DICE’s senior producer Patrick Bach has told Edge that unlike the somewhat open worlds of both Bad Company titles, Battlefield 3’s game design will be rather more focussed and scripted, much like Call of Duty’s.

“I don’t see it as an absolute goal for all games to be sandbox games. We’ve been building sandbox games for quite some time and we’ve got pretty good at it, but I don’t see that as the only way of building games, because then we wouldn’t build campaigns at all,” he says. “In some cases they aren’t, but in most cases sandbox games are hardcore, boring, hard to get into and they are not very popular.”

I’m sure it has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact the Battlefield 3 will be directly competing with whatever Call of Duty Activision decides to push out this year. Both games are scheduled to launch towards the end of the year.