It may be one of the most popular FPS games when it comes to online multiplayer, but that doesn’t mean that the Battlefield series doesn’t have a decent single-player campaign for those of us who are more internet-handicapped.
Brothers in arms, global threats and imminent invasion by those darn Russians were just a few of the action-heavy stereotypes present in the Bad Company games, but gamers loved it anyway. Battlefield 3 however, is planning to be a far more realistic experience, bringing gamers into a more contemporary environment.
According to lead designer David Goldfarb, Battlefield: Bad Company 1 and 2 were more along the lines of “adventure flicksâ€, while Battlefield 3 is “much closer to contemporary reality and current events".
"We’re depicting a war and everything that suggests", Goldfarb wrote on the Battlefield blog. "We have tried to get closer to the slang of the modern warrior. We are mixing tension-building passages with the chaos of suddenly erupting firefights. We’ve sought to keep the game feeling as plausible as possible, because the moment the audience stops believing it could happen, then you’re just like every other shooterâ€.
While Goldfarb explained how DICE “loved’ developing Bad Company 1 and 2, making games that were “light-hearted†and “great funâ€, the games were essentially “Indiana Jones with an assault rifleâ€.
"But with Battlefield 3, we knew we had to really divorce ourselves from those characters and those themes. We had to go somewhere else and do something different and push a different set of buttonsâ€, Goldfarb said. "We’re telling a war story now, and that means it needs to feel credible, it needs to feel contemporary, and it needs to connect with things and emotions that we have never really tried or had the means to properly connect to before".
Setting the right tone has been very important to Goldfarb and the DICE development team as well, something that the studio feels very proud about. "Tone is vibe", Goldfarb wrote. "It’s style. It’s a feeling. It’s why The Dark Knight is awesome and the ’60s Batman is not; the difference between Saving Private Ryan and Hogan’s Heroes. It’s one of those things which, if you do it right, affects everythingâ€.
"More than anything else in Battlefield 3’s single-player story, this is where we set out to do something different. We put (players) in challenging situations. We ask them questions. In Battlefield 3, we ask, ‘What would you really do for your country’?’†“We’ve tried to put our people in contexts where they make emotionally valid choicesâ€.
A more realistic approach to warfare may be just what the Battlefield franchise needs to separate itself from its competition, but at the same time, its going to need to avoid some clichés in order to stand tall. The moment we hear weepy wailing music in a scene involving African militia, while our main character monologues about some sort of vague morality issues, is where the game officially enters stereotype territory, and that’s something no one really wants, or cares about.
Source: Battleblog via Eurogamer
Last Updated: September 12, 2011
