DICE responds to Battlefield annualization rumors

“We can’t build a game every year.”

DICE responded to rumors regarding annualization of the Battlefield franchise, telling VideoGamer.com that the company “can’t build a game every year”.

Furthermore, Battlefield 4′s executive producer Patrick Bach said during GamesCom last week that:

“I think the core Battlefield idea that we’re working on at DICE is… We can’t build a game at DICE every year”, replying to whether a Battlefield game would be released in 2014 to cover Medal of Honor’s gap.

“You saw with Battlefield 3, for instance, it’s not that there’s not an urge for more Battlefield. You mentioned Premium – we [had] 18 months worth of Battlefield and people want more things during that time. Now it’s been almost two years and people feel like they are continuously playing – we still have huge amounts of players playing Battlefield 3. So I think in general, people apparently want Battlefield all year round.”

In 2013, EA announced that Medal of Honor would be taken out of the shooter rotation, leaving 2014′s strong October/November months devoid of it, and making room for a new title. Star Wars: Battlefront is due out in summer 2015, while Titanfall will come out in spring 2014.

So, maybe DICE could release expansions instead of new games?

“Maybe it [could]. You’re touching upon something that we’ve actually started noticing as well. Battlefield is almost turning into a first-person shooter/vehicular combat platform where people want more things but put into the same core mechanic.

So I don’t know. Maybe it’s a really smart thing to do; maybe it’s the completely wrong thing to do. We can see that some games are actually doing it already, like MMOs. You have some free-to-play games [that] continue on the same platform. So I think it’s more about the audience and getting all the ducks in a row, so to speak.

Doing things like we’re doing after Battlefield 4, you couldn’t do that within [Battlefield 3]. It’s not the same game. Some of it might feel and look the same, but if you look under the hood – which people don’t do, but if you would do that – there are so many things that have changed. Just the fact that the customisation layer is so much deeper, is based on a complete rewrite of the core handling of assets from the ground-up. Which of course, is something you could build on for the future, but also something that in our crazy hands, we’d probably come up with new things that are incompatible with what we’re doing today.

We’re trying to push the boundaries, we’re not trying to, like, ‘Oh, Battlefield will sell itself. Let’s make something half-ass.’ So it’s a challenge.”

November 1 will see Battlefield 4′s release on Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC, while Playstation 4 and Xbox One versions will come at the consoles’ launch.