The competition ”brings the best out” of talent, he remarks. EA ”made a dent” with Battlefield 3 in Call of Duty’s FPS armour, and now it’s about ”a balanced portfolio”.
The Battlefield franchise isn’t annualised like Call of Duty, which works both for and against it in pursuit of the FPS crown they once wore with the original Medal of Honor.
Ironically it was the ‘breathe of fresh air’ that Call of Duty proposed when it released that handed the throne over to Activision’s Infinity Ward. Now that Call of Duty has begun to exhibit the same saturation that Medal of Honor did… times could be changing back the other way? DICE has a strong following with Battlefield.
”Competition is good,” Soderlund told MCV. “It brings the best out of people. If there was only Battlefield or only Call of Duty, then the development teams might have been a little bit more content. We don’t look at them necessarily and mimic what they do.” Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty: Ghosts release just four days apart this November.
”But we think about them. Maybe they weren’t thinking about us much when we made Battlefield 3, but I can tell you, they are thinking about us now. They need too. We made a dent in the FPS market and we took share from them. And I am not going to give up until I’m No.1 and I am going to make sure I’m No.1.”
“We are spending a tonne of money on this, our teams are killing themselves every year to make great games. I want to give our consumers the best I can. We will strive to be No.1. If I said: ‘No.5 is probably fine,’ it’s hard for people to rally behind that message,” he continued. ”But I wouldn’t say we could be No.1 if I didn’t think we could. I think I have the right team, the right product and the right strategy to get there.”
EA aren’t putting all their betting chips on Battlefield 4 as they’ve also got Respawn’s Titanfall. ”We have other games now. We have Titanfall, which we didn’t have when we had Medal of Honor. To me it is about a balanced portfolio.” EA has retired the Medal of Honor franchise after it failed to make a comeback.
Battlefield 4 releases on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 October 29th in the US, November 1st in EU.
