After months of anticipation, DICE’s Battlefield 3 is almost upon us. We sat down with executive producer Patrick Bach to chat about hype, rivalry with Modern Warfare 3, and why Battlefield will never be an annual franchise.
Q: Battlefield 3 is almost upon us. How do you feel?
Patrick Bach: Happy. Tired. And a bit sad, actually, because you’re handing out your baby for everyone to enjoy! We had a lot of fun building the game and now it’s over, even though we actually have a team still working on it – preparing for launch, making sure that we get the feedback and react on it, making sure that everything is on par for what we want to do. We’re done, but we’re not done. So in general, it’s important for us to get used to this way of delivering for the future.
Q: If you were going to make a last-chance pitch to someone stuck between choosing Battlefield 3 or Modern Warfare 3, what would you say? Why should someone buy your game over the competition?
PB: I think it’s a very personal choice, because it’s not the same. We’re not trying to build the same game. We are trying to build the best Battlefield game that we’ve ever been.
Q: Have you succeeded?
PB: Absolutely. For sure. There’s no doubt in my mind that we at DICE had this as a goal and we have achieved that. Of course, if you have a very personal [preference] – that person liked this thing in that Battlefield game – that thing might not be in. But as a complete product, this is the behemoth Battlefield game. In general, Battlefield has its own treats that no other shooter has. So if you want a great first-person shooter with a state-of-the-art run-and-gun experience, together with vehicles, together with team play, together with big open landscapes with jets and tanks and everything, and also the very narrow and intimate indoor environments and narrow streets… there’s a lot of stuff going on when you play a Battlefield game! I don’t think any game can compete with us when it comes to the sheer variety of things, not only [the things] that you can use, but also the things that can happen. And of course we have the layer of dynamic destructibility in the world that you play in, that we still haven’t seen in any other game – even though you’d imagine that someone would at least try to challenge us.
Q: Why do you think that is? Why hasn’t anyone else tried?
PB: Well, you could argue that it’s because it’s so crap that no-one wants it [laughs], because there’s no other reason why you wouldn’t try to do it. To us, it’s great fun, it looks great, it adds to the experience, but most of all it changes the tactics as you play the game. To me, that’s a given – everyone should do that. It’s not something that should be unique to us, it should be a part of most games. Everyone is so used to games being static that they maybe haven’t even thought about it.
Q: How do you work the destructible terrain into the single-player campaign? If everything can be destroyed you lose your level design. What percentage of the environment in the terrain is destructible?
PB: We’re not trying to mimic the multiplayer experience. We want to broaden what Battlefield can be by having different experiences. If we only do a copy of multiplayer in the single-player, that would be a bit dumb. That wouldn’t push us to be better. And like you said, you can’t have the same level of destructibility in single-player as you have in multiplayer, because with multiplayer it’s more of a system; it’s a sport. It’s really hard to give a number, but in some cases we have more destruction in single-player, but in other cases we have way less – because we want to give you a narrative that is very dramatic and controlled in a way, but also open up and give you more freedom at certain points. So it’s a more directional, orchestrated piece than the multiplayer, which creates its own dance when you start to, you know, play the song. To us, it was clear very early that we didn’t want to copy multiplayer in single-player.
Q: When people talk about Battlefield 3, they tend not to dwell on the plot. What is the main story in this game, what is it about?
PB: In general, it’s a story about war, and a personal angle on the war. What’s your role in this war? Everyone knows that war is bigger than a person. You can’t have a single individual change the course of a war, but you know for sure that some individuals do have an impact, for reasons that you might not be aware of at the time that it happens. That’s kind of the angle we want to take. It’s also the question of what is right and what is wrong, because what is right could be right at a specific time, but it could be wrong at a different time. Also, when someone goes to war it’s about obeying orders – but what if those orders are contradicting the cause you want to fight for? And that’s kind of the premise, without giving too much away. It’s a very personal story, a very intimate story.
Q: You move across multiple characters, right?
PB: Since we want to do an authentic portrait of war, you don’t want this super-soldier to be able fly a jet and drive a tank and be the best infantry soldier on the planet, because that wouldn’t create very authentic picture. So that gave us an opportunity, from a story perspective, to show different parts of what you do while at war. And also, showing what actually goes on without you knowing it, but that does affect you in the end.
Q: Call of Duty, and Modern Warfare 2 in particular, is known for being very relentless and loud, for want of a better word. How does the pacing in Battlefield 3 compare?
PB: That’s a good question, actually. That was one of the most important discussions we had in the team. Where do you want to be? Do you want to be the loud game – the guitar solo all the way through? Or do you want to have this nice song that contains the slower-pace stuff and the build-ups, and then you have the bombastic pieces, and then you go back to a slow pace. You want to surprise people by not doing the obvious all the time. You want to surprise people by being quiet when everyone else would be loud, and the other way around, because that actually gives you room to use the whole spectrum of emotion. If you start at 9, you can only go one step up to 10 – or worse still you can go to 11. And then you will have never have room for any other emotions.
But if you compose it like a good song, it has everything. And that’s exactly what we wanted the campaign to have. It should be the unexpected, and use the whole spectrum of emotion.
Q: Are people going to be surprised by what they find?
PB: Yes, I am quite sure. Some people will love it, that’s for sure, and some people might get a bit confused, like ‘Wait a minute, this is not what I’m used to’. But that’s exactly what we’re trying to achieve: something that is not like what everyone else is doing. We wanted to create something that had the DICE personality, in a way. Kind of like what we’re doing with multiplayer, but in a different way. We give you room to do pacifistic things, rather than just shoot people. You can actually only help people, you can be a driver, more or less – you move people around the Battlefield. And that’s kind of the same the mentality we used in single-player. Just… being quiet. How about being quiet for two seconds?
Q: The release of a new Call of Duty has become a massive, annual event – and Battlefield 3 feels like the first proper rival the series has had in years. How do you feel about the fact that these games attract attention on such an enormous scale?
PB: I think it’s very exciting, and it’s also quite scary at the same time. We did not build this hype based on something that is not the game, so we’re hoping at least that people honestly like what they see. Don’t believe the hype, believe the game. Play it, try it, test it, listen to what people have to say about it. And if you haven’t tried it, at least have a go at it. We don’t want it to be like any other game. When you build hype around a game, it needs to be based on something, and in this case I honestly think that we have a game that is very different to the competition. We don’t want it to be an impression of someone else’s game.
We sometimes use the comparison with a rockstar, and being a cover band. You can be really good at being a cover band, but you’ll never be the star. The only way to be a star is to play your own songs, and then you’ll go out on a limb – because you’ll be attracting your own audience. And it could be the same audience, or it could be a different audience.
Q: How do you feel about the idea of Battlefield 3 becoming an annual franchise?
PB: First of all, all Battlefield games have been built by DICE. We had studios helping us build the iPhone game for Battlefield: Bad Company, because we don’t have the expertise in-house – but that’s it. In general, with Battlefield games, we don’t want anyone else to do that. And I honestly respect EA for respecting that, because in theory they can say “If we make one every year we can make more money,” – but no-one wants that. Everyone wants Battlefield to have its own personality, its own qualities, and we would not have the bandwidth to build a Battlefield game of this size every year, and no-one else would either. So as long as we keep it DICE, we will not get to an annual release of a big title like this.
Battlefield 3 is so big that we want to keep feeding people. We will build expansion packs, we will make sure that there’s new stuff for people. We will build that stuff at DICE, and we will make sure that we feed you the Battlefield for the time that you’re playing, at least.
Battlefield Competition Code: XKG
