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Battlefield team play “has always been deeper”, says DICE producer

Karl-Magnus Troedsson says other multiplayer shooters are “still actually in team deathmatch mode”, fail to nurture real teamwork.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 saw a burst of somewhat unexpected sunny publicity last year thanks to Infinity Ward’s decision to scrap dedicated servers for Modern Warfare 2 on PC. DICE’s Gordon Van Dyke was quick to reassure official forum posters that his game would tick all the boxes on server support, to considerable applause.

Bad Company 2 online has more going for it than a sound network backbone, of course. According to producer Karl-Magnus Troedsson (whom we accosted at a recent preview shindig), the franchise’s approach to team play “has always been deeper” than that of most rivals – and remains deeper today.

Asked if there was anything he felt other multiplayer shooters were doing wrong, Troedsson replied: “Well I wouldn’t say ‘wrong’ – I don’t want to judge people, other games like that. But for us – multiplayer, online play, we’ve been doing that since Battlefield 1942, and to us it’s open environments, it’s sandbox, it’s team play.

“Because team play – what we’ve done in Battlefield for a long time is team play,” he went on. “You play as squads, you play teams, it’s very important. A lot of the other shooters are still actually in team deathmatch mode – they have tons of different game modes, but they all one way or another are just people playing to get the maximum score.

“This game is deeper, and Battlefield has always been deeper, and that’s due a lot to the gameplay. Like for instance you can heal each other, you can give each other ammo, you can revive each other – we’ve got the shock paddles in now.”

We find this claim a little dubious, to be honest. Among other current generation highlights, Killzone 2, Left 4 Dead and Gears of War have all done compelling things with player revival, healing and ammo sharing. 1942 may have been a trend-setter, but Battlefield faces stiffer competition nowadays. What do you think?

The game’s out on 2nd March in North America and 5th March in Europe.

New IP can take “years of iteration” to get right – Singularity producer

Don’t count your chickens before they’ve been blown to bits with plasma grenades.

Activision’s Kekoa Lee-Creel has a few cautionary words for developers of new game properties. Basically, you shouldn’t expect your spark of originality to explode into a system-selling trilogy overnight: these things take time. Not to mention cold hard cash.

“Initial investment’s the big difficulty, initial investment to start an IP,” Lee-Creel told FPS Gamer during a preview showing of Raven Software’s Singularity, a gloomy, temporally disordered shooter for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. “Obviously they can take years of iteration to get it right, to really feel out the things that make it unique and special. So that’s a pretty substantial undertaking, it’s a risk, and it’s just money kind of ‘going’!”

“But I think the pay-off is definitely there,” he continued, presumably to the intense relief of Activision shareholders (not that they’ve got much to worry about these days). “There are plenty of franchises that have been built off a mildly successful first title, that have ramped into something hugely successful, and I think it’s a worthwhile undertaking.”

Lee-Kreel thinks Singularity has a decent shot. “I worked with Raven on Quake 4 as well, and they’re a fantastic team, so I’ve got a good new IP, I’ve got great marketing behind me, and I’ve got a great development team, so I’m pretty psyched. It’s a big deal.”

Having seen the game in action, we’re inclined to agree. Stay pumped for the full interview this week. Singularity’s out in Q1 2010.

BOOM. It’s the new site for FPS fanatics!

This scene-setting intro is entirely skippable.

Welcome to FPS Gamer. Round here, we mostly shoot stuff.

Not in a because-I-had-to, point-of-last-resort sort of way, but in a cackling, dropped-a-cheesy-punchline-afterwards sort of way.

We’re slightly mental like that. So are lots of you people, if sales of games like Call of Duty 4 are any indication. The FPS is big business nowadays. Why, then, the absence of a fully-fledged FPS-focussed editorial site? Did Rupert Murdoch skip that part of the marketing report? Is Future Publishing too peaceable to step up to the plate? We don’t know. We don’t care. We’ve come, we’ve seen and – given a handy ammo cache or two – we’re going to conquer.
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