According to developer DICE, Battlefield 3 looked too much like its biggest rival.
EA Games executive vice president Patrick Soderlund talked about Battlefield 3 referring to Activision’s Call of Duty.
“One can advocate that even though Battlefield 3 was a gigantic success for us, I would say we may have looked a little bit too much at our competitor. And we’ve been criticized for that, especially on the single-player side. But when we started doing Battlefield 4, we said we were going to make the game we think is the right game for us and the consumers. Again, you can’t be arrogant about it. You have to be a little paranoid about what others are doing, but staying true to what you’re doing is the key.”
“Consumers and press have been telling us they want something different. Last time around, we didn’t really have that problem. If you think about PS2 to PS3 era, it was all about high-def gaming. You can now enjoy this in high-def. They were fine with the same game they could play on the PS2 because it looked so much better. You can’t do that anymore. The games on PS3 and 360 still look OK. It’s about what we do outside of graphics that will make a difference, I think.”
Soderlund said gamers want “a deep, engaging single-player campaign”, “multiplayer with seven to ten game modes”, “a huge variety of locations” as well as “some kind of service to support the game post-launch that is not ripping consumers off but actually adds value”.
“People choose one or maybe two games and they stick with those, and they want to be in that experience for a long time. So we as game creators need to make sure we fulfill their needs, to keep ahead of the curve.”
