Patrick Liu on Battlefield 3

As the lead designer on Battlefield 1943, Patrick Liu is well versed in creating a fluid, perfectly balanced multiplayer gameplay. But as the producer on Battlefield 3, can he call on everything he's learned to create a truly memorable singleplayer campaign as well? We sat down wth Liu to discuss where Battlefield 3 sits in relation to other games in the series and what we can expect when its released later this year.

DICE's solo campaigns haven't lived up to their multiplayer counterparts - is Battlefield 3's extensive solo campaign the best the studio has made?
I really hope so, but you’re right. We’ve been learning lots - ever since the first Bad Company and then Mirror's Edge and then Bad Company 2. Every time we’ve been improving our single player experience and this time around you’re going to get a truly engaging story, I would say. The process of how we make multiplayer games is in our DNA, more or less. It almost comes automatically - how we go about testing the game modes, how we go about balancing the weapons. Those are all things we know how to do. But we haven’t previously had the process there for knowing how to test a single-player campaign, or how to test the AI. Now we know that, and I think that’s going to show in Battlefield 3.

Why split the solo and co-op campaigns?
For co-op you need specific mechanics or specific level design really to support cooperative gameplay. We could put two players in a single player map but it just doesn’t suit as well; it works, but we want something optimal for two players. That’s the main reason for making something different with the missions.

Battlefield 3 producer Patrick Liu

Bad Company’s best trick is getting total strangers to work together…
It’s all about incentivising the right behaviour. We don’t want to force team play, but we know in public games people don’t coordinate stuff in the same way. There are mechanics we can put in there to make people work together; one thing being just giving points for supportive actions. We added a new feature, for example, in the suppression effects. So if you are a Support class and you have your light-machine gun you can earn points just spraying bullets down an alley, emulating what real war is like. If someone shoots at you, you are going to get scared. Just having bullets whizzing round your head is going to affect your vision and your accuracy. So just by giving points for that action we will make people support teams in ways that we want.

The Support class replaces the Medic – are you concerned about upsetting the natural order there?
We’ve been rebalancing all classes overall, so the Assault class has the medic abilities now - the defibrillator, med-pack and so on. The Support class has become much more distinct with the suppressive feature. Recon is actually much more about doing reconnaissance rather than being a sniper - finding out information about the battlefield for the rest of the team and countermeasures against snipers. It’s mostly about a new philosophy we had when we started making Battlefield 3 - letting you play the way you want, customising classes. Customisation features to a much larger extent now, in terms of what you can do and what gadgets you pick and what kind of add-ons you have with your weapons. You can even customise your vehicles.

We want you to play the way you want. We want people to use as much of the arsenal as possible. I think probably the hardcore players will eventually find out what works best and during that journey they are going to explore a lot of different kinds of gadgets. Its more about us working with the UI, communicating what’s actually happening in the game and using the single player campaign to teach the player a couple of mechanics they can use in the multiplayer.

Does locking content away until later levels feed into that teaching process?
Yeah. We don’t want to present the whole arsenal from the beginning because that would be so confusing. It’s definitely the purpose of unlocking it slowly for players. I think that players who play it a lot will rank up to ten pretty quickly and you get quite a lot of stuff from the beginning.

What’s changed since the first Alpha test?
In the Alpha you could spot people through bushes and vegetation; you could basically just look at the markers and shoot that without actually seeing them, but that’s completely changed now. We’ll be blocking the markers with vegetation and bushes and stuff like that. That was a fundamental change of how the game works. The Alpha gave us a large amount of data - we were tracking telemetry and how many kills each weapon has and so on. Based on data we can do a lot of useful tweaks to the weapons.