Battlefield 3: Fault Line Series Episode II

Battlefield 3: DICE Demos Gameplay, Talks Tech, Muliplayer

PC Games talked to Dice-Executive-Producer Patrick Bach about Battlefield 3.Sebastian Stange: You finally unveiled Battlefield 3 to the public and one of the more unusual things, next to the fact that there is a singleplayer, is that you've said pc is the lead platform. Can you elaborate a bit more on that and explain what pc gamers can expect from the final product?

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.

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 

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

Lights, Animation, Destruction! A look into the tech behind Battlefield 3

As part of Game Informer's BF3 Hub they now take a look at the tech that is behind Battlefield 3 including Frostbite 2 engine and what it means for destruction, Gustav Tilleby talks about the lighting system and Tobias Dahl explains all about implementing ANT which some might notice from EA Sports titles.

For more information on Battlefield 3, visit the Official Site.

What does it take to get Battlefield 3 sounding great? Stefan Strandberg explains

Game Informer speaks caught up with Stefan Strandberg on how sound plays an important part in Battlefield and how things are being improved in Battlefield 3 to immerse you in the game more than ever. Head over Game Informer's coverage on their Battlefield 3 Hub to watch interview and check out their other Battlefield 3 related interviews.

For more information on Battlefield 3, visit the Official Site.

Battlefield 3 Trailer Analysis - IGN Rewind Theater

Battlefield 3 Premiere Gameplay Trailer

Battlefield 3 Shown at EA Event Next Week?

So EA is having their New York press event next week. They’ll be showing some great games as always, but something told me that since Battlefield 3 is launching this fall, that MAYBE they’ll be showing it at the EA event. I tweeted Daniel Matros, the Global Battlefield Community Manager for DICE. I asked him, ‘are they showing #bf3 next wed at the EA event?’He replied, ‘stick around and find out  ’. That was the answer I was looking for. Here’s to hoping…

Battlefield 3 Game Informer Scans Surface

Battlefield 3 Game Informer Screens & Information Part 2

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.

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

Battlefield 3 Game Informer Screens & Information Part 1

Here are 3 pages article of the March issue of Game Informer featuring Battlefield 3.
I took my time re-writing the most important parts of the article, and ill be releasing the rest soon. Enjoy!

Armed with a Veteran Team, Powerfull New Engine, and a Bold Vision, Dice Unveils its Most Ambitious Game Ever.

Lighting Up The Sky:
Bad Company 2 featured dynamic lighting, but the process for getting everything correctly light and shadow was time consuming. Frostbite 2 comes equipped with power full new features like defined lighting, real time radiosity, and dynamic shadowing that allow the art team to use pre-calculations to get the lighting up and running in a fraction of time. The left image highlights the light sources - the sun bouncing into the alley and the fluorescent light. The middle image shows the light probes that control how light affects dynamic objects such as vehicles and characters moving through the alley. One probe contains more lighting information than an entire level from bad company 2. The right image shows the finished environment that realistically blends all light sources together in real time.

Destruction 3.0:
Bad Company was the first battlefield game to introduce destructible walls and objects, and Bad Company 2 upped the ante with fully collapsing houses. Given the features popularity , DICE wanted destructibility in Battlefield 3, but with dense urban environments, it needed to deliver real-time devastation on a much larger scale.
With the Frostbite 2 Engine, nothing on the battlefield is safe from destruction.. In the demos we watched, an earthquake ripped apart the city streets, and a seven-story structure collapsed in a plume of dust particles and rubble. When an RPG is fired at a building, the force of the explosion causes rippling splash damage as it would in real life, breaking windows throughout the blast radius and tearing concrete into hundreds of pieces. In theory, DICE could use the engine to destroy a replica of the Burj Khalifa in Downtown Dubai the largest building in the world.
"We're only starting to scratch the surface of what we can do with the engine," says art director Gustav Tilleby.
The power of the destruction is awe inspiring, but don't expect Battlefield 3 to play like the shooter equivalent to the natural disaster racing game Split/Second. "It needs to be believable," stresses executive producer Patric Bach. "You can't have a earthquakes all over the place while you're running and gunning. We want to have set pieces that fit the map. Set pieces can be more than big explosions and big animations. We have some cool things up our sleeves."

Ant:
Like the lighting techniques, the character animations looked believable in Bad Company 2, but involved a laborious process on the developers' part. After finishing the project , DICE entertained middleware solutions from companies like Havock and Natural Motion before discovering the ANT Technology that powers EA Sports games like FIFA. The system wasn't build for war games, but it essentially operates with a series of plug-ins that anyone at EA can create and use. With the goal of pushing the physicality and believability of the soldiers in Battlefield 3, DICE integrated the system into Frostbite and started adding it's own variances to adapt the technology to the combat zone.
Using the rapid prototyping afforded by the ANT engine, DICE is creating two separate sets of animations for AI characters and multiplayer for the first time. The AI Characters now move and act with more profound sense of purpose, and the developers can rapidly condition their behavior with a convenient waypoint technology that issues directives depending on the character's location and the action happening in the vicinity. The ANT technology also enables DICE to ditch the ugly gliding soldier animations that plague every multiplayer game on the market. Soldiers still have responsiveness required in online fragfests, but they now move it a degree of realism, turning their heads and guns before their bodies, transitioning aggressively into and out of cover, and blending animations seamlessly between sprinting and dropping to the deck. "All of a sudden it's about what we want rather than "can we build it?"" says lead animator Tebias Dahl.

Here is a List of the BF3 Details:
-Aiming for CY Q4 2011 release
-Concept for BF3 has been in the works for years, waiting on proper tech to seamlessly come together
-Frostbite 2.0 is the culmination of this tech, entirely re-written
-Lighting sounds neat, one "probe" contains more lighting information than an entire BFBC2 level.
-Level destruction is going to be "believable" but basically everything is destructible.
-Character animations powered by ANT, what EA Sports uses.
-AI characters and multiplayer characters have different animation sets
-No more "gliding" animations that look off, animation realism is a focus
-Captured their own war audios (bullets, tanks, helicopters, etc) at different distances to ensure realism
-Better audio cues for certain actions, more easily able to listen for threats
-Plan on better, more immediate post release content
-More unlocks than BFBC2
-Dice trying to find a good balance between customization of your character and not having "pink rabbit hat(s)"
-4 classes
-Will talk about squads "later"
-Looking into a theater mode but can't talk about it
-Will have co-op
-There will be a kill-cam but it can be turned off
-BF3's team is almost twice as big as the team for BFBC2
-They want the pacing of the single player mode to be balanced, with highs and lows. Makes the comparison to a song vs a guitar solo.
-Part of the single player mode takes place in Sulaymaniyah - Iraqi Kurdistan.
-"Fuck" will be used often, so M rated for sure
-There will be an earthquake in a level. The destruction sounds very impressive. 7 story building collapses, looks very well done
-Significant narrative that goes with the SP mode
-More than one setting, you're not in the middle east for the whole game
-PC version is lead version
-Why 64 players for PC only? No complains from the console crowd.
-No mod tools at release. Maybe none down the line either. Frostbite 2.0 is complex and mods tools would have to be dumbed down, so does Dice really want to put their time to that or would it be better spent elsewhere?
-Original story, not based on Bad Company at all.

BF 3 - Info
Jorge Chevere