They ”didn’t choose not to have more” as they’d love 64 players online for all versions, but they’d have to ”cut away so much” from Xbox 360 and PS3.
”The biggest difference between the PC and console version of Battlefield 3 is that we have 64 players on PC and 24 players maximum on console,” said Patrick Bach.
”The rest is more or less the same: we use the same engine, the same technology, the same animation system, the same lighting system. Our aim is to give the player the exact same experience and not try to dumb down the console version.”
”If you want the same quality of game, I would say it’s really, really hard,” continued the DICE boss. They tried to get more players in the console versions but ”then you need to scale down all the graphics, scale down all the destructibility, and sometimes you need to scale down all the map sizes. Everything is a compromise on: where do you cut?”
”There are games that do less, and there are games that do more. We don’t see games that have more players as a better experience, so having more players per se doesn’t automatically give you a better experience,” he went on.
”Everything is a compromise. It’s not that we’re evil or stupid. We didn’t choose not to have more players - we would love to do 64 players on console but then we would have to cut away so much; people would get very upset that it looked worse, played worse and wasn’t as fun as the PC version. We would never do that because the fun is always more important.”
Another potential sacrifice for a higher head count would be vehicles. They might of had to ”take away vehicles because there’s a lot of data that has to go through the network and the CPUs. If you had more vehicles, that would mean less players and vice versa.”
Are PC and console maps the same? ”More or less. When we say they are smaller, it’s not that we have cut them in half. But we tried to compact them slightly to keep the action up. If you compare it to Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the maps weren’t really small on console.”
”We actually had huge maps even for console. We have the same kind of angle on it right now. We want to create the same experience for PC as for consoles,” said Bach.
Battlefield 3 releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC late October. Right now DICE is preparing to run a closed alpha test for the game which is by invitation only and not beta related. Are you picking up Battlefield 3 for console or PC, videogamer?
