Interview with Patrick Bach - BF3 Producer

[BaronVonRotterdam]

This is an interview from a Swedish newspaper with Patrick Bach (part 1 and part 2, part 3 is coming out tomorrow)

Interview Part 1:

We have just finished a poll about what gaming series is best; CoD or Battlefield. Battlefield came out on top with 59%.

Yes! Perfect.

It feels as if you have tailwind at the moment; Bad Company 2 has sold 5 million copies.

Right now it does indeed feel like we have a lot of tailwind, although we feel we received it later than what we should have. We have always thought "Battlefield" as being the shit. At times we have felt that people don't realize that our competitors' games are a bad copy of our game with a little twist.

Was it because you were slow with doing console games?

I think that we might have been a bit trifling when we went over to consoles. And we also bought the myth about "console players being a bit special". So we tried to simplify the concept in Bad Company 1, scale it down to its essence, "I should be able to manage this", haha. We also really wanted to make a single player campaign, "Battlefield" is a good toolbox for that purpose. So it was a double experiment; Move to consoles and make a more streamlined experience and also test to make a campaign for one player.

I also don't think Bad Company 2 is a simpler game than Battlefield 2, although many would argue that it is. Fact is that it has more depth and is more complicated. We have however improved at packaging the game in a way which makes it easier to understand. Some people may find this annoying. They want it to be more complicated and have made an effort to understand everything in Battlefield 2. And now anyone can do it, then it feels stupefying although it is really about us teaching everyone to control this rather advance experience.


I assume this is criticism you appreciate.

Well, we have to take it. But we know it is not true. We want to make it easier for everyone to play the game, that they should be able to do the most fundamental things. But we still want to keep the depth of the game, and make it even deeper.

The classic saying is that people claim Battlefield 2 to be a realistic game. They claim it was a simulation, more or less. If that is the case, I recommend everyone to go back and play Battlefield 2 and watch old movies of how it actually looks like. It is not something, with today's standards, we are proud of. Back then we were proud and back then we thought it was cool and good looking. But if you compare it with Bad Company 2 it is a disaster. You can still of course have loads of fun with it, the mechanism and the core is still Battlefield. It is tremendously fun to play. But if you look at the presentation and the graphics, how weapons and vehicles look and operate, then there are huge differences in comparison to Bad Company 2. And compared to Battlefield 3, there is nothing to discuss, it is not even near.

The attitude of gamers is paradoxical in that sense. They love the new things, nothing receives the same amount of hype than new stuff but at the same time they are deeply nostalgic. You shouldn't touch old stuff


We have been relatively spared of this despite our heritage; "you should do exactly like in Battlefield 1942, but better looking and better", without them saying what that means. It should be the same, but better.

But now you give them that, with the four maps in "Back to Karkand"

Exactly. We want that ourselves as well. See Karkand through today's high tech filter and with all the knowledge we have built. Many still believe that "Strike of Karkand" was a city map. But if you look at it, there are a few house looking objects placed on a something which looks to be a street. There is not much more to it. But it feels like a city and it feels cool. And it is that feeling we wanna reach to again but take it even closer to the original idea. And the one who designed "Karkand" is on the team, and he if anyone knows what Karkand originally was supposed to be. He is with us and designs Karkand in its original vision.

And of course people are going to be disappointed because "The spot which I used to stand and shoot around the corner" might be gone. It is like you said, people are very nostalgic. They have stuff which they remember from "Battlefield" which they want to be kept in the game. But we know what "Battlefield" should be, we built "Battlefield"! We are trying to reach closer to our own vision of what "Battlefield" should be like. You just have to trust us that we care and try to make the best "Battlefield" game possible.


Interview Part 2:

You have now shown the first footage of BF3, what are your impression of the reactions from the internet?

I am obviously pleased with the game we are building, we have been working on it for some years. We did not start building Battlefield 3 after we were finished with Bad Company 2, we had been working with it 3 years prior to that. It is something we have been brooding in the meantime.

Since we made Battlefield 2, we have wanted to take the next big step, where it really should feel like that now we enter the next generation; That is the reaction we are after. And it was that which made us build Frostbite 2. We did it because we would not be able to deliver the super shocking experience we are looking for with existing technology. All we could do was to go back to the drawing board and postpone the launch of Battlefield 3 until the world reached the point where we could build the game. And we think we are there now. We have worked hard, not to compare with our previous games or what others are doing - but to decide what we want it to be in the future.

You can do cool things just by borrowing from the old games and then fix, repair and plaster. But we are not renovating an apartment, we are building a whole new residential area. And I think that can be seen and felt. It is just not the graphics we have fixed; people have have seen some of the graphics, heard some of the sound, but the big step will be when people play it and feel "wow, this is really different". That is the experience we are looking for. While at the same time keeping in mind that the battlefield recipe still works.

How many people are working with Battlefield 3?

I am not allowed to tell.

Isn't that something you normally speak of?

Yes I know. Apparently, it is the economic part.... It appears that you can deduce some financial summaries of it.

I can say this however; It is without any doubt the biggest gaming project DICE has ever done. By far the biggest. Just the team working with the multiplayer part of the game is significantly larger than the entire Battlefield 2 team. We have taken it to a whole new level. It is a megaproduct, not just in the eyes of DICE or Sweden. It is one of the world's largest gaming team who is building this game. And we're not holding back, we are going all out on this one.

If you look at another Swedish entertainment industry, it was a big event when the "Arn" films were shot. And they cost around 30 million dollars.

Haha... Now I don't want to be critical of the "Arn" movies in any way, but we wouldn't reach far with that sort of money. This project is of a totally different caliber.

It must be one of the biggest games Electronic Arts has ever made.

EA has given us their full confidence, EA has over the years learnt to trust DICE. And now the time has come. And it feels incredible that a multinational company like EA goes all in and really embrace small DICE and ask: "What do you want?", "How can we help?", so for us it feels fantastic. And at the same time it creates an outstanding pressure on the studio to deliver. But we are still confident that the product will be amazing.

Do you sleep well?

Of the few hours of sleep I get, I sleep very well.

Do you have days when you think damn, what the hell is about to happen?

Yes, every day. Basically, every day you think "what the hell are we doing?", this project is just so big, there are so many people involved. And I am not speaking about DICE only, but also the rest of EA, which have such extreme expectations on the product. But it passes away about as quickly as it struck you. All I really need to do is look at what we are building to feel "we have this, it's here".

We are not trying to sell something which we don't have. I can understand projects which make use of rendered movies to demonstrate something, without having a game. We only show things from the game, we are extremely Swedish in that sense. We are very stubborn, we don't show anything which we can't deliver. And that is not always popular, but in the end it always pays off. We don't talk shit; although we try to learn to sell and become slightly more American in that sense, you know that if we say that we are going to deliver something at a certain point, we will.

And it is not about EA, DICE or me, it is about the team. It really is Swedish teamwork at its finest, it is IKEA all over again. If we know what we want, it will be good. We might be modest that it was a success, but we would never promise something that we can't deliver.

How do you coordinate people to head in the same direction when the team is of the size it is?

It is actually easier than one might think. In Swedish manners, I can't tell people what I think they should do, it can't be done, it is impossible. It is Swedish to ask, "why". So my job is to find the direction that we have and refine it, repeat it to people and convince them about it. Because once they are convinced, they put 100% into that direction. The only danger is when someone starts heading in a different direction. So all you really do is to search for people who haven't been convinced about our direction.

What do you do then?

Well, then you talk it through. You explain, discuss or show; That person might be right and then everyone else has to change direction instead. We have a very socialist view of game developing; Best idea wins. There is no "I win", no idea-hierarchy or a "tell people what to do hierarchy". We have different areas of responsibility. Of course you could argue that it would be easier if someone just stands up and yells "Let us head north!". But what we are doing is a bit more complicated. And above all, we are doing things which are rather creative, which is new and which no one else has ever done.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/5323231.page

[Mobster]

Video Interview by Gamespot with Patrick Bach.

[BaronVonRotterdam]

Good interview but I was hoping he would give a specific date or month of release rather than the same old "this fall".