14 DAY TRIAL // Ben Cousins, one of the top men at DICE, has stated that his company's big online shooter, which also happens to be basically free, Battlefield Heroes, will not benefit from the big release which AAA titles are getting in today's videogame industry. He says the very nature of the game makes it easy to draw players in while also creating new features. In one sense, the game is never "done" as a boxed game is "done". Battlefield Heroes, much like World of Warcraft and other MMOs, is a perpetual work in progress.
He says that his company is going to be slowly expanding the closed beta that is already running so that "every hardcore gamer in the world will probably be able to get a key if they want to". In essence, what he is saying is that just like Gmail relied on an invitation system to get bigger without coming out with a bang, the game will grow slowly, with an emphasis of developing the infrastructure and the services that are necessary to provide a good playing experience to the gamers interested in it.
The DICE boss launched into a comparison with Battlefield: Bad Company, another game which is big online, saying that the size of its current community is the target for the Battlefield Heroes community in the coming months.
Battlefield Heroes is designed to be free-to-play, with the money coming in from ads and, maybe, from selling some in-game items. The game has a pretty cartoonish look, designed to attract casual players and the system requirements are low enough to guarantee that all but the lowest end computers will be able to run the game. The idea is to create a game medium where both veteran players and novices are able to enjoy an interesting online shooter.