EA’s hoping to storm to the top of the modern military FPS heap with Battlefield 3, ending Call of Duty‘s recent reign as the number one shooter franchise. The man leading the charge at the DICE development studio making the game is executive producer Patrick Bach. Bach’s been at DICE for nine years and spoke with me about what DICE hopes to achieve with BF3, the tech powering it and how it won’t be like other shooter games set in the present-day.
So, you guys are unveiling Battlefield 3 for the first time this week. Talk about why this entry is being seen as the next chapter of the mothership as opposed to a Bad Company game or a kind of tertiary branch of the Battlefield franchises. What do you feel has changed in the first-person shooter field since BF2?
First of all the biggest focus of ours is mindset going back to the roots rather than iterate on the games that we have. So going back and looking at what the BF community did and liked with Battlefield 2, I think is a very important thing. You can see the prone position as a symbol for added complexity to the game. It’s not run-and-gun. But, with complexity, I don’t think it’s harder to play, it’s just that there’s more depth in the core Battlefield games than there was in Bad Company. But Bad Company was supposed to be a console-only game from the start. Bad Company 1 was only for the consoles. That was our kind of spinoff console franchise while the core was still on PC. So, looking back at the original community and then marry that with the community with the Bad Company series, we can see that there’s a lot of potential to serve both communities in BF3.
Right. Something that brings in bridges the gap.
Yeah. We take the best of both worlds, of course, but having the springboard being Battlefield 2. And your second question was how the first-person shooter has changed lately. We haven’t really seen it move forward that much. It’s been kind of more of the same. They forget about the nuts and bolts. Great graphics or technical excellence might be the reason why they bought it, but in the end it’s the experience you have every time you play the game. A lot of people have their own war stories where they did this cool thing, and then someone did this, and then they countered with that. And then my squad came in and helped me. Then we won. Everyone has their personal war story to tell with the Battlefield games.
But that kind of experience is always emergent, right?
Yeah.
It’s always player-based and random in a way that you as developers can’t script yet. But it seems like you’re trying to deliver that same energy into single-player mode, at least from what you’ve shown.
Yeah.
Can you talk about how that emergent multiplayer chaos can feed into a script with single-player experience?
That was actually the original intent when we built the first Bad Company. Because that was the first single-player focused Battlefield game. “How can we transform these stories of the battlefield into a coherent experience where everyone can more or less try it out and see?” Then, when you go online you can actually start playing with it and enjoy it. In general, our motto is more or less to have single-player being, first of all, an experience where you can try everything out before you go online.
There’s actually a lot of people that are scared of going online because they think they will just get owned which they do. But today at least have a chance to try the game on safer grounds and try out all the guns in a more controlled environment.
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.
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.
The top FPSes over the last couple of years–Call Of Duty: Black Ops, Medal of Honor and Bad Company 2–have all seemed really tethered to the mundane. Not that the play experience is mundane, but more like they’re done in an almost documentary style. Why do you think there’s such a focus on that right now? Because DICE has done Battlefield 2142, which is a far-future sci-fi…
And we’ve done the WWII games as well. If you look at the core game as a sport again, for us it doesn’t really change the core game, what setting you’re in. But I think the contemporary world of what you watch on TV is very attractive to a lot of people. They get really attached to it. They can recognize the guns. They can recognize the vehicles. They could connect to the situation in a way that might be harder with sci-fi like shooter.
But I still think there’s room for both. And I’m not trying to say that this is the only way to do it. Because we just did Bad Company 2: Vietnam, which we think is an awesome setting to have a first-person shooter in.
You’re treating the time periods like a palette of colors…
Yeah, it’s more, again, what is the flavor you want today. It’s not ‘how do we change the game?’ So even we get fed up with stuff sometimes. That’s why we did the Vietnam DLC.
Still, you set a game in a hotspot area on the Iran/Iraq border. Medal of Honor got into some trouble with that kind of thing last year and even Black Ops caught some heat with the Castro assassination mission. Do you think there’ll be a controversy surrounding your game?
The point isn’t to be controversial. Some connection to reality is important but, even as you’re referencing reality, you can still do a what-if scenario. We believe we can create a more grown-up experience than our competition. We can do more with character drama and player expectations than is presently being done. Controversy is not a mature way to sell a game. You still want to be proud at the end of the day.
So basically you guys see BF3 as a transitional game?
Well, it’s a transitional game in the sense that I think we will see a lot of games trying to copy us from where we are because they will see that, oh, wait a minute, you can do it differently. It’s not just about fixing one thing, it’s about fixing the experience.
It’s creating a new groundwork to move forward. Rather than just doing it, take your old engine, do a new story, and ship a new game.
The model that you’re talking about with Battlefield 3 is building new technology from scratch. This is a very different model than what Activision uses for Call of Duty where they’re going to rotate talent in and out of the franchise every year. Do you feel like there is something categorically wrong with that approach?
I think what you might end up doing is losing what made it good from the start. You’re diluting the core idea. One, you’re trying to build it on the same core but you’re using different people at a time. With us at DICE, again, it’s the same people building this game that built Battlefield 1942.
So, there are some core ideas that people still think we can do better. Then, on top of that we add the new talent to expand and grow in different directions so we just try to kill our weak spots. Because we know we have some pretty decent peaks. It’s just killing your weak spots, making sure that we create that coherent experience.
You keep talking about the core design ideas of Battlefield. Can you explicitly state them just so it’s clear? I know I said something before about…
It’s the whole balancing of rock, paper, scissors, where there’s always a counter to whatever. If you have a big gun, I can get a tank. If I have a tank you can get a gun that takes out tanks. There’s always a counter for whatever tactics you’re using. It’s just a question of, if you pulled a rock, I would pull…
You still have to acquire the scissors.
Yeah. You will get beaten once but once you get back in you can find new strategies. You always have to be flexible. And that creates a very vivid and living battle. You can play the same map twice in order to complete the games because people change the way they play.