Thread: FragCast Interview with DICE

From here: http://www.fragcast.org/?p=608

Interesting read...

Patrick: This is a discussion we constantly have in the office. The whole misconception that we are removing stuff that worked perfectly, there are multiple reason why we are making changes to the game. The whole prone discussion is quite interesting, the whole thing is that is the wind has started to change for prone. People have started to see the benefit of not having prone in a game because it changes the pace of a game, I think. You can always argue that yes, it is better to have prone than not have prone. We, of course, are constantly monitoring the game to see if it works, to make sure in case we need to patch anything. We are not going to say what we are going to patch in the future, we are only talking about what we are going to do for the next patch. We will not make any changes until we see the game live, played with all game modes, all maps, on live servers. I am not trying to be an asshole by saying we won’t have prone, it is not that we won’t have prone. It is just that we, from our internal testing, that prone does not add to the gameplay. It changes the gameplay into something that is not beneficial to anyone. It is only beneficial for the person who is lying on a hill on the ground proning. It is better for everyone else.

Anders: The whole game is based on the fact that there is not prone, adding prone would be quite a huge design change. On the specific toggle crouch, I can’t say absolutely yes. We are looking into it, and we would like to have it patched in soon. But we just need to prioritize that with everything else we want to continue patching. That feedback from the beta for toggle crouch, we heard you and we are looking into it.

Trigger: We as players have to have some faith in what you guys as the developers do, and prone is a perfect example. I wasn’t sure about how I would feel about it. If you could prone, you could just camp. But crouching in one spot, really makes the game less campy.

Dreamgirl: I really do like the pace of the Battlefield series, and I kind of like the fact that not a lot of people can camp.

Patrick: That was kind of the idea. We still want people to behave as a recon. Sniping is still an important part to a Battlefield game, but camping and sniping is not the same thing. If you are sniping, you need to be on the move and clever on that if you shoot, someone will see you. You need to be clever on how you peek, how you move, and how you alternate. The importance of the Battlefield series is the fact that you cannot do the same thing over and over again.

Trigger: You added killcam, which caused another controversy, but another piece of feedback that also came from BF2 and BF1942 was the lack of active notification, when you kill someone you get a bit of registration. Are you guys planning on enacting more nofitication when someone gets killed, when you need more ammo. There are already some audio cues, but are you going to add cooldown bars for tank reloads, are you planning to add more visuals to the game and notifications for the player.

Patrick: This is based on the feedback when the game is actually out there, we are getting indications that this works perfectly or we want this or that. Right now with all the contradicting wishing of different things, we will definitely make sure we see all of the different indicators to see if something is wrong or not working correctly. We will act on anything that proves this to be a problem. On the topic of the killcam, we have a hardcore mode where you can toggle the killcam off or on. Server owners on the PC have the ability to change this, but those on the console can only toggle between hardcore or regular. On the PC there are more options to go about this, as we split hardcore into separate sections in order to the give the community, server owners, and the RSPs themselves more options to decide how much friendly fire, what elements of UI they want to keep on or off. You could also consider the PC Beta to be the most noob version of the game to exist. [Patrick leaves, Anders finishes the interview]

Originally Posted by FragRaptor

I'm listening to the podcast and right now he just mentioned vehicle stealing as a "Battlefield moment"

Which is a big kick to the face of stupid servers who rule on "no stealing enemy vehicles"

Bitches.

Dont you just love it when our rules and policies are vindicated by the developers?