Three missions, plot details and COD-style linearity - OXM gets under DICE's skin
Making a game that'll win the hearts of millions is no mean feat, but we suspect the harder call, once you've crafted such a game, is working out how to expand its audience. Do you heed the example of more popular rivals, looting their top tricks and filching their fanbase, or strike out on an unproven tangent of your own, seeking to bypass rather than beat the competition? Either way, you should be prepared for a running battle with the people who made you successful in the first place.
Microsoft has spoken to the difficulty of evolving a brand lately, admitting that squaring the needs of "broad audiences" and prickly core customers is "tricky". Though loath to admit it, BioWare appears to be struggling likewise with Mass Effect, attempting to pare away "meaningless stats" without slaying the sacred RPG cow. But as winter approaches, the franchise feeling these growing pains most is arguably Battlefield, the sometime PC monolith turned mass market shooter, shaping up for a titanic throw-down with Activision's Call of Duty.
And make no mistake: Battlefield is changing. Thanks to DICE's Battleblogs, our own interviews and extensive hands-on time, we know plenty about how the developer has expanded and restructured multiplayer to lure in laymen. We know that unlocks now happen on a per-weapon basis, making it easier to get at the gadgets you want faster, that tank armour now recharges above a certain threshold to accommodate solo rampages, and that Assault players can now heal themselves to minimise time spent trundling back to the frontline. DICE has styled these shifts carefully - explaining that the new team deathmatch mode will acclimatise greenhorns to teamplay, for instance - but some fans will call them concessions nonetheless, evidence that the studio is going soft.
The campaign's less of a worry for either party, simply because the campaign has never been Battlefield's calling card in the same way, for instance, Halo's has. While the community debates the pros and cons of leaving out Commander mode, DICE is taking more drastic steps with the single player formula hammered out in Bad Company and Bad Company 2. Dialling up the seriousness of the endeavour is a primary objective. "We want it to feel personal and intimate, and for you to feel close to the characters around you in-game," comments producer Patrick Bach. "We want players to understand why things around you have become like they are, instead of offering a cartoon story that just says: you must save the world - go.
"We want a more mature audience to enjoy the game, so we're creating a story that people will find interesting, where players can understand the motivations of the characters throughout the game. We don't want to be pretentious though, and claim that we're making something that has never been created before - because everything has been created before, in one shape or form at least."
The Bad Company games are just such "cartoon stories", deriving main characters from the set of the Dirty Dozen and stagecraft from the adrenaline-slicked annals of Roland Emmerich. Tone, insists general manager Karl Magnus Troedsson, is the biggest shift. Along with the all-new plot, the decision to leave the wisecracks to Bad Company is suggestive. Activision has created a profitable distinction between Treyarch's wackier Call of Duty games and Infinity Ward's unrelentingly po-faced Modern Warfare series, and EA seems to have similar designs on Battlefield.
If levity's in shorter supply this time round, DICE is no less interested in making you feel like you inhabit a physical body. One earlier mission kicks off in an APC, ranks of huddled squaddies swaying to and fro as the vehicle turns and breaks. Strains of Johnny Cash waft through the thick, dusty atmosphere, and shafts of light peck at harried faces. Traffic honks like geese, the noise spreading to both speaker channels as the cunningly nicknamed Sergeant Henry "Black" Blackburn clamps a hand on the hatchway and hauls himself onto the tarmac, every motion accompanied by a finely mapped lurch or judder. Later, we watch squadmates sprint through heaps of loose objects to slam their shoulders against cover spots, the transition between animations barely noticeable. Bach may have script and dialogue in mind when he talks about fostering "intimacy", but it's the quality of the engineering, not the writing, that carries the sentiment home.
Such expressive subtleties make up the thin end of Battlefield 3's technological wedge; earth-shattering spectacle comprises the other. The Blackburn mission soon escalates as the squad penetrates deeper into Tehran, provoking the wrath of dug-in People's Liberation & Resistance fighters. Frostbite 2.0's destruction systems earn their breakfast as you engage snipers across a carpark. Dust clouds envelop battered cars and writhing tangos, and bullets tear metal plates off bridge frames. Later, a whole skyscraper spews its glassy guts and tips gracefully, devastatingly forward at the prompting of a compact rocket launcher, only to be upstaged not long after by a full-blown earthquake. The bombast isn't enough to obscure fine details, however, like the shell casings that cascade from a helicopter's cannons.
Small touches in the midst of chaos. It's a visual contrast that compliments DICE's narrative agenda, shunning wider politics or exposition in order to "put you in the boots of a soldier". Battlefield 3's global plot will turn on characters rather than the events they're caught up in. "We depict it from the perspective of an individual rather than an army. It's about you as a soldier on the battlefield, because no matter who you are or on what side you are, it's still drama. I don't want to create a war simulation or a game which picks sides. I think that would be tasteless." Bach dryly acknowledges the input of legendary military author Andy McNab. "Talking to people who know how things are done in real life adds quite a lot."
The developer isn't above soppiness in small doses, as the beginning of a tank mission starring corporal Jonathan "Jono" Miller reveals. The camera pulls back from a low angled close-up of a toy dinosaur labelled "to Dad", looming over a desert landscape. A child's voice whisks by on the wind. The vision is caught on the verge of being cloying by an order to "stop screwing around", and the view tilts to show the tank you're riding and the convoy beyond. There's time nonetheless to soak up the ambience, the chassis creaking and clanking over the rumble of the engine, temporarily blotted out by the thunder of passing helicopters. Then battle erupts and Jono takes over control of the main gun, slapping enemy vehicles to debris with single shots. A smaller calibre gun is used to thin the ranks of advancing RPG wielders, and a laser sight employed to plonk airstrikes on troublesome buildings. It's a knock-'em-out-of-the-park shooting gallery that's worlds away from Black's taut gauntlet run, but you never feel like you've been dumped into a different game: the execution is just as convincingly weighty, Jono grappling with monitors as you swap cannons.
Bach wants "all of the variation we have in the multiplayer game to shine through in single player", echoing Troedsson's suggestion that Battlefield campaigns are best treated as tutorials for the online modes. This tilt towards multiplayer is reflected in Bad Company 2's enjoyable, but somewhat fragmentary-feeling campaign structure, with many areas resembling taped-off multiplayer maps populated by bots - but Battlefield 3 alters the tempo here too, retiring many sandbox elements for a more "sealed", choreographed and fluid experience. The earthquakes that reave Tehran's streets are among DICE's key conjuring tricks in this regard, using Frostbite 2's otherwise choice-enabling destruction systems to beat players into line. To some, this tighter, pushier style will constitute Battlefield's greatest capitulation to commercial thinking, recalling as it does the relentless thrust of a Modern Warfare campaign. Bach is pragmatic about his game's newfound linearity, stating flatly to Edge that "in most cases, sandbox games are boring, hard to get into and not very popular".
It's tough to get a sense of just how much flex DICE has cut from the preview levels, selected and edited as they are for promotional purposes. Dynamism seems no less prevalent at the micro level: incoming mortars knock out allied NPCs at random during Operation Guillotine, a night-time foray across a river into an apartment complex, and when you punch out a crisp nugget of concrete to perfectly frame a sniper's head, the sense of empowerment prompts ecstatic wiggles. But there are "gateway" actions to keep straggly squads in order, like being boosted over the lip of a concrete wall, the surrounding darkness deters exploration, and once we're deep in the gloom of the buildings themselves, the only way is forward.
So it goes for Battlefield 3 as a whole. Ostensibly a return to earlier form, brushing past the irreverence of Bad Company, the new shooter is progressive to the core - for good or ill. Frostbite 2's fancier tricks show a developer with one eye on next generation consoles, but as far as more prosaic matters of scenario design, pacing and scripting are concerned, a new creative agenda is already in action.
Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
oxm.co.uk
