‘Battlefield 3’ Producer: ‘Controversy Is Not a Mature Way to Sell a Game’

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You talked about the Frostbite 2 engine. And it seems like you guys built it with the end experience of great lighting, massive destructibility and scalability in mind. Can you talk about what the goals were?

I think the big point with building your own engine is that you don’t have to find the best engine that someone else made. You can actually decide what is it that need to achieve and then you build the engine to fit. And since we have so much experience in building Battlefield games we know how to build that core engine and we know what we need to improve on to move forward.

And then looking at what first-person shooters should be rather than what they are. I think we are trying to be the first ones to actually move into the next generation where you can actually experience a different game rather than just having developers say, “Oh, we’ll have more polygons.”

What are the experimental components that are going to be different? You talk about better graphics, better lighting, the HDR sound. What goes into building those without like talking about the game specifically?

I think in general it’s back to starting with the end experience: What is that you want to achieve? And then reverse-engineer that into something that is doable. Because you can always claim, “If I only had like 15 years to build an engine, this would have been the ultimate thing.” So this is a big step for us to be able to actually build a game that looks like this.

First thing that struck me was how the demo showed the player going from the parking lot through the air vent and back out to another big street skirmish. What’s the inspiration for that? Obviously, you want to have different environments to keep the player engaged. Was anything else at work that made that widening/narrowing be a design pillar?

Variation is something that’s key to player experience. Because some games when it turn into a repetitive shooter, you do the same thing, over, and over, and over again, and the environment is more or less like a backdrop. It’s supposed be like, “Oh, now we’re here and now we’re here.” But the world doesn’t really change, it’s just the textures covering the world that change.

With us, the constant surprise of multiplayer inspires us again with all the variation. We want players to be able to think, “Today I will go silent. I will try to sneak around and do things this way. Or I’ll go super loud, I’ll pick up a tank and I’ll just go charging in.” We want to take that mentality and feed that into more areas.

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