DICE’s upcoming military shooter Battlefield 3 has been getting some mixed reactions over the past few days since the beta’s release. To address the concerns of gamers and speak out on the future plans for the studio, the development team explained their approach to the franchise.
In an interview with The Guardian, Battlefield 3 producer Patrick Liu described the team’s experience with the beta, citing it as a major learning experience for DICE.
It’s taught us a lot. Our primary intentions have been to test the backend. As we said at the beginning, we have six times the number of players we had with Bad Company 2, we have record high concurrent users compared to anything we’ve done before. And we know it works. In previous games, like Bad Company and 1943, we’ve had serious problems with the backend, it’s just been overloaded – this time it hasn’t been a problem.
In response to player’s concerns with the overwhelming number of bugs and glitches, Liu went on to add:
Yeah, I think there’s been a misunderstanding of the term ‘beta test’! We ran the alpha tests with a rush map and we wanted to have some sort of reference so we could compare results – so we needed to have more-or-less the same map. But we do understand the concerns that we didn’t show a conquest map, but we have demoed Caspian Border, and we did run a conquest map as a limited PC-only test.
With regard to the future of the franchise, as well as what will happen to the Bad Company spin-off series, Liu explained that nothing is set in stone at the moment, though they do wish to remain the sole developer of Battlefield.
Well, we haven’t killed Bad Company! But we can only make so many games. Be patient – there might be something else coming up…
We always have a couple of projects going on – some of them die, but some are more fruitful. We don’t have any plans to make Battlefield an annual title – we want to make it ourselves we don’t want anyone else doing it! And no studio can make an annual franchise by themselves – well, the sports titles can but they’re a very different breed.
Look for Battlefield 3 in stores on October 25th in the US, and the 28th in Europe.
