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.
