DICE Clarifies Battlefield 3 Console, PC Differences

The PC version of the military shooter Battlefield 3 will come with a huge number of difference to its console counterparts on the PS3 and Xbox 360. DICE revealed that the largest difference between versions is that the PC will have support for up to 64 players, on dedicated servers, while the console will be constrained to a 24-player limit.

"The biggest difference between the PC and console version of Battlefield 3 is that we have 64 players on PC and 24 players maximum on console," said DICE's Patrick Bach.

"The rest is more or less the same: we use the same engine, the same technology, the same animation, the same lighting system," he continued. "Our aim is to give the player the exact same experience and not try to dumb down the console version."

Bach said that while the team attempted to scale the player limit of the console version up to 64, it required sacrifices to the game that they simply weren't willing to make. The developer would have had to tone down the destructibility and reduce the map sizes to make the game feasible to play on the console.

"Everything is a compromise," he said. "It's not that we're evil of stupid. We didn't choose to have more players—we would love to do 64 players on console but then we would have to cut away so much; people would get very upset that it looked worse, played worse, and wasn't as fun as the PC version. We would never do that because the fun is always more important."

The maps in the console version are, for a fact, smaller than they are on the PC, but it's only because DICE decided to compact them into smaller areas to retain the game's pace.

"When we say they are smaller, it's not that we cut them in half. But we tried to compact them slightly to keep the action up. if you compare it to Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the maps weren't really small on console. We actually had huge maps even for console."

Battlefield 3 is set for an October 25 release on the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.