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.

Page: 1  2  3 

Page 3

Kikizo: And for that matter, why can't we have cartoon graphics in a lot of other genres?

Cousins: Absolutely. You've probably seen FIFA Street, the new one which has got a stylized graphics style, which is kind of interesting. I'd like to think we've basically hit a pretty damn photorealistic level with these types of games, which is fantastic, I love it. I love these realistic games. But that gives us the opportunity to step back and say, "Hey, let's be artistic and take some chances and have a look at stylized graphics again."

Kikizo: If we go back 15-20 years ago, all the games looked cartoony, and now, I suppose Jet Set Radio was the first cartoony cel-shaded one, so it's looking nice to see something a bit less serious.

Cousins: It's been really nice. The great thing about Bad Company is it's realistic but it's also very irreverent, and when you play singleplayer you're laughing all the time. It's hilarious. Some of the characters in the game are fantastic. I don't know if you've seen our movie trailer which opens with World War II footage and a kind of cheesy voiceover. We really want to, with Heroes, be the anti-Medal of Honor, basically. We love Medal of Honor. I really enjoyed playing Airborne. But there's been a lot of very serious, gotta-save-the-world type games out there. Just because you're shooting a gun, doesn't mean you've got to be doing a type of Tom Clancy neoconservative agenda type game.

Kikizo: Heroes is going to be a third-person game but we've heard rumblings about a first-person mode too. What's the deal with that?

Cousins: We announced that we were third person and then somebody contacted EA France who said something in French. Then somebody posted on a website in French that got translated back into English and that became that we've got both third-person and first-person. It's not true. The only time that you're in first-person in the game is when you zoom the sniper rifle. You're third-person in all other times. We had maybe 50 people play it yesterday, a lot of them hardcore Battlefield fans, and none of them mentioned it. You don't notice it after a while.

Kikizo: How about weapons? I was talking to Jamie Keen and there was of a sigh of relief now that the weapons in Bad Company are free, because there was a bit of worry that they wouldn't be. And yet Heroes relies on microtransactions. What kind of things are we going to be paying for?

Cousins: The immediate thing that people tend to think is that obviously you're going to be selling maps, obviously you're going to be selling weapons. But we're not selling maps and we're not selling weapons. There's two main areas. One is the aesthetic items. So the gold helmet, the giant moustache, the mirrored shades - those are the kind of things that if you want your character to look super, super cool, maybe you have to spend just a little bit of money on items. You can also unlock items as well, but some of the items will be just available to be bought. Emotes as well. The characters have these cool animations that you can play on the battlefield and some of those we'll be selling - the really crazy ones.

And then the other category of items comes from Korea, it's influenced by games in Korea. They're called convenience items. The better way to describe it is to imagine that we're both playing the game. You're playing it every night for four hours, levelling up your character. You're getting quite far in the game. But I've got a wife and kids and I don't have time to play the game, but we want to play together at the weekend and have a similar experience. What I can do is buy an item which gives me double experience points for a certain period, say a weekend. I'm still playing the game, I still have to be skilled, and I'm still unlocking the same items as you. I can just get there a little bit quicker because I've bought this item.

And that doesn't imbalance the one-to-one conflicts. If we meet each other and we're fighting and I'm getting more experience points, it doesn't affect that kind of minute-to-minute experience. it just means that I'm progressing a slight bit quicker. So we're really careful. We don't want to piss people off that are playing the game, but we also don't want people to look at us and think that we're being cynical and selling items just to make money. We're an entertainment company and everything we do has to focus on entertainment.

Battlefield: Heroes is coming to PC as a free download this summer.

Page: 1  2  3 

Click here for Kikizo's interview archive.