Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Monday, March 14, 2011
Battlefield 3 Atomic Interview DICE CEO
We were lucky enough to be invited along to the Battlefield 3 unveiling in San Francisco last week and had some one-on-one time with Patrick Söderlund, CEO of EA Digital Illusions CE (or ‘DICE’ for short). The schedule was all over the place and we were told to stick to a strict 10-minute interview structure. To make matters more interesting, we’d written down a whole bunch of multiplayer-related questions that DICE didn’t want to answer. We still managed to get some interesting nuggets of information out of him. Check it out below.
Atomic: So are we allowed to talk single and multi?
Patrick: Well, mostly single.
Atomic: Okay.
Patrick: But we can talk a bit about multi, but we’re not talking specifically about it.
Atomic: Right. So what little bit about multi can you tell me about?
Atomic: Well, I can tell you that we’re looking at PC as our main platform for the game. We're gonna support 64 players, dedicated servers... that’s basically it.
Atomic: That’s basically it?
Patrick: Yup.
Atomic: Anything else you can talk about in terms of-
Patrick: -A lot of people ask us about 64 versus 128 or 256 players. Technically, we can go to 256, we’ve tried it. 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.
Atomic: So are you planning any sort of dedicated server model for consoles?
Patrick: I can’t talk about that but we're absolutely looking at it, yeah.
Atomic: Cool. I think that's all of the multiplayer stuff out of the way. There was a teaser trailer released not so long ago that had some great little things that geeks like me have been studying. There was some bolt cutters on the back of a character; is that something that’s coming into the gameplay?
Patrick: *Smiles* You'll see, you'll see.
Atomic: Door kicking?
Patrick: Yup.
Atomic: Is that something that the player’s going to be able to interact with?
Patrick: Yup.
Atomic: So in terms of that, what sort of other interaction with the environment and maps can we expect beyond destructibility?
Patrick: Yeah, exactly. Destruction is obviously turned up to max in this game as you probably saw and you can do anything you want, more or less. I think the physicality of the game is something that we’re working quite hard on. I don’t know if you saw when he jumped down that little hole, you could see the feet of the soldier. We’ve taken some thoughts and ideas from Mirror’s Edge so that we’ve implemented a version of that into this. You can see the vaulting, see a lot of the first-person movement has taken a lot of the inspiration from what worked well in Mirror’s Edge. We see some amazing things like dog tag taking, knifing, there are some things you haven’t seen before that we're doing because of what the animation system allows us to do. So it’s going to be a big, big part of this game and you’ll understand when we show you more and more.
Atomic: You mentioned the EA Sports technology that’s been implemented-
Patrick: -ANT.
Atomic: Yeah, yeah! How does ANT tie into this idea of what you talked about in terms of taking inspiration from Mirror’s Edge.
Patrick: Yeah, I mean ANT is a piece of tech that EA has been developing for many, many years and it’s developed centrally at EA. Technology that sports teams are primarily using for FIFA, NHL and Madden and those games. And it has been industry-leading animation tech. Y’know, FIFA is one of my favourite games myself. I can’t overcome how realistic the animations are sometimes and that you can do so many things and it all works great. And that’s why when you see the demo today, hopefully, I hope, if we’ve succeeded enough, you will see that you can’t really tell if it’s AI driven or scripted. And that’s the whole intent. Eighty percent of what you saw today was AI driven, but there are parts that were really direct and we script. But the blending in between is completely seamless and you don’t know whether it’s AI-driven or scripted. To us, that’s exactly what AI is about. AI to us is about a presumption of artificial intelligence. And artificial intelligence is so much more than, y’know, oh the AI decides to go from here to here. It’s how you perceive and how you react to what the AI is doing and what you experience the AI doing. And we’ve taken a slightly different approach there that maybe many others do. We looked at what’s the experience; everything we focus on is the experience.
Atomic: Particularly from the intro and the banter between the soldiers, it looks like you’ve sort of almost been using the Bad Company series as influence for how to inject that personality into the Battlefield core game. Can you talk a bit about-
Patrick: -Yeah, I think that... I’m glad that you're catching that. I think that characters are important to us. 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. And to create a set of characters that are believable yet likeable or not likeable. So, for us that’s been a key thing and we looked at the TV series Generation Kill for a lot of banter and the dialogue between the friends there. And we’re trying to pick up on the things that they do really well and we’re trying to implement that into the game. Another problem that we’ve seen... now that you see a lot of things in the game at such a high fidelity, it puts a higher demand on us to deliver dialogue that feels believable. So if you don’t do that it’s going to break the whole illusion. So the same thing with when there’s that fighting scene, we worked so much with dialogue and how they communicated more and what’s going on to create this whole immersion of, ‘Wow, this really is something that we don’t want to be in and we’ve gotta get out of here.’ And hopefully we’ve done a good job.
Atomic: So the tone of Bad Company 1 and 2 was sort of more like, we compare it to a modern-day retelling of Kelly's Heroes-
Patrick: -Kelly's Heroes was the inspiration for Bad Company.
Atomic: It’s very light, and it sounds like what you’re talking about—particularly with Generation Kill references—is that Battlefield 3 is going to be a bit more darker.
Patrick: Absolutely more serious in tone, but yet personal. 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.
Atomic: At the end of the demo there was a gigantic earthquake which obviously gave a great way to show off your tech; is that going to change the literal battlefield of the game for the rest of the campaign?
Patrick: We’re doing a lot of things that the tech allows us to do and this is just one of those. And yes, the answer is ‘yes’; you'll see that changing that particular piece of the level.
Atomic: And the destructibility that sort of suggested, Bad Company 2 was more focussed on destroying buildings and less on the terrain. Is there more of an allowance for destruction of terrain?
Patrick: Yeah, I think again we want it to feel real. 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.
Atomic: And that’s going over into multi as well, that same level of destructibility?
Patrick: Yes.
Atomic: Vehicles are obviously a big part of the Battlefield series. They'll be in multi obviously, but in terms of single-player, are you going to be this sort of jack-of-all-trades soldier who can go from a Humvee to a tank to a jet fighter?
Patrick: Yeah, we’re not really talking about the story campaign at this point. But we will obviously have those in there.
Thankyou Patrick.
Atomic: So are we allowed to talk single and multi?
Patrick: Well, mostly single.
Atomic: Okay.
Patrick: But we can talk a bit about multi, but we’re not talking specifically about it.
Atomic: Right. So what little bit about multi can you tell me about?
Atomic: Well, I can tell you that we’re looking at PC as our main platform for the game. We're gonna support 64 players, dedicated servers... that’s basically it.
Atomic: That’s basically it?
Patrick: Yup.
Atomic: Anything else you can talk about in terms of-
Patrick: -A lot of people ask us about 64 versus 128 or 256 players. Technically, we can go to 256, we’ve tried it. 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.
Atomic: So are you planning any sort of dedicated server model for consoles?
Patrick: I can’t talk about that but we're absolutely looking at it, yeah.
Atomic: Cool. I think that's all of the multiplayer stuff out of the way. There was a teaser trailer released not so long ago that had some great little things that geeks like me have been studying. There was some bolt cutters on the back of a character; is that something that’s coming into the gameplay?
Patrick: *Smiles* You'll see, you'll see.
Atomic: Door kicking?
Patrick: Yup.
Atomic: Is that something that the player’s going to be able to interact with?
Patrick: Yup.
Atomic: So in terms of that, what sort of other interaction with the environment and maps can we expect beyond destructibility?
Patrick: Yeah, exactly. Destruction is obviously turned up to max in this game as you probably saw and you can do anything you want, more or less. I think the physicality of the game is something that we’re working quite hard on. I don’t know if you saw when he jumped down that little hole, you could see the feet of the soldier. We’ve taken some thoughts and ideas from Mirror’s Edge so that we’ve implemented a version of that into this. You can see the vaulting, see a lot of the first-person movement has taken a lot of the inspiration from what worked well in Mirror’s Edge. We see some amazing things like dog tag taking, knifing, there are some things you haven’t seen before that we're doing because of what the animation system allows us to do. So it’s going to be a big, big part of this game and you’ll understand when we show you more and more.
Atomic: You mentioned the EA Sports technology that’s been implemented-
Patrick: -ANT.
Atomic: Yeah, yeah! How does ANT tie into this idea of what you talked about in terms of taking inspiration from Mirror’s Edge.
Patrick: Yeah, I mean ANT is a piece of tech that EA has been developing for many, many years and it’s developed centrally at EA. Technology that sports teams are primarily using for FIFA, NHL and Madden and those games. And it has been industry-leading animation tech. Y’know, FIFA is one of my favourite games myself. I can’t overcome how realistic the animations are sometimes and that you can do so many things and it all works great. And that’s why when you see the demo today, hopefully, I hope, if we’ve succeeded enough, you will see that you can’t really tell if it’s AI driven or scripted. And that’s the whole intent. Eighty percent of what you saw today was AI driven, but there are parts that were really direct and we script. But the blending in between is completely seamless and you don’t know whether it’s AI-driven or scripted. To us, that’s exactly what AI is about. AI to us is about a presumption of artificial intelligence. And artificial intelligence is so much more than, y’know, oh the AI decides to go from here to here. It’s how you perceive and how you react to what the AI is doing and what you experience the AI doing. And we’ve taken a slightly different approach there that maybe many others do. We looked at what’s the experience; everything we focus on is the experience.
Atomic: Particularly from the intro and the banter between the soldiers, it looks like you’ve sort of almost been using the Bad Company series as influence for how to inject that personality into the Battlefield core game. Can you talk a bit about-
Patrick: -Yeah, I think that... I’m glad that you're catching that. I think that characters are important to us. 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. And to create a set of characters that are believable yet likeable or not likeable. So, for us that’s been a key thing and we looked at the TV series Generation Kill for a lot of banter and the dialogue between the friends there. And we’re trying to pick up on the things that they do really well and we’re trying to implement that into the game. Another problem that we’ve seen... now that you see a lot of things in the game at such a high fidelity, it puts a higher demand on us to deliver dialogue that feels believable. So if you don’t do that it’s going to break the whole illusion. So the same thing with when there’s that fighting scene, we worked so much with dialogue and how they communicated more and what’s going on to create this whole immersion of, ‘Wow, this really is something that we don’t want to be in and we’ve gotta get out of here.’ And hopefully we’ve done a good job.
Atomic: So the tone of Bad Company 1 and 2 was sort of more like, we compare it to a modern-day retelling of Kelly's Heroes-
Patrick: -Kelly's Heroes was the inspiration for Bad Company.
Atomic: It’s very light, and it sounds like what you’re talking about—particularly with Generation Kill references—is that Battlefield 3 is going to be a bit more darker.
Patrick: Absolutely more serious in tone, but yet personal. 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.
Atomic: At the end of the demo there was a gigantic earthquake which obviously gave a great way to show off your tech; is that going to change the literal battlefield of the game for the rest of the campaign?
Patrick: We’re doing a lot of things that the tech allows us to do and this is just one of those. And yes, the answer is ‘yes’; you'll see that changing that particular piece of the level.
Atomic: And the destructibility that sort of suggested, Bad Company 2 was more focussed on destroying buildings and less on the terrain. Is there more of an allowance for destruction of terrain?
Patrick: Yeah, I think again we want it to feel real. 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.
Atomic: And that’s going over into multi as well, that same level of destructibility?
Patrick: Yes.
Atomic: Vehicles are obviously a big part of the Battlefield series. They'll be in multi obviously, but in terms of single-player, are you going to be this sort of jack-of-all-trades soldier who can go from a Humvee to a tank to a jet fighter?
Patrick: Yeah, we’re not really talking about the story campaign at this point. But we will obviously have those in there.
Thankyou Patrick.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Battlefield 3: DICE Demos Gameplay, Talks Tech, Muliplayer
Patrick Bach: We picked PC as the leading platform for two reasons. First one is: PC is what made Battlefield 2 a great game. You know it's a pc game and this is based on battlefield 2. So we want to go back to the roots of what that game was and then take that into the next generation. The other thing is that if you look what the most powerful platform on the market is today, that's the PC. If you go back 5 years it was the consoles because when they were released they were slightly more powerful than the pcs. It took almost two years for the pc to surpass them, because of all the complexity of the actual platform. But nowadays the pc is way more powerful than any console and I think that's our way of showing that the world has moved on. There's a new kind of bar that's been set by the PC and no one has really explored it. Everyone is going back to fit everything to the consoles and then they port it to the PC and have higher resolution. I think that's a bit weak. The target that we are setting is actually beyond what the consoles can do and what we are doing is trying to scale that back and create the same emotion the same experience on the consoles. And also because the frostbite 2 engine is build from the ground up to fit on all of this the platforms. So the streaming system, the animation system everything is build to scale no matter what platform you're on.
Sebastian Stange: What was you motivation behind the deciscion to bring in a singleplayer-mode?
Patrick Bach: Why? It's more the opposite question. Why not? There've been a lot of people actually asking for a campaign in Battlefield. Of course there is also an other side. "No we don't want singleplayer in battlefield!". My answer to those players is: "Well you don't have to play it!" The Battlefield 3 team just building the multiplayer is way bigger than the Battlefield 2 team was. So it's not that we're taking people away from the multiplayer to build the singleplayer. We are adding people to build the singleplayer. And actually the benefit yout get from that is that you can exchange a lot of stuff in between. Adding a singleplayer doesn't make a worse multiplayer. And I will make sure that we can prove that to everyone, that we actually have a very strong multiplayer because of this. If you want to create a true blockbuster game you need to have all the ingredients. A lot of people just love to play singleplayer and it doesn't really help that: "Oh I only want to play multiplayer. I see singleplayer as a problem.". You don't have to play singleplayer. I wouldn't worry too much if I were a hardcore Battlefield 2-fan, that we are taking focus away from the multiplayer because we are not!
Sebastian Stange: With the singleplayer-mode and a hopefully strong multiplayer-mode you're clearly competing against the Call of Duty franchise, aren't you?
Patrick Bach: That's up to the consumer to decide.
Sebastian Stange: Very diplomatic!
Patrick Bach: I am very diplomatic! [laughs]
In general I think we have battlefield as a core game. The rock-paper-scissors, the vehicles, the strategy behind, it's a very, very strong game. Our biggest problem actually is to reach out to the audience because once you start playing it most people prefer that experience compared to other first-person shooters. To us it's more up to marketing and PR to make sure that everyone is to know about battlefield. Battlefield has never been about a hard core small community exclusive title. It's actually been a very accessible and easy to get into game but takes forever to become an expert on the game and that's what people love about it. You get better and better and better but it only takes two minutes for people to get into battlefield 2 and start to understand the strength of it. That's the same goal we have in battlefield 3. We're not doing anything different here.
In general I think we have battlefield as a core game. The rock-paper-scissors, the vehicles, the strategy behind, it's a very, very strong game. Our biggest problem actually is to reach out to the audience because once you start playing it most people prefer that experience compared to other first-person shooters. To us it's more up to marketing and PR to make sure that everyone is to know about battlefield. Battlefield has never been about a hard core small community exclusive title. It's actually been a very accessible and easy to get into game but takes forever to become an expert on the game and that's what people love about it. You get better and better and better but it only takes two minutes for people to get into battlefield 2 and start to understand the strength of it. That's the same goal we have in battlefield 3. We're not doing anything different here.
Sebastian Stange: The Call of duty game is a typical...let's say American shooter with a lot of patriotism. So we hope that you as Non-Americans won't do the same.
Patrick Bach: I really hope that people don't think that we are trying to build the same game because we are not! Battlefield as a core concept is something that we will never change. There is no point in trying to copy in someone else. What we are trying is to build the best Battlefield game that we've ever built and that's actually quite hard because Battlefield is not only one thing. For each individual it's one thing because that's their experience of Battlefield but if you take all the different play-styles, the different types of people that actually play battlefield, it's quite complex to build the full Battlefield experience. You need to have anyone to get in the game at every time and feel like you can actually change your tactics and do better on the Battlefield. It's not about simulating something that only a few people can get into. It's actually a very open environment but it's really hard to get really good at it.
Sebastian Stange: Was it always clear that you'll choose a modern war face scenario?
Patrick Bach: No. We're doing so many different time periods now so it wasn't completely clear. We do like we always do. We are Swedish so we are very social people. We try to talk to everyone and try to find the best ideas and you narrow that down to: This is it! This is what we want to build! But we've done crazy stuff before so you'll never know for the future.
Sebastian Stange: One thing that a lot of shooters in the singleplayer-mode do is to offer a very linear and very restricted cinematic experience. So for me Battlefield is that one franchise where you can choose how to play. How will you combine this? Will you offer a more cinematic and linear thing in the singleplayer? Will there be different possibilities, open spaces and situations I can tackle the way I want? Please tell me there is more than: You can go the left side of the corridor or you can go the right side of the corridor…
Patrick Bach: That's a very hard question to answer. The goal is to create a game that is versatile. It's not about being open all the time. A lot of people think that Battlefield is only about being open. It's not! It has never only been about being open. There are a lot of people that play Battlefield in a very linear way even the multiplayer. They take the same route every time and do the same thing. To a lot of people the choice of doing whatever you want is more or less only doing the same thing over and over again. To us having choice in multiplayer is key. That's the core of the franchise. That doesn't mean that everyone loves it and that doesn't mean that everyone plays it. Singleplayer is supposed to be something different. Yes it's going to be more controlled and cinematic and more dramatic than multiplayer but in a different way. Yes we're doing more open spaces in singleplayer and yes there will be places we're you'll have two paths instead of one. It's all about the contrast. Our goal is to create a contrast from one game mode to the other but also within that game mode create contrast. You don't only do one thing. You don't only shoot people over and over and over like you do in some other games. It's about different weapons, different gadgets and different vehicles in different ways. You can see the singleplayer as a training ground. It's more or less a planned training session to go online. You should be able to try all types of weapons, all types of gadgets and all types of vehicles before you feel ready to go online. There are people who are afraid to go online because they thing that they'll get old the millisecond they go online. So you need something where you can practice and that's also a goal for our singleplayer.
Sebastian Stange: In former battlefield games you always had matches with bots for training. Do you intend to do that again for Battlefield 3?
Patrick Bach: No. We won't have bot-matches in the same way. We think that bot-matches were kind of a emergency solution for Battlefield 2. It wasn't the dream scenario even back then. Then again we were much smaller and we didn't have all the resources that we wanted to have. Now we have it and we want to create a great campaign, where we can create more drama and create more things as you saw on screen here [presentation at the GDC 2011]. If we weren't allowed to do this because of the Battlefield 2 heritage I think we would do something very wrong. I think this is the right way of moving forward with the Battlefield franchise and again … I want people to understand that we don't want to dump down the multiplayer and we don't want to create a worse multiplayer just because we make singleplayer. It's about creating the full experience.
Sebastian Stange: When will you begin to show us the multiplayer-part of the game?
Patrick Bach: Soon! [laughs]
Sebastian Stange: You dont think that there are a lot of players out there wanting to see something?
Patrick Bach: In general people used to have trust because we at Dice have been building Battlefield for so many years. We are using the same team and the same designers. It's the same people building it. We won't screw up completely. We know this shit. We've been doing it for quite some time. We don't want to stay in 2005. We want to move on! We want to create something better, something that is more interesting than what we had back then. You people loved Battlefield 2 and honestly I think people should keep playing Battlefield 2. We don't want to build Battlefield 2 again, we want to build Battlefield 3 and that's quite different. Look at the evolution from 1942 to Battlefield 2. People hated us when we released Battlefield 2 . They thought it was the worst game ever because it wasn't exactly like 1942. Then it took six months and everyone started to love us, except for the people that kept playing 1942. So know we have two great games that you can keep playing and we want to create a new experience with battlefield 3. Accumulate the knowledge from everyone at the studio and learning about building Battlefield games over so many years would actually give you new perspectives. That's what we are adding to Battlefield 3.
Sebastian Stange: Did you ever expect the huge success of the Battlefield: Bad Company 2-mulitplayer?
Patrick Bach: Now we didn't know that people would like it that much. We tried to make the best possible Bad Company game looking at all the things we learned from Bad Company 1. Of course we took a lot of inspiration from Battlefield 2 and trying to turn it into its own type of game but keeping the Battlefield core. And I think the things we learned from the Bad Company series is something we are moving slightly into the Battlefield 3 game, like destruction races. We didn't know that it would work out so great because it was a bold move to add destruction into a first-person-shooter. No one has really done it, at least not in this way. It's also a very tactical move. It adds a tactical element to the game that we didn't have in battlefield 2. So you could argue that Bad Company 2 is a much more strategically and tactical game than battlefield 2 because that's a very static world. You can't really change it but Bad Company 2 actually evolves as you play it and turns into something different. That cover used doesn't exist anymore. That sniper had a great position but that house is now gone so he needs to find a new spot. There are a lot of tactics that we're using from the bad company series and that we are moving to Battlefield 3.
Sebastian Stange: I had the feeling that the people were like starving for a Battlefield game and then there were the Bad Company and everyone was rushing the servers and playing.
Patrick Bach: The people also hated us when we released Bad Company 2. We are sorry but we've got used to people hating us because we know that if we've done everything right people start to understand what it was we tried to achieve and then actually start to like it a lot. So were quite surprised with the success of Bad Company 2.
Sebastian Stange: As always you had problems with the server browser!
Patrick Bach: Yes.
Sebastian Stange: I think it was in every battlefield game the same that you had problems with the server during the first month. Why?
Patrick Bach: This is the truth: All multiplayer games that have a server have problems with it if the game is popular. We actually had five times the traffic than we planned for which meant that we had to scale up five times in about two months. It costs a lot of money and energy to scale up that fast. What you do before a launch is to plan how big the game will be. You have your servers and everything set up to work accordingly and there are a lot of complicated systems. It's not as if you take a PC, put software on it and have it run that's not how it works. There are a lot of stat servers that need to run 24/7 and then you have the game servers that need refreshes and have their own reboot cycles. If you have to scale up it takes time. It's because of the fans that we had problems [laughs]. If people wouldn't have bought the game we wouldn't have had any problems. And if you look at other games that are popular, they have the same problems or worse I would argue. If you look at nonpopular games, they don't have any issues because no one is using their servers.
Battlefield 3 leaked gameplay video
A new video of Battlefield 3 in action has been leaked during a presentation at GDC. The video shows some intense singleplayer action — again, no mulitplayer There’s another teaser at the end which shows jets in action, and tanks as well. Finally, there’s a showcase of lighting in the game, where a map is shown in daylight, evening and during night as well, all done on the fly.
Battlefield 3 Day & Night Cycle Images
Yesterday, DICE's Kenny Magnusson gave a talk at GDC called "Lighting You Up in Battlefield 3". Some pictures of the slides shown have been posted showing the day and night cycles in Battlefield 3. Clearer images of the slides should be posted on the DICE website after GDC. Images below from VideoGamesZone.de
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Battlefield 3: Fault Line Series Episode I Breakdown
We are really enjoying the new material coming out of the DICE offices lately and are hotly anticipating the Battlefield 3 title. We broke down the brief trailer the other day and now DICE handed us the first in a series called Battlefield 3 Fault Line Series Episode I and we grabbed our MRE spork and dug in!
Here’s the video in case you’ve been under a rock or on patrol someplace classified
The Breakdown
The following is a breakdown of the video and we’ll point out the time index of the video in case you want to go back and review.
Time Line 00:00:22 – Here’s a nitpick but one anyone with military experience will likely cringe recalling a at least one time when you or someone near you got ‘counseled’ for it. While in a vehicle weapon barrels should be pointed towards floor. In the event of an accidental discharge you’re less likely to kill yourself or your buddies.
Time Line 00:00:23 – S15 under the flag on his uniform (origin unknown) . Usually the USMC is notoriously shy about uniform garland so the US flag and any type of unit or other designations got our attention. We see our Marines still haven’t been issued those rear sights yet. Doh, just kidding DICE, we know you said you’re getting it back in there but we kid because we care.
Time Index 00:00:26 – Single door on LAV is not usual for LAV-25. It’s either a variant that removes that center post or a little artistic license by the DICE dev team. Maybe they got claustrophobic.
Time Index 00:00:30 – Mark 19′s confirmed and your character and unit is in the 1st Recon (USMC)
Ahem.. can we get an armorer in here stat.. lol
Time Index 00:00:45 – Kardaland Provence appears to be the Chemical Weapons Site. And Al Mazlaq is the ‘bad part of town’.
Time Index 00:00:49 – What appears to be a hardened laptop is seen and we see MAGPUL on magazines for a nice detail touch
Time Index 00:00:54 – Great game demonstration of minimizing body exposure to the door. Its an NPC of course so unclear if peek/lean will be part of the playable character performance.
Time Index 00:01:00 – Alley movement. Point man moved ahead and took a knee, then the other members filed past showing tactical movement techniques being employed.
Time Index 00:01:20 – Earthquake! Please note that Iraq/Iran border sits on top of two meeting tectonic plates. We were also taken with the dynamic lighting and how particle effects appear to impact it.
Time Index 00:01:33 – We see a good example of the new physics models being used with characters running and leaning giving us a feeling that they are genuinely carrying weight and feeling the inertia of all that gear. Yes people, that stuff is heavy!
Time Line 00:01:51 – We’re concerned about our downed buddy but at least he appears to be hydrating properly since it appears to be a camelback hydration tube and bite valve. Very nice attention to detail
Time Line 00:01:52 - Repeatedly press ‘S’ to drag fallen Marine (PC control shown). Not really a military feature but dragging someone out of the situation to get medical assistance is an interesting change than just ‘kill where that bullet came from!’ mentality.
Time Line 00:02:01 – Change magazine animation – Pull Charging handle. Ammo count consistent with 30 round standard magazine. This is a big one, so few games take the time or energy to do this right.
Time Line 00:02:05 – it appears the OPFOR is UNIFORMED and not local insurgent based (previously mentioned PLR organized militia or Iranian troops may be where this is going.)
Time Line 00:02:18 – Tactical Communication. “I’m Up” is the proper term, and universal. A little color in the ‘Im f’d up but up’ is consistant and light, not the overdone heavy language we’ve heard from other franchises)
Time Line 00:02:19 – Change of magazine with ammunition still in it means no charging handle pulled is consistent (round still in the chamber) and ammo count correctly set at 31 (30 round magazine and 1 in the chamber)
Time Line 00:02:26 – No exhaust from the RPG shot, and noise from RPG-7 (assumed) seems odd (based on experienced ODG staff). Down OPFOR seems folded in half (possible ragdoll issue).
General Notes:
- Lack of grenadier (203 etc) in players squad for those ‘hard to reach areas’
- Ambient sounds are consistent and detailed including car horns, choppers, local speech etc
- Sounds ‘feel’ more realistic and the impact of location clearly distinguished (inside vs outside with echo etc)
- Weapon movement off target during firing requiring user adjustment is a great sign, not enough distance to determine if bullet physics (bullet drop) is in/out yet
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