The Auditory Experience:
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is already one of the best-sounding war games we've evere heard, but DICE's audio ambitions keep growing. For Battlefield 3, audio director Stefan Strandberg and his team look to the field to record the sounds of war up close and personal during a Swedish military exercise featuring infantry combat, tanks, and helicopters. With bullets wishlist across the hot zone, Strandberg's team collected audio samples from various distances to make sure their game sounds true to real life.
"Just the sheer force of weapons, it's intimidating when you're there," Strandberd remembers, "Bringing that into your speaker is a challenge, but we've done it before and we've improved on it."
When they got back to the studio, Strandberg's team analyzed its findings and created a new agenda for Battlefield 3. Rather than striving for a cinematic audioexperience, the team decided to treat the sound as if it were the soundtrack to a documentary.
"Battlefield 3 sounds much cleaner, "Strandberg proclaims, "It's a brighter sounding game. It's less noisy and easier for the players to locate stuff and hear what's what, and it's actually a much more accurateportrait or war."
By recording the choppers, tanks, and guns up close and personal, DICE is making it easier for player to use audio cues to aid their decision-making. Players will have a better sense of immediate threats thanks to the way the team is mixing the game. For instance, footsteps of a nearby soldier in the same house will be more audible than the shots being volleyed between two soldiers outside your window. It's also easier to hear the difference between when a vehicle is facing you and when it's moving to another direction. Subtle audio cues tip you off when your tank is struggling to climb to a steep hill, and rather than giving you a visual indicator, sound effects inform you when a gun is about to overheat.
Power to the PC Players:
Being the lead platform has its advantages, none more convincing than the return of 64-player matches - a PC exclusive.
If you have a rig with cutting-edge technology, you have access to the ultimate Battlefield 3 experience, with superior motion blur effects and advanced anti-alliasting that won't be possible on consoles. That said, the console version is no slouch. "We do care about the PC audience, and we will have alot of extra goodies for the PC while also making sure consoles player won't be left out," Bach Promises. "They will be part of this whole grandiose scheme that we have when it comes to playing our game."
"The only bad news is that we will not deliver mod tools in the way that we delivered them for Battlefield 2," Bach admits. "Creating mod toold today - dumbing them down - takes alot of of energy and what we are discussing more every day is, " Were do we put ours focus? "Right now our focus is to create the best possible multiplayer, single-player, and co-op game - the core game of Battlefield 3. We're still discussing how we handle modifications of any kind."
Multiplayer Q&A With Executive Producer Patrick Bach:
Though we didn't see any multiplayer in action during the Battlefield 3 Demo that didn't stop us from prying some revealing answers from DICE in our Q&A.
Bad Company 2 came out of the gates quickly, placing in the top three on Xbox Live for seven months. Then you went six months without delivering new maps and the community left drastically. Do you plan on taking a different approach with Battlefield 3?
We have a big focus on sustaining the game. To be honest, Bad Company 2 was bigger than we anticipated. We did not account for that. We sold a lot of copies and don't feel bad about where we were, but looking back, we should have released more , bigger content to it.. The challenge is to build a game, and then have more people coming on before the project is done to start building extra content because it takes alot of time to get stuff out. So if you're done with something it takes another one or two months to get it on the net. So we've learned our lesson now, and have alot of really interesting plans for how to get the attention of the player. We can do better in that area.
One of the thing i felt went hand-in-hand with the lack of new maps was that alot of people stopped playing around level 25 because there was no more unlockables. Why did you decide on that approach, do you plan on altering the progression in Battlefield 3?
Back on what i said earlier - we were much more successful with our approach than anticipated. We didn't think most of the people would hit level 22 to be honest, and specially that fast. Our calculations on how much people would play to hit level 20, 25, 50 were completely wrong. We tough people wouldn't play that much. We're looking into the numbers of how we scale up, what we give away, how we give it away, with the understanding that some people put alot of time into the game. There will be a lot more to unlock, not only weapons and other treats, but we have more things that you can unlock than in Bad Company 2. We're also making sure that there is a reason for you to reach the top rank. It doesn't just end. There will be alot of focus on persistence and how we present stuff to the player.
When I think about Battlefield 2, I always come back to the Commander position and the game within the game that arose from having Special Forces objectives. Are those returning in the proper sequel?
We could implement it, but the questions is “how do you get the threshold lower?” That’s not by making it more complicated. Our challenge is to make sure that anyone that just jumps into the game will get it. One of the biggest problems with Commander was that only two people could use it. Some people like it but most people didn’t care. They just cared that someone gave them an order or that their squad could play together having fun on their own more or less. Then the most hardcore people went into the Commander mode and learned how to use that. You could argue it was a great feature, but looking at the number you could also say that no one uses it. We tried in Bad Company 2 to give that t players, so you could issue orders to your squad, and you could use gadgets like the UAV that only the commander could use earlier — giving the power back to the players so everyone could use it. That made a big difference. More people could enjoy the game. We lowered the threshold for everyone because we gave it to everyone. We now know the boundaries are for keeping the strategic depth and complexity while lowering the threshold to get in.
We could implement it, but the questions is “how do you get the threshold lower?” That’s not by making it more complicated. Our challenge is to make sure that anyone that just jumps into the game will get it. One of the biggest problems with Commander was that only two people could use it. Some people like it but most people didn’t care. They just cared that someone gave them an order or that their squad could play together having fun on their own more or less. Then the most hardcore people went into the Commander mode and learned how to use that. You could argue it was a great feature, but looking at the number you could also say that no one uses it. We tried in Bad Company 2 to give that t players, so you could issue orders to your squad, and you could use gadgets like the UAV that only the commander could use earlier — giving the power back to the players so everyone could use it. That made a big difference. More people could enjoy the game. We lowered the threshold for everyone because we gave it to everyone. We now know the boundaries are for keeping the strategic depth and complexity while lowering the threshold to get in.
One of the things that helps persistence is when you give the player an identity. For instance, you can carve your initials into your gun in Black Ops, and Rainbow Six Vegas lets you customize your outfit. What are the challenges to this approach, and do you see Battlefield 3 Going in this direction?
The more variation you have [in the characters] the less variation you can have in the rest of the world. I think it also has to do with the way you play professionally. You don't want people to look completely different. It's team A versus team B. It's always a challenge - how do you personalize a uniform? Giving the pink hat someone would make it fun, but if you're running around and you don't know what you're shooting at you don't take the professional gaming seriously in my book. So there's a challenge between personalizing and keeping it uniform. We will do more in that area, making sure that you can get you character to be more personalized both in a visual way and more specifically in the way you gear up. We did a good job I would argue in Bad Company 2 with specializations, different scopes, and different weapons - you can kind of find you way of playing the game which broadens the game for more people. The deeper you get into that the more you unravel figuring things out every day. That was kind of the seed to what we're building now. We now know more than we've ever known about how to personalize a uniform team. Your friends will get very happy when they can see what they can do with their soldiers.
How was Hardcore mode received? Was there a broad adoption?
I think it goes in waves, and it's also about your daily form. How are you playing? How do you feel today? How fast are you? I think the hardcore game mode is a brilliant idea, and we could probably turn it up a notch to make it even more hardcore in the future because people are willing to try it out. It's the same game, but you turn it up to 11.....You want that layer of complexity that you can just add on top of whatever game mode you have. It's a good way of seeing the same game through a new angle.
It was great to be able to squad up in the pre-game lobby, but limiting it to the four people in one squad was trouble some for larger groups who wanted to play together. Are you changing your approach for Battlefield 3?
Well, yes. It's actually a very crucial part of the game. We're thinking alot about squads and team play - making that even more accessible. Like you said, squads are really easy to set up, but how can you take that further? We have some really cool things that we'll show later when it comes to dictating how you play with friends.
What are your plans on co-op? Will you be able to play through the campaign with friends?
We will have a co-op mode. I won't go into exact details about if it's going to be connected to this or that, but we will have a co-op mode in the box.
Jets are coming back in Battlefield 3. How are you dealing with the maps to give them room to maneuver?
We're building bigger maps. Then again , the gamers are about fun, so if you have a Mach 2 jet on one of or maps you would pass it in 0.2 seconds. You still need to design the game to fit. It can't be as slow as a chopper, but then again it can't be Mach 2 so there's a sweet spot that we're hitting with map scale, scale of flight, and speed of vehicles so it will actually fit. And of course there should also be a way of countering something.
Prone is coming back as well, why the change of heart from Bad Company 2, for which you defended your reasoning to leave it out of the game?
First of all Bad Company 2 was the spin-off. We had our own rule set. This is based on Battlefield 2, so we can go back and look at how can we solve the problem of proning, hiding in high grass, and there are alot of ways to countering that. Muzzle flash is one of them, vapor traces are another - the bigger the gun the bigger the trace - stuff like that. And of course giving others tools to spot players and give away positions. We have more time to fiddle with those things to make them work. Prone is fun for the person proning. How fun is it to not see someone shooting you? It's not fun at all. That's our challenge. That's our job to design around that and find ways to counter that.
Platform
Playstation 3
Xbox 360
PC
Style
1-Player Shooter (PC:
64-Player Online)
PS3, Xbox 360:
24-Players Online)
Publisher
Electronic Arts
Developer
DICE
Release
Holiday
By Matt Bertz
Game Informer
Re-written By Jorge Chevere
