Battlefield: Bad Company - DICE Interview

EA and DICE change tack and turn their attention to singleplayer for their new Battlefield game. We visit DICE to find out more.

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This attitude permeates the game, from its story to the action and even the weapons. Hand grenade have an extra badge on the pin - a bright-yellow smiley face.

"It's something that we put together," Troedsson says. "We want a different attitude in the game, so that it's not all serious and grey. It's more of a happy feeling. They're [after] their pot of gold, they're renegade soldiers, they're pretty much having fun and that's what we're trying to get across."

Probably the most visible element to the game, though, is its emphasis on the environment and the many ways you can blow it up. "Tactical destruction," DICE calls it, a fancy way of saying that you can use big guns to make bigger holes in anything you see.

This will have direct effects on gameplay. Say you're trying to pick off a guy you suspect is standing behind a wall. Using one of the high-calibre weapons on offer, you'll be able to aim where you think he's standing and just blow right through, taking out the wall and your opponent in the process.

And since blowing stuff up is so fun, DICE is making sure there's plently to play around with. Trees, alone, number in the dozens of thousands and they're all there for you to cut down. Enemies will also be aware of the impermanence of the world and they'll tear through your cover to get at you.

"Things can't get in the way anymore. If there are trees, just take them all down," Troedsson says, as he takes his own advice, doing some deforesting of his own in the demo we're seeing.

Powering this creative destruction is DICE's own in-house Frostbite engine, which the team developed in response to the greater power afforded them by the new wave of hardware. The team also turned to Havok for help with handling all the physics.

Sadly, there are limits. While the world is yours to deimate, you won't be able to destroy absolutely everything. There's something called reinforced concrete in the game that your weapons will not be able to tear down.

This is mainly there for game design reasons. You also won't be able to completely raze houses, so that multiplayer doesn't get too absurb. "After just ten minutes of play we would have leveled the entire level," Troedsson says.

After all, that would just be excessive.

Battlefield: Bad Company is coming to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 this autumn.

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