INTERVIEW KARL-MAGNUS TROEDSSON
Battlefield Hardline is coming out this October
refreshing that we dare to go to E3 and show work in progress rather than perfectly pre-rendered trailers, which is what a lot of other companies have done, which no-one mentioned. We showed movies that are not about a finished game; it’s about the people that made it, their passion, and a status report about where we are right now. We want to get closer to the players. Everyone works so fricking hard to create great games and that’s because we are very passionate about it. We want people to know that.
What inspired you to do these early concept videos? There are several things, from allowing people to buy half- finished games in alpha state and allowing them to be part of the development to the crowd-funding of games where people can pay to be part of the process. We absolutely take cues
from gamers: what they can relate to and how they want to communicate with us. They want us to be more open and we will be.
So you want gamers to get involved in making the games? I strongly believe that you can’t design by committee. You can
www.mcvuk.com
focus group-test a good idea to death if you’re not careful. It can’t be a democracy where everyone can be part of the designing – especially if it’s a new IP. But if you have a long-lasting franchise like Battlefield, gamers know what it is and its core values, and if you create something like this you can listen to core fans and get very valid input as to which direction you should take it.
How have you found making next-gen triple-A games? No development of a game of this size is a breeze. There could be 250 people involved in doing this and that doesn’t count all of the support people in EA that are needed to get a game to market. So it’s a huge undertaking. Every platform transition we go through is a challenge from that perspective, but when you have taken the plunge and once you have gotten over the first generation of your games on a new platform, everything becomes easier. It showed at E3 this year. Some people are getting into the groove on the new platforms.
Have you had to change the studio’s structure at all? No. The Battlefield franchise has
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grown and we have a sister studio that is helping us build a game which is cool. DICE has grown. We have a studio in LA. We built that in order to get the right capacity for the Star Wars game. From that perspective there’s been changes going on. One thing that has changed a bit, but isn’t brand new, is that we strongly believe that studios like DICE should not work on one franchise. That’s been an idea in DICE way back before we started building the first Mirror’s Edge. The theory is this: if you bring a group of talented people and have them working on a big franchise they can do that for several iterations. But at some point these creative people are going to be like ‘I’ve worked on three Battlefield games, it would be great to try something else’. We don’t want them to leave DICE for something like that. We would rather they say ‘Can I go work on Mirror’s Edge or Star Wars?’ – Yes, we can sort that for you. Or if you want to you can move to LA and get a little bit more sun. We want to create studios where people can see themselves working for ten or 15 years or even longer.
July 18th 2014
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