14 DAY TRIAL // Electronic Arts boss John Riccitiello is adamant that Battlefield 3, his company's newest upcoming first-person shooter is going to be the best product of the genre this year.
Battlefield 3 has just received its first concrete details a few weeks ago, and EA has already begun hyping it up as being one of the most technologically advanced shooters of the year, largely due to the all-new Frostbite 2 engine used by the development team at DICE.
John Riccitiello is extremely confident in this, and spoke about EA's love affair with shooters during the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference.
During his speech, the EA exec admitted that his company lost the shooter crown when transitioning to the next generation devices.
"I've made no excuse for the reality that I want market leadership in the first-person shooter game business," he said. "In many ways I feel that we created the first mass market first-person shooter with Medal of Honor and unfortunately with the transition to the PS3 era we lost that. We're after it now.
"There's a great thing about an annual franchise, whether it's us or our competition; when you've got that annual franchise it's a meal ticket, it can generate a great deal of income.
"One of the problems with an annual franchise is you don't take the time to reengineer the underlying codebase so that it's as 'next-generation' as it can be," he added.
Battlefield 3 aims at fixing this, and, like the development team at DICE admitted, it's going to be a next-generation game for current generation devices.
"We think there's a window of opportunity here. We've been investing for three years to build Battlefield 3. I think it will stand up as the best product in the industry this year... and we're going dead at 'em."
The Frostbite 2 is, in EA's words, an "incredible technology that takes animation, destruction, lighting, scale and audio to new heights."
Battlefield 3 is set to appear ahead of the 2011 winter holiday season and will no doubt compete with Activision's newest Call of Duty release.