Battlefield 3‘s single-player campaign will be much more tightly-scripted than that of the Bad Company sub-series, which was much more open, developer DICE has revealed. According to executive producer Patrick Bach, most sandbox games are “hardcore, boring, hard to get into and they are not very popular,” which is why the team’s chosen to this route.
“I don’t see it as an absolute goal for all games to be sandbox games,” Bach told Edge during a recent interview. “We’ve been building sandbox games for quite some time and we’ve got pretty good at it, but I don’t see that as the only way of building games, because then we wouldn’t build campaigns at all.
“In some cases they aren’t, but in most cases sandbox games are hardcore, boring, hard to get into and they are not very popular.”
Bach went on to speak about the franchise’s signature destructible environments, noting its challenges when developing around AI.
“Just the fact that the environment can change dynamically creates a huge challenge for us when it comes to AI,” he explains. “[It] puts a lot of challenges to our AI code when it comes to finding new cover, reacting to the fact that it has disappeared, moving and flanking based on the new situation.”
For more, check out issue E227 of Edge Magazine, on newsstands April 12.