunks of concrete are literally punched out of the low walls around the roof.
DICE is keen to impress the fact that Frostbite 2 handles destructibility on a grand scale, and Bach soon proves the point. Switching from rifle to a one-shot anti-tank missile, he pops his head over the balcony and fires at the sniper's hiding spot in an adjacent tenement block. Windows explode outwards, showering thousands of glass shards and the building crumbles before us convincingly. Somewhere out there, Roland Emmerich dreams on approvingly.
The money shot of the demo is the final sequence. It's a running gun battle down a main city highway, while the squad receives close air support from a chopper. Just as Bach clambers into an abandoned technical to mount the machine gun, the threatened earthquake hits in earnest.
A massive shockwave ripples the pavement slabs, and a tower block shivers like a dinosaur and begins, oh so slowly, to fall towards the camera. The chopper is right in its path and I feel a tremendous urge to shout, "Look out behind you!" Just as the pilot realises, it's swatted out of the sky as the building tumbles towards the player.
Fade to black. For now, it's a wrap. And I'm puzzled. Battlefield 3 is visually startling, and a technical marvel, but I still don't know what it's really
about. Later, I ask Bach what the hook of the game is. What will make people want to play it?
He simply says, "We're making the best modern-era shooter ever made." Given
recent form and the strong technological base they're working from, not to mention my personal fatigue with the latest crop of military-FPS blockbusters, I'm inclined to believe him. I certainly want to, at any rate.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-03-02-battlefield-3-preview
