Battlefield.
To your average dictionary or English teacher, it’s just two words fused to form a single, super word. Not that ‘field’ keeps up its end of the bargain, but ‘battle’, well, battle is one of those swell combinations of letters that paints all sorts of images in your head. Say, running courageously at an enemy encampment with nothing but a pistol and slice of toast; mining the crap out of your opponent’s vehicle bay or shooting your teammates in a mad scramble to commandeer the map’s only biplane, only to crash the thing in excitement five seconds later.
Okay, we’re not talking about battles here, but the Battlefield series of games. Developer Digital Illusions CE (now EA DICE) single-handedly forged a new chapter in first person shooter history – the online-only, mass multiplayer FPS. It did it first with the original Battlefield 1942 in 2002, then Battlefield Vietnam. Battlefield 2 brought the series into the present, while the most recent instalment, Battlefield 2142, introduced futuristic elements. If you were to count the number of simulated battles that have occurred in these games combined, you’d have to be a million-fingered spawn of Cthulhu to keep track. What you don’t need copious amounts of digits for is to recognise what facts all these games have in common.
They’re PC and multiplayer only. There’s a generation of console gamers out there that have yet to enjoy the sweet rush of Battlefield mania, and a generation of Battlefield players who’ve never experienced the title with a strong singleplayer campaign. EA DICE hopes to rectify both situations with its latest project, Battlefield: Bad Company.
Something different
“It’s not so much a transition as it is an offshoot,” explains senior producer Karl-Magnus Troedsson. “Battlefield was invented on PC and we’ll never let go of this heritage, the PC still holds a very interesting proposition. However, offering the Battlefield experience to the millions of console players as well makes perfect sense.”
EA DICE is quite adamant about the whole console thing, so PC gamers will have to skip this iteration of the game unless they buy an Xbox 360 or PS3. “This time around we’ve said no to a PC version and focused all our efforts on the console development to take this to another level.”
You’d think jumping to consoles would be enough. But no, the developer has big plans for Bad Company’s singleplayer campaign, a facet it has neglected in other Battlefield games.
“The story doesn’t relate much to previous Battlefield games as this is the first time we’ve done a true single-player campaign, driven by characters and a real story,” says Troedsson. “In the game you play a new recruit called Preston Marlowe, who has just been placed in B Company.”
Rather than being an elite squad of crack commandoes, B Company contains the US Army’s “misfits, troublemakers and general screw-ups”. That doesn’t stop the army from assigning B Company dangerous missions – not because it thinks you can complete them, but more that it doesn’t care if you return or not. Hey, if you can accomplish some good in the process, the army has come out on top.
Of course, B Company doesn’t take kindly to being sent on suicidal adventures. Along with his new-found mates Haggard, Sarge and Sweetwater, Marlowe decides it’d be better to desert than cop it sweet from high command.
“When the opportunity arises to pursue a large cache of black market gold, horded by a ruthless mercenary, they decide it’s time to stop following orders and go AWOL,” says Troedsson. “Sometimes the gratitude of a nation isn’t enough.”
No Battlefield game would be complete without classes and weapons. Bad Company is no exception.
Players will be able to choose from the following fields: Officer, Assault, Demolitions, Support and Sniper; and firearms will include .45 calibre pistols, M203 grenade launchers, mines and more. Sounds like your standard array of roles and weapons... except you’ll be able to use them in a fresh new way – total destruction of the environment. This is thanks to EA DICE’s Frostbite engine, designed in-house by the developer.
As with more recent Battlefield games, players will have to unlock weapons before they can access them. Most however can be gained via the campaign.
Okay, so we know the focus is on singleplayer. Does that mean there’s no multiplayer at all?
“Battlefield: Bad Company is true to its heritage by including a full online experience as well as the offline campaign,” explains Troedsson. “This is a very important part of the game and anyone that enjoyed the previous games should be very pleased with this new installment.” In short, we have nothing to worry about. In fact, Bad Company comes with an entirely new multiplayer mode called ‘Gold Rush’. It’s a ‘defend and hold’ style game mixed with objectives. Attackers must destroy the defending team’s caches of gold, which provides access to more areas of the map, as well as additional reinforcements.
“The general idea with it is to keep the action in the game closer together, not spreading all the players thin around the huge maps which often happened in the old Conquest mode,” say Troedsson. Fans of Conquest mode have no need to cry – it will be accessible via a free download post-launch.
Frostbite, the good kind
EA DICE has always been possessed by the need to craft its own technology. Frostbite, the engine that underpins Bad Company, is completely proprietary and will make its first appearance in the developer’s console debut. With the popularity of Unreal Engine 3, Gamebryo and other options, why is EA DICE obsessed with building its own tech?
“Developing a new engine isn’t a cakewalk and every company going down this road really needs to ask themselves why, especially today when there are proven engines available for licensing,” warns Troedsson. “Our reason was that we really wanted to create a cutting edge game that made the most out of the next-gen console’s hardware. In order to do this while at the same time innovate with things like destruction, creating our own engine was the natural choice.”
Troedsson also says that the known hardware of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 has made this process easier. The team started work on the Xbox 360, but over the last year or so most of EA DICE’s efforts have been pumped into the PS3 version. Both platforms provide impressive hardware for the game to operate on, even if Sony’s console threw the developer a few curveballs.
“It’s just a matter of harnessing that power and making the most of it. This can be very different when comparing to previous instalments of the platforms. Working with parallel processing on the PS3 has been a challenge but it also opens up some great opportunities.”
Overall, it sounds like the jump to the loungeroom systems has been smooth, if not beneficial.
Perhaps the biggest compromise EA DICE has had to make is on the modding side. This deficiency has been offset by beefing the multiplayer support by adding persistence for awards and medals, leaderboards and unlockables.
“On top of all this we’ll supply even greater insight to player performance on the homepage, where additional stats and comparison tools will be available,” adds Troedsson.
Battlefield: Bad Company should be available by the time you read this, and a demo shortly before, so we’ll have ample opportunity to judge EA DICE’s transition from PC for ourselves. For those in doubt, Troedsson says if you like Battlefield, then Bad Company won’t disappoint. Throw almost totally destructible environments and the series’ reputation for stunning visuals, and the game is a tempting proposition.
“Players who go deep will also notice that it definitely changes how you play shooters and introduces another tactical layer to the sandbox experience.”
All about optimisation
Part of the development process involves optimising the content – it’s just as important as creating code and assets. Troedsson was able to provide us with some insights into how EA DICE deals with space and performance issues by tweaking its games.
Thanks to the known hardware of the consoles, the developer has been able to take its foot off the pedal on the optimisation front for Bad Company. Troedsson notes that usually it’s a crucial aspect when dealing with a new engine.
“In order to get to the final result we need to work with all areas, squeezing out every little piece of power of the hardware. Usually we start with overall optimisation of the code, like looking and rendering, physics, sound and AI. When they start to hit the limit of how much more performance we can dig out, we move over and optimise the content, scaling down on the amount of trees on a level or the amount of polygons on the environment.”
This deals with performance, but how about getting all that data onto a DVD or Blu-ray disc?
“If optimising for pure size on the medium we ship on we most likely would optimise by removing content e.g. scaling down quality of movies or removing entire maps/missions. But there are other things as well. Usually we try to squeeze as many localised version of the game onto the same disc, especially here in Europe. If the increase in manufacturing cost could be handled, these could be broken out to several discs and this would free up a lot of space.”