DICE: BF3 is "very different" to MW3

By Wesley Yin-Poole Published 11 October, 2011

"We're not straying from our own ideas."

Battlefield 3 isn't like Modern Warfare 3 at all, DICE has insisted.

Some have said Battlefield 3's single-player campaign shows an about turn for the Swedish developer, and is reminiscent of the kind of set-piece driven, bombastic single-player campaign the Call of Duty series is known for.

Not so, DICE insists.

"We're not straying away from the formula," Patrick Bach, executive producer, told Eurogamer TV in part two of our Battlefield 3 special.

"It is a very different feeling we're going after. We're not straying away from our own ideas. We are looking at our own stuff, maybe a bit too much at times because sometimes you forget to look at what everyone else is doing. But of course it adds a lot of pressure when people's expectations are that maybe we should do something else, rather than doing what we're doing."

Lead game designer David Goldfarb agrees, and rejects the comparison with Activision's first-person shooter behemoth.

"We don't go out to be consciously different," he said. "But we have our own thing we want to do, and it isn't that. It is a very different feeling we're going after, in the same way we don't want to always have the meter pegged at 11 when it comes to pacing. We do want one to ten, or one to eleven as it were."

THERE MAY BE SPOILERS AHEAD.

Last week the ESRB revealed that in Battlefield 3 you shoot cops in order to finish a mission.

The mention of shooting police officers conflicted with comments made by the Bach earlier this year.

"If you put the player in front of a choice where they can do good things or bad things, they will do bad things, go dark side - because people think it's cool to be naughty, they won't be caught," he explained.

"We have to build our experiences so we don't put the player in experiences where they can do bad things."

Now, speaking to Eurogamer, Goldfarb has gone into more detail on what DICE is going for with its single-player campaign.

"It's hugely important to us to have single-player as the thing that identifies the tone of the game," he said.

"How much would you really do for your country? That's a theme that permeates the whole of the game, not just the main character you play, but the other characters.

"That takes shape in a number of different ways that will have a certain impact in the game.

"What is patriotism? What would you do given a certain set of circumstances? Is this the right thing or the wrong thing?

"I don't know if ethically challenging is the right phrase but it is in a certain sense, and that's new for us."

EGTV: The Making of Battlefield.

Picture of Wesley.

About Wesley Yin-Poole

Wesley is Eurogamer's news editor. He likes news, interviews, and more news. He also likes Street Fighter more than anyone can get him to shut up about it.

Read more articles from Wesley by visiting the Wesley Yin-Poole archive page.

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