Only in Battlefield can you change the landscape in real-time with interactive environments that react to your every move.
Only in Battlefield will you find the awe-inspiring power of the next generation Frostbite 3 engine, whose unrivaled audio and visual fidelity make your game more dramatic, more believable, and more human.
Only in Battlefield can you experience an unmatched level of all-out war that grants you the freedom to play to your strengths and carve your own path to victory.
Only in Battlefield do you have the power to dominate land, air and sea with all-new, intense water-based vehicle combat
DICE and EA want you to stop thinking that Battlefield is primarily a multiplayer shooter. GDC 2013’s reveal video showed us a generous 17 minutes of footage from Battlefield 4′s singleplayer campaign, but it didn’t reveal what the series’ dedicated following really wanted to see.
Millions came to Call Of Duty for the singleplayer, and stayed for the multiplayer; perhaps DICE and EA feel that they have won the battle in terms of online play, but can only win the war by beating its great rival’s bombast and spectacle in Battlefield 4’s solo campaign. We spoke to DICE executive producer Patrick Bach to find out more.
So why the focus on singleplayer rather than multiplayer?
It’s a great showcase of a lot of different aspects of the game. Lots of people say ‘oh, my favourite thing about Battlefield is this’, and depending on the personality of the consumer, they want to see different things. If you look at this demo, you can extrapolate a lot of features that you can then translate into either the singleplayer or the multiplayer.
The cinematic elements, like the Mirror’s Edge-style running and the thick dust cloud that obscured all vision; those surely can’t be appearing in multiplayer?
No, most of those things will be part of multiplayer. Then again, if it destroys the multiplayer experience, we will of course tone it down. Dust clouds taking over the whole map could be really cool, but it could also be too much. For us, without spoiling anything, you can see the possibilities we have with the technology and the creativity on the team. We could potentially do all of that. We have this saying ‘fun first’ – even if it looks great, if it’s not fun to play then it’s just a pretty picture. For some people that’s important and cool, but to us it’s just one of the elements of the great experience.
The demo we saw was set in Azerbaijan, specifically in Baku. Why did you choose that location?
It’s actually again, this is the opening of the game. We want to create a segue into the rest of the game, without spoiling too much. Azerbaijan is on the border with Iran, where the last game was set. They are in the same region, so they have a lot of crossover, when it comes to culture and other things. But in general it’s a segue into the rest of the story – but I don’t want to spoil too much.
What are you trying to achieve with the campaign mode this time around?
We tried to create… I won’t call it a Bond opening, but you see a build-up from showing you different parts of the actual gameplay and showing you game elements. But also from a narrative standpoint, we wanted to open it up: ‘who are you in this squad? Who are your squadmates?’ and of course then ‘will this evolve into the future? What’s the hook?’
One of the things we’re most happy with is that people actually pick up on the characters. They remember their names. How often do you do that in a game, really? People talk to me about the characters, for a game like Battlefield, you could argue that it’s just a shooter, so who cares. For us it’s important to grow up a bit and create a great story, a character you care about, where you feel involved in their actions and that’s based on the core idea of the whole game, that we want to move elements of multiplayer into singleplayer. If you’re playing multiplayer, you actually care about the guys in your squad, those are often your friends, they have their personalities, you help them, they help you, and they have their own mindset. Now we need to create a singleplayer that mimics that feeling.
Our goal is to create the perfect Battlefield movie, where you do all the things you do in multiplayer at some point, where you have choice, where you have these characters that you care about, that evolves over time. We actually have features that are pulled directly from multiplayer instead of having two separate paths.
Some people do that anyways; they do cuts and they show stuff and jump from third person to first person and back. To us, we talk a lot about player autonomy. We want to keep the player as the player and be a part of all these scenes. If you have a dialogue, you should not be standing there and no-one cares about you. You need to be invited, someone is at least looking at you as you pass by.
Can you talk about the two next-gen consoles?
No.
Can I ask a separate question then, about DICE’s perspective on motion control? Does it work for you guys?
We are not interested in things that don’t make the game better. There are a lot of gimmicks – people throwing money at us – ‘can you implement support for this quirky control thing’. No, it doesn’t make the game better. We are extremely open to innovation, but if it’s a gimmick, there’s no point unless it adds value to the player. Touch screens used to be a gimmick, because no-one could get it to work until iPhone came out and used it right. It adds to the experience, and now everyone is doing it. To us it’s the same with motion control and perceptual gaming in general; if it adds, great. If it’s a gimmick, ignore it.
There’s a certain element of military tourism in the CoD and Battlefield games. You go to an area, blow it up, and leave it devastated. That’s a very American view of the world but it doesn’t seem to me a very Swedish view of the world. How is it that a Swedish company is making so many bombastic games?
That’s a hard question. Sweden is a pacifist nation. We are extremely pacifist. We came to the conclusion that it doesn’t pay off to go Viking on things. We use the fiction of these themes and we’re extremely interested in these themes. It’s fun to play war. You can see kids doing all the time and parents trying to stop them. It’s apparently built into human nature to run around and try to hit stuff.
We’re quite childish at DICE, and we’re fascinated by technology and hardware, fascinated by guns. Not what guns do, but the functionality of guns and the acutal hardware. Same with vehicles; we love tanks, jets, helicopters are awesome. To us, the fiction of war is very interesting. You can see a Bond movie as all these themes about ‘what if’ and that’s how we create Battlefield as well. Because Battlefield, in its core, in the world itself, is about the plethora of what could go on on a battlefield. We try to not confuse war with Battlefield too much, even though the fiction is there. We base it on war, but it’s not, it’s a simulation.
You have made pacifist games before, like Mirror’s Edge, which punished combat. Would you want to do it again?
Maybe. It’s still interesting. We still very focused on making sure when you played Battlefield, that it’s very clear what it is. It’s a game, it’s a fiction, and it’s about me versus you having a fight.
It’s one of those pulp militaristic novels that sells by the bucketload, right?
Yes, and the people reading those aren’t warmongers; they just want the fiction and the drama
Battlefield 4 looks like it has something to prove. Right from the opening moments of its reveal event in Stockholm in front of the world's gaming and tech media, the single-player demo for DICE’s new shooter aimed straight for the audience’s collective gut and its shot fired true.
It presented us with four characters – a team of soldiers trapped in a car sinking into the sea – and it made us care about them to the extent we could still name them all by the time the demo was finished: Pac, Recker, Irish and the ill-fated Sgt Dunn.
Battlefield 4: Plot & Characters
We only mention all that because characters - and indeed plot - weren't exactly strong points in Battlefield 4's predecessor, Battlefield 3. Indeed, while players and critics alike all praised the game's sublime, wide-open assymetrical online mode, they were equally universal in their dismissal of Battlefield 3's turgid and unmemorable single-player campaign.
It's to DICE's credit, then, that it's taken this criticism on board and gone to great lengths to build a single-player that, at least in what was presented, looks as engaging and as impressive as any Hollywood blockbuster.
The way it's done this is through some rather decent writing and voice-work and some pretty mind-blowing tech. The beautiful way four characters are rendered makes them seem life like and the super smooth, realistic way in which they move lends them a geunine sense of authenticity.
This was topped off impressively by the voice acting, which lent the four of them a sense of camaraderie - even if they mostly communicated in the demo in macho grunts and screamed military jargon.
Battlefield 4: Visuals
The silver bullet in Battlefield 4 – the aspect that makes all of this possible – is the game’s Frostbite 3 engine. It’s through this technical marvel that DICE is able to make its world and characters seem utterly believable. The level of detail – from dynamic lighting, to particle animations to the game micro and macro-scale destruction rendering – is utterly stunning in Battlefield 4.
Watching it on the big screen, it looked and sounded as though we were watching an action movie from the point of view of the protagonist. Blink, and it almost looked like real life.
Battlefield 4: Features
It all looked impressive enough when the player controlling the demo was sneaking through the corridors of a slum filled with sewer-water and fading graffiti.
But when we witnessed a gun battle in an abandoned factory that featured a helicopter crash, the dynamic destruction of the film around the game’s protagonist and then a high-speed chase involving a commandeered taxi cab and a helicopter gunship, our jaws were nailed firmly to the floor.
DICE has always had a sense of what it takes to present an epic action set piece, but the Frostbite 3 engine makes it look all the more visceral and terrifying to behold. The action ended on a downbeat, with Pac, Recker and Irish having to leave Sgt Dunn to drown in a submerged car that had landed in the sea after spinning out of control.
Battlefield 4: Verdict
The fact that we even remember Dunn’s name, however, shows you DICE is moving in the right direction. The developers have realised realised that in order to infuse some interest in their game’s single-player campaign, they need to present players with fully formed characters that we'll care about for more than twenty-seconds at a time.
It’s new territory for the developer; what they need to ensure is that their always impressive technology is wrapped firmly around a visceral human heart. Watch this space... see more review!!
