In a recent interview with RPS, executive producer Patrick Bach has revealed Battlefield 3 will not allow players to shoot civilians citing reasons like they don't want to put players in a situation where they could take on a darker role in the game by simply not providing the moral choice and wouldn't like videos of mass civilian killings in BF3 surfacing on the internet. He said,
Games are where movies were in the 30s or 40s, when it went from a technical spectacle to ‘hey, wait a minute we can actually use this to tell something, be political’ and things like that. I think we are on the verge of seeing things like that.
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…In a game where it’s more authentic, when you have a gun in your hand and a child in front of you what would happen? Well the player would probably shoot that child.
Back also said that although it was the player's decision to shoot the child, the developers will be the one blamed for providing that feature in the first place. He later added,
That doesn’t mean that I don’t want people to feel that war is not good,… We are trying to do something that is more mature. Mature not being gore –some people confuse the two. That’s childish actually, to want more blood.
