Actually they’ll offer ”probably more,” says executive producer Patrick Bach. They don’t know anything the new consoles ”would do differently” than PC.
”If anyone would build a new console today, that would be the result,” said Patrick Bach, referring to the PC version of Battlefield 3 as the ‘next-gen console’ level of quality. ”At least. Probably more, because it’s classic PC technology.”
The PC and home consoles will be closely aligned moving forward, believes DICE.
”We know everything about multi-threading now. We know everything about multi-graphics card solutions now. If someone built a console where the specs are that or more, we have the technology to do something. We could port the game to that console tomorrow.”
The developer designed their Frostbite Engine 2 to ‘future proof’ the Swedish studio for when the next-gen wave arrives. Battlefield 3 is the first full game to take full advantage of it with EA Black Box’s Need for Speed: The Run incorporating its technology too.
”There’s nothing we know about now that the new consoles would do differently, rather do more,” executive producer Bach explained. ”More processors. Bigger memory pools. Everything we have and more.”
”The big step is to go from single processor to multi-processor. Single graphics card to multi-graphics card. To multi-memory. Do you do multiple memory pools or one memory pool? Since we can handle both consoles now, we control that as well. We have all the streaming systems. We have whatever we might need for the future.”
”I would be surprised if there were something we couldn’t do with the next-generation of consoles,” added the Battlefield 3 top brass. Bach doesn’t see the new console generation as being super expensive because of this leap in hardware. ”Remember when the 360 and PS3 came out they weren’t as expensive as an expensive PC,” he explained.
”If you optimise things and say, instead of building 10,000 of these graphics cards we want 50 million of these graphics cards, it’s like, wait a minute, we can push the price down to zero. Then you get a cheaper console. So if you take this PC technology and just mass produce it for consoles you will get a much lower price.”
”There’s some stuff in here that’s truly next-gen,” Bach insisted. ”A lot of tech stuff, Frostbite 2. Rendering, the lighting, destruction, to me I’m mesmerised no one else has been trying to do it.” Top line PCs offer a taste of next-gen consoles.
”I’m looking forward to see if other games can start to do some of the things we’re doing. We have some really cool stuff.” Battlefield 3 releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC October 25th in the US, 28th in Europe. Will the next Xbox and PlayStation deliver PC quality?