What other areas?
For instance, sound and graphics. One of the goals with the demo you saw was actually to prove that we can go from a dark indoor environment that is super tight, almost claustrophobic and then seamlessly go out into a huge, big, bright, open with loads of things going on. Loads of bullets. Loads of soldiers. And do that completely seamlessly, because most games would have a kind of loading point.
Right, like something on screen that hides the buffer. Yeah.
Yeah, you can buffer loading and stream things in or out, and we do that on the fly. The reason for that is wanting to make the player feel more immersed in the world.So our biggest challenge right now is what do we want? Rather than can we build it?
It sounds like one of the design points of the game is that you’re talking about it as if you want the experience of playing the game to surprise you in the same way that playing against other people would.
Yep.
That’s quite a lofty goal. Talking about the multiplayer, which is obviously coming. Is a big hallmark for you guys. Can we expect the usual pillars? A lot of vehicles. Letting players jump in and jump out. A broad range of classes and stuff like that. How much are you guys talking about that at this point?
We’re not talking details at all really. But the whole mentality is exactly what you said. I’m trying to convince people that you don’t have to worry about our multiplayer. That doesn’t mean I won’t change stuff or add stuff. It’s more about what we call the sport of Battlefield.
You can’t change the rule set. Tennis is tennis. You can’t just change the rules from one day to another because people are bored. For us, it’s super important to make sure it’s how you play tennis rather than what tennis is nothing you can focus on.
It’s how can we improve on the Battlefield experience rather than how can we change the Battlefield experience. Because as a core idea, the Battlefield experience is a brilliant concept. We just need to make sure that it becomes more vivid and a smoother experience where you can experience even cooler things.
The demo you guys show ended with an earthquake. Now is that a chicken and an egg scenario where you guys decided ‘We want destruction,’ then had it built into the game? Or was that a story point before the engine was built?
Yeah. It’s actually a story point before anything. I won’t go into what the story is right now. But it’s one big chain-reaction event in the story that tosses things around, which turns into what the game is all about. So that was more of, “Oh, we want an earthquake. Could we possibly build that?” So we had to come up with all this crazy stuff to be able to create that sequence. Of course, we used the Frostbite 2 engine to do it. And we had to do some extra work on the engine to get that going.