EA: Battlefield 3 tech raises FPS bar
Relishes battle with Call of Duty.
The technology underpinning DICE's stunning-looking Battlefield 3 will raise the first-person shooter bar, EA has confidently proclaimed.
The competition will find it "tough to match" the visual splendour served up by the Frostbite 2 engine, EA Games label head Frank Gibeau told the IndustryGamers at the Game Developers Conference last night.
Gibeau was clear in his assertion that Battlefield 3, due out later this year, will provide current FPS king Call of Duty with its toughest challenge in years.
"We're here to compete," he said. "Everyone loves a heavyweight battle. It's good for the industry, it's good for the customer - there's a lot of energy and hype and fun and comparisons.
"It's always good to see how you can energize a market by looking at how one guy can up the other. That's kind of what we're doing here."
EA showed the game off to press last night at GDC, but Eurogamer popped on the plane to DICE's Stockholm studio for a closer look.
Gibeau was pleased with the reveal - and the hot off the press gameplay trailer, below.
"We're super proud of the game," he said. "The Frostbite 2 technology is reinventing the category, and the Battlefield brand has its own persona and positioning, the multiplayer and squads.
"The combination of the brand and the technology and the quality of the DICE game is what we wanted to show tonight.
"We wanted to show unadulterated gameplay and show it for a long time, in February, and because we don't ship until the Fall it means we have a long time to polish it and make it extremely high quality.
"It's what we've been trying to do in the EA Games label over the last couple years - get our mojo back in terms of quality and great IPs. For me, this is a great example of investments we've been making in technology, team culture and getting the talent in place to make world-beating games.
"We're going to own what we do because we're going to leapfrog the category by introducing a whole new set of technology that's brand-new. The Frostbite 2 technology is going to help us do things in games and shooters that haven't been done before and will be tough for [the competition] to match."