Battlefield 3 Needs to Deliver Change While Remaining Familiar

The biggest challenge for the developers of first person shooters is to create games that manage to be familiar to players while changing enough to make them feel like they are exploring new ground.

Speaking to Gamasutra Patrick Bach, who is the executive producer working on Battlefield 3, stated, “Everyone wants unique. But when they get it, they don’t like it, because it’s different.”

He added, “I’m a consumer, so I know what I want. I want the same, but different. It’s the classic ‘same, same but different’ mentality. It needs to be similar to what I had, but it needs to be unique at the same time. And the question is only, ‘what is the same?’ and ‘what is unique?’ How daring do you need to go?”

The developer believes that doing market research serves little purpose because players are unable to define how they want to see both consistency with past experiences they liked and innovation that impresses them with how different it is.

Bach believes that Battlefield 3 is different from other titles in the modern first person shooter space because it has much more physicality and establishes a clear “presence in the world” for the player and for his enemies.

To create them DICE has put together a whole new game engine, Frostbite 2, which is capable of delivering impressive visuals while also making players feel like they are part of a real experience.

Battlefield 3 has impressed since it was initially shown to players at trade events and, after a rather disappointing beta, DICE has promised that all issues have been solved for the release code.

Battlefield 3 is now available in North America on the PC, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 and in three days it will also reach European shores.

It's big rival, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, arrives everywhere in the world on November 8.