14 DAY TRIAL // DICE, the developer behind the upcoming Battlefield 3 first-person shooter, has talked about the lack of mod tools in the PC version of the game, saying that the tough decision was taken because of several reasons, although they might be released at some point in time.
Battlefield 3 is shaping up to be one of the biggest shooters of the year, second only to just Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
Lately, however, news about the title haven't been too good, as the PC version isn't going to be available on Valve's Steam digital distribution service, nor will it have dedicated mod tools.
DICE general manager Karl-Magnus Troedsson talked about the last issue with AusGamers, and revealed the reasoning behind the decision to scrap mod tools at least from the initial version of Battlefield 3.
Basically, three large reasons were behind this, including the limited development resources of the studio, its constant strive for perfection, as well as the potential security risks.
"Well first and foremost, I will say that there’s been a lot of cool things coming out of the mod community for many years; I have a lot of respect for the people in the mod community. At the same time, as developers of a game of this magnitude -- I mean, it’s the biggest thing we’ve ever done -- we have to select what it is we’re going to spend our focus on. We cannot do everything; it’s basically like that."
"At DICE, we are very committed to quality and innovation when we do something. So if we do mod tools, we really want to do it right. It can’t just be some hack that we throw together and people have to reverse engineer it and do all these kinds of stuff. It needs to be a very proper tool that people can use and that’s not a small thing to do."
"There’s also a security risk behind all of this. It means that we need to open up our precious game and let people just tear around in it in whatever way. I would love to do this, but there’s a lot of things we need to consider in the background before we can make the decision if we want to do this."
Troedsson does admit that his studio heard its community, which eagerly demands mod tools for Battlefield 3, so they might still appear at a later time, if the launch of the game goes off smoothly.
"We have heard the community very loud and clear on this topic -- that they want mod tools. We are considering it, back in the studio. The game won’t ship with mod tools, but we have heard it. I’m not saying that we’re going to do it, I’m saying that we are thinking about it."