DICE Battlefield: Bad Company Interview

When your game is focused on multiplayer, keeping your audience happy is paramount. We ask Jamie Keen why DICE responded how it did to gun-gate and feel the love in the process.

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Kikizo: How are these particular project separated at the moment at DICE? Is it just different teams on different floors?

Keen: Pretty much. There's a number of teams in the studio that are working together. There's good communication between the teams, to leverage a lot of the lessons that we learn from other projects to deliver the best product that we can.

Kikizo: Would you ever consider outsourcing development on the Bad Company franchise as it continues to grow?

Keen: There's no plans for that at the moment, no.

Kikizo: What are some of the other intellectual properties that you're looking after at DICE?

Keen: For example, Mirror's Edge is coming out, and then Heroes, too. Heroes as well rather than Heroes 2. We need to get Heroes 1 out of the way first. [Laughs]

Kikizo: When was Heroes 2 announced?

Keen: No, no, there is no Heroes 2. It's just Heroes. I meant Heroes as well rather than Heroes 2. [Laughs] Just to clarify, not Heroes 2.

Kikizo: That could have gone horribly wrong. [Laughs]

Keen: Heroes as well.

Kikizo: So, Mirrors Edge is looking fucking awesome. We e-mailed EA about it after seeing it in Edge and asked what the deal is with it and when do we get to see it. Why is that not here today?

Keen: Today we're just showing Battlefield titles. Mirrors Edge is looking really great and the guys are doing a really great job on it.

Kikizo: That's coming out next year, right?

Keen: I'm not quite sure about the release date on that to be honest.

Kikizo: There's nice lighting going on in the game.

Keen: Yeah, the Frostbite engine is something we spent a lot of time developing for this and it's going to give us a lot of opportunities moving forward as well. It's well-crafted for the game that we're making. It really lets us do a lot of stuff. The tech guys have really accomplished a lot.

Kikizo: And that was built from the ground up for this title?

Keen: Yeah, with the idea that we could use it going forward for other titles as well. As you can see, the lighting and the rendering and the shadows and the physics and dynamics and stuff, it's technically extremely challenging to get those looking as good as this.

Kikizo: And the visual engine, is that separate from the destructive environment engine?

Keen: No, it's all part of the one engine. We use Havok physics for the hit physics perspective and that all knits in together. And visually, some of the stuff that is handled more visually is handled more client side, other stuff is handled more server side, depending on what we want to push around and where we can optimize as much as possible. As you can see, this is running on a 10-foot screen here and it still looks really detailed. From that perspective we're really pleased with where we've ended up, purely from a rendering perspective. I don't think there are many other titles that would hold up as well as this on this kind of scale.

Kikizo: Because development costs are rising, what a lot of studios - such as Sony Worldwide Studios - are doing is sharing more tools and assets and engines across studios they have. Do you think that's something EA should be doing more of? You say you've built the Frostbite engine from the ground up, which I'm sure has its advantages, but do you think there could be more sharing among EA's studios?

Keen: There absolutely was during the development of this as well. It's not something that we're doing in isolation. That's one of the real benefits of becoming part of EA is that there is a large knowledge sharing. And then we have other partners coming to the table, like BioWare, CryTek and Valve. There is a lot of knowledge sharing that goes on between the different studios, both internally within the studio stucture and then with the partners. And that's something that's been invaluable to us during the development of this and hopefully we can pass back some of the lessons out there as well.

Battlefield: Bad Company will be released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on 27 June with a demo for both platforms available on 5 June.

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