With EA's Battlefield 3 reaching over 17 million units shipped, it seems its developers at DICE is now considered EA's "golden goose." So, does this mean the Swedish studio is stuck making Battlefield games for the foreseeable future? Not so, according to EA Games vice-president Patrick Soderlund.
In an interview with OXM, states that not everyone at DICE is working on "Battlefield things," and they want it that way so the studio won't just be a "Battlefield factory."
The DICE guys are roughly 300 people in the Stockholm studio; not all of them are working on Battlefield things, and that's intentional, because we don't want to become a Battlefield factory.
So, why isn't DICE a Battlefield factory just yet? It sure seems to have worked with Activision's Infinity Ward and Treyarch studios, right? Soderlund thinks that mandating the studio to just keep on chugging away at Battlefield games will make its employees leave.
The minute we start saying 'you're going to make a Battlefield game for the rest of your life', they're going to go some place else…So for them to make great Battlefield games there need to be other things for them to do as well. That's why we have people who move around quite a bit. And then obviously we have a boatload of people that just want to make Battlefield because they love it.
I admit, that's not a bad mantra to have when it comes to the studio that holds your highest-selling game ever. I'd rather they do this than force DICE to milk the franchise for all its worth and lose its quality in the process, no?
While it's easy to think that DICE might be working on Mirror's Edge 2, I assume that aside from Battlefield 4, which is expected to hit next year, the studio also has a Battlefield game brewing for next-gen platforms. Hopefully that will mean the console versions of its shooter will be closer to its PC counterpart both in graphic fidelity and in scope.
Battlefield 3's latest expansion, which is titled Aftermath, is expected to hit PS3s next week (November 27) for Battlefield 3 Premium users, while Xbox 360 and PC BF3 Premium members will get it a week after on December 4.
What game or genre would you want DICE to work on aside from Battlefield? Would a horror game from them be any good? Seeing as their audio design is topnotch, I wouldn't put it past them to make a good one.
