Battlefield 3’s release is imminent, and fans of the series are eager for the next installment. Lead designer David Goldfarb, however, has come out and said everyone should expect something a lot different from the Bad Company iterations.
He describes Bad Company 1 and 2 as “adventure flicks”, and insists that Battlefield 3 will go “much closer to contemporary reality and current events”.
Writing on the Battlefield blog, Goldfarb talks about “depicting a war and everything that suggests”.
“We have tried to get closer to the slang of the modern warrior. We are mixing tension-building passages with the chaos of suddenly erupting firefights. We’ve sought to keep the game feeling as plausible as possible, because the moment the audience stops believing it could happen, then you’re just like every other shooter.”
He says that while DICE had a good time making the Bad Company games, he describes them as “great fun” and “light hearted”, “Indiana Jones with an assault rifle”.
“But with Battlefield 3, we knew we had to really divorce ourselves from those characters and those themes. We had to go somewhere else and do something different and push a different set of buttons.
“We’re telling a war story now,” he added, “and that means it needs to feel credible, it needs to feel contemporary, and it needs to connect with things and emotions that we have never really tried or had the means to properly connect to before.”
Battlefield 3 will attempt to make a deeper connection with the player – it will really try and tap into emotion and morality, asking you to make actual decisions – as opposed to moving through the game in a more linear, gun-everything-down fashion.
We put [players] in challenging situations. We ask them questions. In Battlefield 3, we ask: What would you really do for your country?
“We’ve tried to put our people in contexts where they make emotionally valid choices.”
Sounds like DICE is attempting to make the Single Player experience a cut above the average war-time FPS fare, making it more impactful and immersive than just ventilating an endless stream of baddies. Whether or not they can pull it off, we’ll just have to wait and see.
