You can do a lot in Battlefield 3, but you can’t shoot innocent bystanders. Why’s that? Because if you can, you probably will, and that’s just a tabloid headline waiting to happen.<\/p>\n
“If you put the player in front of a choice where they can do good things or bad things, they will do bad things, go dark side – because people think it’s cool to be naughty, they won’t be caught,” executive producer Patrick Bach tells Rock, Paper, Shotgun.<\/p>\n
“In a game where it’s more authentic, when you have a gun in your hand and a child in front of you what would happen? Well the player would probably shoot that child.”<\/p>\n
Of course, that’s not an entirely unlikely contingency in real life, if WikiLeaks is to be believed, but that’s another matter altogether. The real problem here is…<\/p>\n
“We would be the ones to be blamed,” explains Bach. “We have to build our experiences so we don’t put the player in experiences where they can do bad things.”<\/p>\n
“Me personally, I’m trying to stay away from civilians in games like BF because I think people will do bad. I don’t want to see videos on the internet where people shoot civilians. That’s something I will sanitise by removing that feature from the game.”<\/p>\n
“That doesn’t mean that I don’t want people to feel that war is not good,” he adds. “We are trying to do something that is more mature. Mature not being gore – some people confuse the two. That’s childish actually, to want more blood.”<\/p>\n
“I’d say that’s a rather pessimistic outlook, but then, I’ve also seen forum posts raving about how awesome it was shooting everybody in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s controversial “No Russian” sequence. So maybe not such a pessimistic outlook, actually.”<\/p>\n
Read the full interview over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun<\/a>.<\/p>\n