DICE Battlefield: Heroes Interview

A Battlefield game with no upfront costs? Sign us up. We chat with DICE's Ben Cousins to see why Battlefield Heroes is far from a Team Fortress clone.

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Kikizo: Why is Heroes a good fit? We've got the cartoon style. Is there an emphasis on humour in Heroes as well?

Cousins: As I said, I've been playing Battlefield games since before they were called Battlefield games. My sensation whenever I play Battlefield is always one of fun and humour, and even if you're playing BF2 with it's kind of gritty, realistic graphics or Bad Company you're constantly laughing at these crazy things that happen, completely unexpected things. It's that mixture of physics, infantry and vehicles that really makes the unexpected happen a lot in Battlefield games. And because there's that sense of humour in your experience of playing the game, we decided to put that into the game itself and really give that game a personality and a humour in the art style and also the backstory.

Kikizo: Given that's the setting we have for this world, what sort of advertisers or products are suited to this world?

Cousins: Well, that's what I mean. In Battlefield: Heroes there will be no in-fiction advertising. We won't have any billboards or posters in the world. That's been a deliberate decision. All of our advertising is in the game menus and the front end, and obviously that will be standard web inventory basically. Whoever wants to advertise with us.

Kikizo: And you can't play offline, right?

Cousins: No. Well, there's a tutorial which you can play offline. We really want to give people the option to kind of mess around and experiment in the game world and we offer one of the maps up with some kind of tutorial text and all the weapons and vehicles that you can experiment with, but it's focused on being online-only.

Kikizo: This is the first game in EA's Plays For Free brand. Can you speak about any other games being considered for the line?

Cousins: I can't speak for other brands but all I would say is that there are a few teams out there who are going to be watching Heroes to see if it's a success. There's lots of IPs within EA that we could do Plays For Free with, and we'd be really happy and excited to help them out in terms of letting them use our back-end and our billing system and things like that.

Kikizo: There are fairly predictable and obvious comparisons between Heroes and Team Fortress 2. How are you going to set yourself apart from Valve's game?

Cousins: There are enormous differences between this and Team Fortress. We're third-person, that's one of them. We have this historical setting. We have aircraft, tanks, jeeps, we've got a special ability system which is completely customizable, we've got a real, fully featured RPG-like leveling up and customisation system in terms of clothing items, we're obviously Plays For Free, we're PC-only and we've got very low system specs, and I think the game is much easier to get into and more immediate than Team Fortress. Really the only similarity we have with Team Fortress is that we're a class-based shooter and we've got cartoony graphics.

Kikizo: How many interviewers have asked you about comparisons with Team Fortress 2?

Cousins: Every single interview we've done since the [announcement] of the game.

Kikizo: And yet you don't sound all patronizing about it. [Laughs]

Cousins: I think it's a valid question. The situation we find ourselves in is there's two cartoon shooters out there and one of them's Team Fortress and one of them's Battlefield: Heroes. I would like there to be five or 10 or 15 cartoon shooters out there and I hope there's going to be more. I'd hate to think that people are scared of making a game that's a little bit different because there's one other game doing it out there. I mean, no one says Bad Company looks like Call of Duty of Medal of Honor because it's got realistic graphics. It's often the people who are critical of the games industry for not taking chances who are criticizing us for using cartoon graphics in Battlefield: Heroes.

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