DICE executive producer Patrick Bach wants another Battlefield: Bad Company game. He really does. It’s a project that’s very close to the hearts and minds of both him and the rest of his team, but sometimes, game development isn’t about whatever seems like the most fun project to create at the time. With a major publisher like EA funding the projects, it’s crucial to make sure that whatever’s being developed is financially sound, and not something that will only satisfy a certain niche.
"It is a discussion about niche and mass market, I think," Bach told OXM. "If you make your product more niche, you'll get more happy fans, but that audience will be smaller – some people won't care, some people will love it.
"When we did the original Bad Company and the sequel, we got a lot of criticism. ‘Why would I play this? It's not a serious shooter, I don't care about this. I want a serious shooter with a more hard-boiled angle.’ And we thought it was fun! We loved it; we thought it was a great game. The narrative was amazing and the characters were amazing.”
That doesn’t mean the series is dead and gone, though. It’ll just have to be delivered with the right marketing at the right time.
"So, it's not that we've buried the crew, so to speak," he continued. "But it is true that for some reason if you want to make a game for the masses, you need to be more neutral when it comes to things like humor, because humor is very personal. Some people love it, some people hate it."
