Oil: Battlefield 3: What we know so Far

Perhaps we can look at the current Battlefield franchise as “more realistic” call of duty. Some people will disagree with that statement, however the authenticity of real warfare breathes on a player in much larger amounts than any of the call of duties ever did, in multiplayer that is.

The latest installment in the mentioned Battlefield franchise was Bad Company 2, which introduced a whole new dimension of modern warfare to the player, with very authentic experience. Perhaps it was not the most popular game in its series, but DICE’s rendering architect Johann Andersson mentioned in an interview that Bad Company 2 was not a sequel to any of the Battlefield games, but to the Bad Company original game. In other words, it was always intended as more of an offshoot/side project unlike the flagship titles such as Battlefield 2 have been.

We think that EA and DICE are keeping it pretty quiet with the new Battlefield 3 title, because according to EA Europe’s VP Patrick Soderlund, BF3 is fairly far in its development, and it is looking to be a great addition to the series. We don’t know many details so far, however we do know that DICE has completely rebuilt the new Frostbite 2 engine, while we were impressed what the Frostbite engine could do, it did have certain limitations to it. We also know that the engine is being developed separately for each platform, which means that each player whether You game on PS3 or PC will get the most out of the game. Frostbite 2 will be built exclusively around DirectX 11 and will not support DirectX 9 anymore. It will be able to take full advantage of 64-bit Operating Systems and feature support for things like multi-threading and tesselation. Yay for nVidia users!

Another notable and confirmed fact for BF3 is the destruction of environment that DICE will implement. We have seen this in Bad Company 2 and can expect it to be only improved. Expect the maps to be truly “destructible” to the limit due to the new Frostbite 2 engine.
It is safe to say that porting games to consoles can hurt PC users, and we definitely saw that with Bad Company 2, maps were smaller and the max amount of players were cut in half to 32. Senior gameplay designer Alan Kertz wrote the following to a fan regarding the number of max players for each map,: “For Battlefield it’s bandwidth; we are bandwidth capped on the consoles. For PC, I’d like to get back to big scale 64 player.” Perhaps we can expect the return of 64 player maps and therefore having huge environments allowing for some advanced tactics. This brings way more realism to the game unlike “Nuketown” types of maps we can see in the Black Ops. It has also been rumored that BF3 will be a PC exclusive title.

When Patrick Suderland was asked, what the status on the newest Battlefield game currently is, he had a pretty wild answer,: I’m very happy with what we have and I’m really excited about showing it to the world because we have something that is going to be very, very cool.” He later said that Battlefield 3 will be a “true sequel to Battlefield 2“.

And finally, here are the words from a former DICE CEO,: “What the PC version is going to be, Battlefield 3, I think it’s going to absolutely blow everyone away, but I can’t tell you what it is, but it will blow people away.”
This is some pretty exciting news if You are a PC player specifically.
Battlefield 3 might get a “reveal” at the upcoming VGA’s on Spike TV on December 11th, so be sure to lookout for that. It has been also said that DICE’s Kenny Magnusson will speak at the GDC, March 2011, with further explanations regarding the new Frostbite 2 engine.

We definitely have something to look forward to in 2011 and hopefully DICE will not disappoint with Battlefield 3.