Battlefield developer DICE has today said that they “should be slapped” over the learning difficulty and unlock system off Battlefield 3.
Battlefield 4 creative director Lars Gustavsson revealed his feelings about their previous game in an interview with VG247, and he revealed the numerous ways they have improved the series for Battlefield 4.
You should check out the full interview over at VG247, but I’ve highlighted some of the things that I feel are most telling below:
“We’ve reworked menus to give you a much better understanding of how you customise – comparisons when you add attachments that give you a better understanding, just like racing games. We have reworked the spawn menu, just the concept of spawning in; in most games you just end up somewhere random, but here we have a choice. We have to try to show that in a much more visual way. So we’ve done rigorous testing on that one. Game mode movies and so on. We’ve definitely done a lot to smooth the learning curve.”
“We shipped Battlefield 3, which we should be slapped for, with probably the worst set ups ever”
“As a pilot, you had to fly your plane and only kill other planes with your cannons. You didn’t have any counter-measures; you didn’t have any missiles. And that’s basically for the best of the best pilots; that’s what they should do to show their skills. [As a beginner], you should have counter-measures, you should have heat-seeking missiles to give you a smooth ride into the game and then from there on you should customise.
“So that’s what we’ve tried to do; the full set-ups are supposed to be quite easy to learn and to master, and from there you can start unlocking things and seeing what your preferred setup is. So, a lot of learning from Battlefield 3 have gone into making the game.”
I think it’s great that DICE are learning from previous mistakes in the series. They have identified that the system was very punishing for new people and that was negatively affecting game sales. It seems they have realized that they can still have the skill based gameplay but help out new players by giving them greater/easier tools to start with. The better players will still be at the top of the leaderboards and it will give first timers a bit of a chance. It’s always nice to hear that developers are listening and learning from past games instead of just blindly developing the next but making it “bigger and better”. From these quotes I can already tell that I will enjoy Battlefield 4 much more than BF3.
Let me know in the comments below what you think about Gustavsson’s remarks and whether or not this has convinced you to pickup BF4 this October.
