14 DAY TRIAL // Video-game publisher Electronic Arts has announced that it currently does not plan to release any official mod tools for its upcoming first-person shooter Battlefield 3, which is being developed by DICE.
Patrick Söderlund, who is a vice president working at the European division of Electronic Arts, has told GameStar that, “As of now, we are not going to make any modding tools. If you look at the Frostbite engine, and how complex it is, it’s going to be very difficult for people to mod the game, because of the nature of the set up of levels, of the destruction and all those things… it’s quite tricky.”
He added, “So we think it’s going to be too big of a challenge for people to make a mod.”
It seems that the biggest problem is making it easy for modders to work with the destructible terrain features that are one of the biggest features of Frostbite 2.
The lack of official modding tools will likely not stop determined PC-based players who are interested in changing certain aspects of Battlefield 3 and unofficial tools will probably be released quickly after the October launch date.
But with no support coming officially from DICE, it will be tougher for modders to create coherent experiences and the long-term success of the game on the PC might be affected.
Of course, there's still time for the Battlefield community to get vocal and announce that official modding tools will be launched sometime after launch.
Electronic Arts has been positioning Battlefield 3 as the main challenger for the first-person shooter crown to the Call of Duty series from Activision, which sees the launch of Modern Warfare 3 this fall.
The game is powered by a new engine, Frostbite 2, and the realism it can deliver has impressed a lot of gamers.
I got some hands-on time with the multiplayer side of the game at E3 2011.