Thread: Planet Battlefield: What's Next for DICE?

1UP: How did the idea to do Battlefield 1943 as a downloadable title come about?

LG: Actually, the whole project started from having resources in between the projects. I mean, nowadays we're around 260 people, which means we have a number of projects that we're juggling, and we try to sync them up so that when one is wrapping up, the other one is wrapping down. But there will always be some slack in between where you have people between projects, and that's how it all started. Seeing the Frostbite engine that we built for Bad Company and onwards, we just saw the huge potential of getting to revisit the sands of Iwo Jima and so on.
We saw huge potential, [so] we put a small team to see what we could get out of it just as an experiment to start with. And I think we left them alone for quite some time, which allowed them to go crazy and really create something that surprised us all. So in the end, it seemed [like] we had to check that everything was doable, and that we could downsize it enough to get it up there and all of that. So it started as an experiment, and I would still see it as an experiment since it's the first time we've done something like that. But my honest take is that it's a great game and I have high hopes that people who like Battlefield will like that game.

1UP: You said in the presentation that it's a "slice of a full game." Can we expect to see additional slices further down the line?

LG: As I said, it's an experiment. [Laughs] So we will follow up and see. I can't say yes and I can't say no -- we'll see how well it's going to be received.

1UP: If it does do well, do you think that DICE would pursue additional shorter-form games like that in the future?

LG: If it would be successful and we would keep on doing it, it wouldn't change our focus on the ways we were making games before. That will still continue. But this is the perfect way for us to deliver different types of games or new types of games for a cheap sum of money for the customer. And for us, it's a way us to kind of challenge people and really make good use of our resources. If people like it, then I think I'm going to be a happy man, and we'll keep on doing it.

I don't like the comment about how they built frostbite for bad company and onward... means bf3 will probably use that engine... I just hope they don't pare it down to 24 players there too or I'm totally done with DICE.