Why EA moved from the military to police combat with Battlefield Hardline (interview)

Troedsson: We’re not going into specifics on the story, but what I can say is, Visceral has done a lot of single-player-focused games in the past. Even if it’s in a very bloody sci-fi setting, Dead Space has featured stories that are more personal, more built around characters. I hope you’ll agree, when we show the single-player, that they’ve added their flavor to the single-player campaign.

GamesBeat: Is this a good way to keep players happy without, say, overfeeding them? Call of Duty comes out every year, and now Battlefield comes out every year.

Troedsson: I get that question a lot, about annualizing the franchise. Yes, this game is coming out one year after the other one. We haven’t announced in any way that this is the strategy moving forward, though. What we have said, and what I was trying to get across in the press conference, is that if we have an idea for great Battlefield game and we have a team that wants to build it, we might build a game whenever. If we don’t, then we won’t release anything.

In this case, we had the team, we had the idea, and when we saw what they came up with, we said, “This needs to be built.” Naturally there’s a business element to this as well, but what I’m trying to get across is that first and foremost, it’s a focus on building on great games.

If people can get too much Battlefield, well—Let’s say that someone’s playing Battlefield 4 today and having a great time. They say, “There’s no way I’m buying Battlefield Hardline, because I won’t be done with Battlefield 4.” You know what? I’m happy with that as well. At least they’re still playing our game.

One thing I’ve been telling anyone who wants to listen here at E3 is that we’re dedicated to taking care of Battlefield 4, even after Hardline comes out. We’re going to move more from a serial way of looking at our games to a parallel one. We have teams all over the world now. We’ll keep taking care of Battlefield 4 and we’ll keep taking care of Hardline when that comes out. We’re happy as long as someone wants to play Battlefield. We want them to play the latest one, but if they don’t want to, they can keep on playing Battlefield 4. Naturally the post-launch content will be more focused on the latest game, but if a lot of people are still playing the old game, maybe we’ll do some more there as well.

GamesBeat: Omaha, was that a deliberately deceptive code name? It reminds me of Omaha Beach and World War II.

Troedsson: The teams always come up with different code names. Sometimes there’s a deep thought behind it. Sometimes they just had a few beers at the pub and dreamed it up.

GamesBeat: Do you feel like the server problems that Battlefield 4 had are understood at the point? Can you apply that knowledge? Or are these games still very difficult to keep up?

Troedsson: We acknowledge that we had certain challenges with Battlefield 4 when it launched. It wasn’t on the server side. It was more on the client side, just to be picky about it. That’s why we’ve been so dedicated, and still are, to taking care of Battlefield 4. We have people in Stockholm, L.A., Uppsala, and Redwood Shores as well helping out and taking care of this product. It’s the same way we’re going to take care of all our products. We’re dedicated to making sure people have a good experience.

One of the things that’s crucial is that we’re changing how we do things. One factor is very present here today at E3. We’re letting people into beta right now, which is very early for us. That is a direct change. We understand that we need to do things differently to make sure we have a stable launch of this game when it comes out. We’ll do more things like this going forward.

GamesBeat: What are some of the things that you can learn earlier on?

Troedsson: There are many different facets to the difficulty of launching something as huge as a Battlefield game. One of them is just communication. We need to talk to our players. We feel we want to get closer to our players.

That’s easy to say – people then ask, “How are you going to do it?” Well, we’re doing some of that in the background. We invite people to the studio to play the games under NDA. The other part is just getting the game out there, so people can get hands-on with the code and see how the client reacts, how the server reacts, how all the backend systems work. That’s more of the technical part, of course. But there’s a lot of different things. A lot of learning is coming out of the games we’ve done in the past, which we’re now applying to this game.

GamesBeat: It sounds like you need more and more analytics.

Troedsson: That’s been going on for some time. We have very advanced data collection going on in the background. We can track players and help them out if we see they’re having problems. If they reach out, we can help them out.

GamesBeat: Could you continue this after the game launches, monitoring how people are doing in the game and modifying it?

Troedsson: We need to do that. We need to know what’s going on. If someone calls in to our customer experience and they allow them to check out their account, our people can look in and see if they had problems. We’re going to do more of that in the future.

GamesBeat: This is your second crack at next-generation hardware. How are you able to improve that experience?

Troedsson: As with all game teams and all games and all code bases, the more you work on them, the more they mature. Making games for new technology platforms is always a big challenge. You always need to overcome a lot of unknowns.

Coming in with our second generation of next-gen games, if you want to call it that – I wonder when we’ll stop saying “next-gen,” by the way – is definitely going to be a different ride for us as game developers. We’re in a better baseline when we start out building a second generation.

GamesBeat: Is it still an easier process than the PlayStation 3 days?

Troedsson: I shouldn’t answer that. You should ask somebody who actually works hands-on with it on the teams. From what I hear, yes, absolutely. In everything from tools and pipelines to how the hardware is set up, people say it’s much easier.

GamesBeat: Will you make the cops and robbers more well-equipped, in order to make the military players happier? Can I break into a bank with a tank?

Troedsson: That was like, what was it, Kelly’s Heroes? But no. That’s part of the fiction. Part what’s interesting is that there won’t be tanks, per se, in the multiplayer. There might be heavy vehicles that you could consider the equivalent of a tank, but there won’t be the tank exactly. That’s what I think a lot of people are going to appreciate about the gear and the vehicles and the gadgets and the weapons in the multiplayer. It’s very specifically tied to this new fantasy that we’re putting together.

GamesBeat: Some people may like it. Some people may miss some things about the military Battlefields.

Troedsson: True. Some people may say, “No, I need to drive my Abrams tank.”

GamesBeat: Taking the criminals out with a fighter jet.

Troedsson: That’d be a bit of overkill. We could do military versus criminals, I guess? We’ll see. We have a tendency to do something crazy every now and again.

GamesBeat: In what way would you say you’re having fun with this new fiction?

Troedsson: One very specific way to look at it is when we introduce the new two new gadgets, the zipline and the grappling hook. When you talk about it like this, it might not sound like much, but when you play the game it’s a huge differentiator compared to something like Battlefield 4. It changes your minute to minute gameplay.

It starts with your question – how can we have fun with this? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could zipline in between skyscrapers? Sure, let’s do that.

GamesBeat: Do you have more vertical environments like that, maybe?

Troedsson: Definitely, at least in the urban maps. Not all the maps are going to be as urban as the one we’re showing here at E3. There will be other, more open, spaced-out maps as well.

We’re really excited about this game. We gave a sneak peek into Battlefront and the new Mirror’s Edge game as well. But there’s not that much to say about those. We’ll have more to come in the future.

GamesBeat: What’s it been like working with Andrew Wilson as CEO?

Troedsson: It’s great to have Andrew on board as our fearless leader for this company. He’s involved in what we’re doing, of course, as is Patrick Soderlund, my boss. They’re game-makers themselves, which is really cool. But it’s down to the game teams to get this together. Naturally we get feedback on all this stuff, but it’s down to them to get the games together. It’s down to the team, their vision, and what they want to build.