We pick the brain of the open and frank Karl-Magnus Troedsson and get the final word on Battlefield 3... Part one of two.
Not so long ago, I had the pleasure of sitting down not once but twice with Karl-Magnus Troedsson to pick his brain about the finer point of Battlefield 3. For anyone who’s been following the interviews on Atomic, we’ve had the chance to sit down with Patrick Soderlund and Patrick Bach. So it made sense that we talked to the other main man at DICE, Mr Troedsson. Having covered a lot of Battlefield 3 ground before, we talked about consoles, the alpha and responding to Activision’s frames-per-second dig.
Atomic: Why wasn’t I in the alpha?
Karl-Magnus: *Laughs* The Alpha trial that we created was solely for development sake. We are very dedicated to have a stable launch when we launch this game. We know that it is problematic to release big games like what we’ve been doing. We thought that we needed one additional test before the beta—which is coming in September—we haven’t announced exactly what date. So we started out just internally within DICE, people within EA, then after that we started sending out to people, like the high-ranking Battlefield veterans that we actually have in the system. So it was a very closed off test, so I’m sorry if you didn’t get in. I will make sure we remedy that with the actual beta.
Atomic: So what sort of feedback have you gotten from the alpha?
Karl-Magnus: Well, it’s quite interesting actually, because we needed to low-test the backend. But we also got some really good feedback when it comes to actual features, etcetera. The map that people got to play was the Rush map on Metro that we had showing. Some of it we actually already reacted to. One of the key feedback we got, for instance, was that people wanted the comm rose back on PC. So that’s one thing that we actually have added. It’s a PC specific feature, but it’s the PC community that has asked for it.
Atomic: How does that work in terms of the balancing? Does that affect the console versions of the game or is it more of an addition?
Karl-Magnus: It’s more of an addition and we are very dedicated to make sure that none of the versions of the game are actually a port of the other one. So we’re looking at the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 and saying, ‘Okay, what can we do best with these consoles? And what are the input devices that we are using?’ And the PC’s so different that they will have different unique things for the keyboard.
Atomic: What’s been the biggest challenge of taking that approach of not wanting any platform to be a port? How do you maintain that quality across three platforms?
Karl-Magnus: It’s hard, basically just from a time perspective. Because you need to give love to the platforms and form the dev teams. Y’know, we’ve had so many people just working on it, so that’s one of the challenges. The good thing is that we have done several PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 games in a row, so we have a lot of experience, rendering programmers and etcetera, who really know and specialise on the PlayStation 3, for instance. So they can go in and they can look at, ‘Okay, we have this on the PC. How do we get that to fit into the memory of the PlayStation 3, etcetera?’ And naturally the PCs are more powerful, but I strongly believe that the PlayStation 3 is going to look absolutely amazing. I don’t know what you think when you saw the co-op mission that we showed.
Atomic: Actually, I thought that parts of it looked really good while there were still some textures, like the walls and ground and stuff that seemed kind of bland, for lack of a better word. That was one of my later questions. Because the weapon models look fantastic, the effects look fantastic and obviously it played really well. What sort of stuff have you had to scale back specifically for the consoles?
Karl-Magnus: Well, you should ask one of our renderer programmers. But one typical thing is you don’t have the same amount of players. There will be 24 players in multiplayer, we can do up to 64 on the PC. So that’s one of the most obvious things that we have to scale down. But, I mean, game development nowadays is a lot about smoke and mirrors. So you have to look at what’s important for the player, what are they going to be looking at? Okay, the gun. They’re gonna look at that all the time, so let’s make some extra effort on that and make sure it looks really good. But we have some tricks up our sleeve when it comes to Frostbite 2 that we’re now using. We can now stream in things, stream in and out, we can have more things on screen at the same time, we can have high resolution stuff and then dump it out of memory. So one of the key things that I actually believe strongly will make the console versions look really, really good compared to what we’ve done before is the dynamic lighting. That is still present on consoles. Muzzle flashes will actually light up the environment, spotlights, in the demo at the press event did you see the headlights of the cars actually had lights coming out and hitting the street, and reflecting in puddles and all this kind of stuff.
Atomic: I messed around with shooting out the lights as well.
Karl-Magnus: Some of them are a bit hard to hit, actually, but all of them should be breakable.
Atomic: So I also got to play the 64-player multi on PC, which was amazing. You talked about the idea of having 64-player maps on PC versus 24 on console; how do you approach map design if you’ve got to, I’m assuming you’ve shrunk the size of the maps, how do you do that? Do you approach it from smaller first?
Karl-Magnus: No, we start big and scale down. We’ve had a lot of experience with this already from Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield 2 where we had, like, large maps which were then playable as smaller maps with smaller amount of bases and smaller amount of players. So it’s basically the same thing that we’ve done here as well. So basically you will play Conquest in this mode with a smaller amount of bases.
Atomic: How do you go about balancing that if you’re taking it from something bigger and making it smaller? How do you make sure that it still has that same flow?
Karl-Magnus: You have to hand chase it. Play test, play test over and over again to make sure that the base layout and, we call it the area of operations, the area of operations we can play within that it’s structured right. Okay, this base is too close and we need to open that up a bit more and we wanna fondle it a bit more so we can make the area of operations smaller. But it basically is just hand chasing; I dunno if you say that in English. But you chase down and just play test, play test, play test. Okay, that didn’t work, change that, move that base, do something else.
Atomic: Can you talk to me a bit about your play-testing process; is that purely internal people or do you bring in external people as well?
Karl-Magnus: I mean, we have QA teams that might sit in different parts of the world that might help with the play test, but usually we use people at DICE. So usually the afternoons at DICE, especially towards the end of the cycle of the dev, there’s at least one or two play tests every afternoon. And then as many people as can have time, they just jump in, they collect all the feedback, it goes back to the multiplayer lead designer who then distributes it and says yay or nay. Then we rinse and repeat and iterate over it.
Atomic: You mentioned feedback, is that purely telemetry data or is it also the guys talking about it? Are you watching them as well?
Karl-Magnus: There’s a lot of telemetry as well but telemetry is a tool: if you don’t analyse it in the right way you can make a lot of bonkers decisions. So verbal feedback and written feedback is very, very important. It’s also very important to just hear how did you feel when you fired the main battle tank. ‘Y’know, it felt a bit underpowered.’ Okay, what does that mean? Because some feedback from some people, they can’t describe, ‘Oh, it was the recoil that wasn’t big enough or the muzzle flash was too small.’ They just describe that it didn’t feel powerful enough. Then it’s up to the experts on the game design team, the artists and the programmers, to analyse this and say, ‘Y’know, it’s probably A, B and C. Let’s fix those and try again.’
Atomic: Okay. A while ago, Activision shot a lovely shot across the bow with the whole 30 frames per second thing.
Karl-Magnus: Yeah.
Atomic: What’s your stance on that?
Karl-Magnus: First and foremost, it’s not a technical problem. We could easily, with Frostbite 2, make a 60fps game. But we are putting priorities—and we have been for some time—putting priorities on scale, large maps, destruction, vehicles, 24 players on console. We do so much more than what they are doing. And in our mind, 30fps suits us very well. We have a slightly slower pace, which fits this as well. But the 30fps works very, very well for us. And I believe that even in the future console cycles, you will continue to see games running at 30fps because that’s alright. Our game is a little bit less twitchy, which also fits that 30fps. And, naturally, for the people that are highly competitive and really want that high frame rate, most likely they’re going to be playing on PC where you can get like 200 or 300 fps if you so wanted.
Atomic: On the topic of the Activision versus EA thing, you’ve got Battlefield 3 versus Modern Warfare 3 and they’re both calling each other out. What sort of approaches have you taken to grabbing the attention of Call of Duty players—you mentioned the whole twitchy shooting, it’s a bit faster, etcetera—how do you get their attention and say, hey, look at Battlefield 3 now.
Karl-Magnus: First and foremost, I want to point out that there’s a big battle going on out there on the marketing battlefield. We’re developers, we’re really focussing on building the best game that we can. Naturally, we play what the other competitors are doing, but we focus on creating the best game that we can. We’re very competitive with ourselves first and foremost, so we’re very dedicated to building a better game that, in this case, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was. But at the same time, and it’s important to look at how can we attract new players to our franchise, to Battlefield 3? One of the most typical things we have decided is to add team deathmatch because we know that a lot of players from other players love to play team deathmatch. We haven’t had it before so, okay, it’s a slightly similar game mode than perhaps what Conquest or Rush is. If that is what a lot of people like to get into, let’s give them that and hopefully they can grow from there and we can get them into Rush and Conqeust and all the other modes that we have.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012