DICE have worked hard on the single player campaign in Battlefield 4, ”opening up the encounters” to give players freedom to tackle obstacles, instead of being forced into particular routes.
Battlefield 3’s campaign was criticised for not really embracing some of the more prominent features of the Battlefield series, such as letting us decide what to do.
”The future will tell, but where we come from we do single player because we want to and we’ve learned a lot while doing it, and I think we have a great story to tell,” Lars Gustavsson told CVG. ”As a team and a studio we’ve learned so much from crossbreeding between single player and multiplayer. The whole concept of Levolution in many ways comes from single player, and our exploring how we could bring drama and interaction to the world.”
He’s proud of what they accomplished with Battlefield 3’s single player, but acknowledges its faults.
”We got a lot of feedback from the Battlefield 3 singleplayer, and based on what we intended to deliver the team did a great job, but given that it’s a Battlefield product there were a lot of expectations that it would be more open.”
Gustavsson said they promised to ”unify the product more, so we infused a lot of the things from multiplayer - from being able to use your squad - into multiplayer, so now you can use them in single player to engage enemies. First and foremost we’re opening up the encounters more to give you the freedom to decide how to tackle them, whereas in Battlefield 3 it was more ‘pick up that one and kill that one’, which I can agree is not the most exciting way.”
”Players want to feel smart doing what they’re doing.”
Battlefield 4 releases on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 October 29th. Xbox One and PS4 at launch.
