Battlefield: Bad Company may have alienated PC gamers with its console-only appearance, but DICE senior producer Patrick Bach believes the decision to dedicate the experience to consoles bodes well for the franchise’s future.
“One of the things we learned is that you can build a proper Battlefield multiplayer experience on a console,” Bach recalls. “We hadn’t really gone into that territory before – making an all out, full-on Battlefield.”
For the sequel, Bach and his team plan to use those lessons to full capacity, intensifying the game’s signature brand of open expanse warfare filled with destructible environments, vehicular combat, and deep progression systems. Rather than achieving this by upping the player count to 64 players (like it traditionally was on PCs), DICE is focused on honing elements of the first game that came up short.
“Player count is a hot potato,” Bach remarks. “Some think bigger is better. We want to make more and better use of the players we have.” To that end the team is responding to several common community complaints by improving vehicle handling, allowing full environmental destruction, and tweaking squadmate spawning. The hope is that these fixes will result in more intense and action-packed battles.
Blackhawk helicopters equipped with two miniguns also help drive up the explosion factor. These transport choppers can fit an entire squad, allowing talented teams to rain bullets on infantry to rack up the kills. Now that soldiers can deploy parachutes, squads can also use the choppers to employ hit-and-run tactics on gold crates or conquest flags. On the ground, DICE is adding nimble ATVs to the fray that allow two people to cruise quickly though hot zones.
DICE has always had a reputation of giving Battlefield titles great post-launch support, but that wasn’t the case with Bad Company. Glitches still exist in the game to this day, leaving many to wonder if the DICE philosophy has changed regarding post-game support. Bach insists that the problem had more to do with figuring out the proper patching strategy on consoles, not a shift in philosophy. While the PC platform allowed DICE to issue patches whenever it saw fit, the consoles have limited memory and patches to service the community, which means the developer needs to do a better job prioritizing to make sure the most necessary changes make the cut.
“We’re looking into a lot of community management this time around because we actually agree that we could have done a better job at handling the community in Bad Company,” Bach admits. “The whole studio is looking into how we can get better at handling community issues.”
Bach says the team has several more exciting new features to reveal, including two new game modes focused on squad play. Stay tuned in the coming months for more information.
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