GamesBeat: So the Wii U is the one that just isn’t able to do it?
Troedsson: There are lots of different reasons why we won’t be releasing Battlefield 4 on the Wii U. The input control is definitely one of them. We’re making a shooter, which is very twitch-based. The controller needs to match up with that. In this case, we feel that it doesn’t really work on that platform.
GamesBeat: The competition this fall looks bigger than ever. How do you sell the consumer on Battlefield 4?
Troedsson: We’ve been building Battlefield games for so long now – over a decade. We’re very sure of ourselves as far as what the Battlefield formula is and what people like. That doesn’t mean we’re getting fat and happy, just sitting around and saying, “Crank out another one.” We challenge ourselves quite a bit. We took a look at Battlefield 3 when we started production on the new game and said, “That wasn’t good enough. That wasn’t up to standard. We need to fix that.” At the same time, we keep a close ear to the ground for what the community says out there. We decide which areas are the ones where we really need to drive quality and which areas we want to innovate and so on.
There are a lot of things coming in Battlefield 4. Some of them are on a very grand scale, feature-wise — things that people notice immediately, like the skyscraper coming down. There are a lot of other smaller-scale innovations, though, that we know are important for our core gamers. Small things like how you can sprint-swim now. It might sound silly, but for people who will invest hundreds of hours into this game, it’s important. We’re going to build the best game that we can. We’re going to put the appropriate amount of innovation into it that we believe is important. If we do that right, hopefully all these players will come and play the game.
GamesBeat: There’s so much tech and gadgetry in these modern-combat games now, they almost seem like science fiction.
Troedsson: The modern day used to be the future not long ago. If you start looking into what technology is doing today and what we’re going to be using tomorrow, it’s pretty advanced stuff.
GamesBeat: How do you manage a lot of this, with all the corporate directives? EA has had a lot of layoffs. You guys have been expanding. You expanded in L.A., [and] executive chairman Larry Probst has also signaled that operating costs are going to be stable throughout the year – they’re not going to go up during this transition to a new generation. It sounds like a hard thing to balance all around. You can’t hire too many people, but you need to work on next-gen. You need to move onto more platforms.
Troedsson: Naturally, there’s a need for more investment when you’re making games for new platforms. At the same time, he’s absolutely right when he’s talking about how we need to manage our costs. Battlefield is a great success, and EA is a very generous host to us when it comes to letting us build the games that we want to build. But at the same time, we know that at some point, when the teams get too big, it cuts into the traction that we have. So we try to stay top of it. We’re focused on building the best game we can but also on doing it as efficiently as possible.
GamesBeat: Has DICE really tripled its size because you’re doing three games right now?
Troedsson: We’re continuing to grow. We grew a lot last year in Stockholm. We’re going to continue growing there, and as you mentioned, we’re opening the studio in L.A. as well. We do this to be able to build the games that we’ve announced — all of them. Not only is it the games, but as you know, we have a long heritage of taking care of our products afterward as well, with a lot of expansions and updates coming out. We take this service very seriously. We need to continue growing so that we can build everything we have on our plate.
GamesBeat: Are you happy with the consoles as they’ve turned out now?
Troedsson: Well, they haven’t turned out yet. [Laughs] They’re not quite done, so I can’t answer that question.
GamesBeat: They seem like they’ve taken similar hardware but very different approaches with that hardware. Microsoft is talking about having three operating systems in there, and the cloud processing that can change over time as they upgrade their servers. Sony seems to believe in focusing just on games, using GDDR5 and all that. Do you detect any sort of difference at this point in their approaches?
Troedsson: It’s still early days. Our game isn’t done, and the consoles aren’t done either. The software for their consoles isn’t done. We don’t know everything that’s happening. People might think that we do, but we don’t know everything.
We approach the issue pretty agnostically. We can do that because we have Frostbite 3 in the background. We feel pretty safe thanks to that. The engine allows us to scale up and down and release on the various platforms with just the core platform that we built the game on. What we do with the game team is very much focused on building the game itself. Then, if the console manufacturers change their specs up or down, we can manage around that.