Just because Battlefield 4 has been announced doesn’t mean that Battlefield 3 won’t be supported.
When it comes to gaming it’s very common for critically acclaimed games to get sequels, but that still didn’t make it any less surprising when EA slipped a Battlefield 4 announcement into the trailer for Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Considering that Battlefield 3 isn’t even a year old yet, the announcement has raised concerns among the franchise’s fans that support for the older game will be phased out to support the new. DICE executive producer Patrick Bach understands the concern, but reminded fans that Battlefield‘s history alone should prove that DICE supports its games long after release.
“We heard that before with Battlefield 2,” Bach told Eurogamer. “It was like, oh, you stopped supporting games! No, we’re working like hell, but we haven’t announced it yet. We have now announced we are putting a lot of effort into supporting Battlefield 3 and still we get reactions like this. I think it’s just sad. We are dedicated to supporting Battlefield 3. People seem to be worried for all the wrong reasons.”
According to Bach, developing new games immediately after launch is business as usual, not a sign that the developer and publishing are moving on. “People tend to forget we built three other Battlefield games in between Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 3,” Bach said, referring to the Heroes and Bad Company installments. “That’s a natural reaction. People then think we won’t support Battlefield 3, even though we have the Premium version, people know we’re working on future expansion packs and we’ve been very open in explaining what we are doing.”
This certainly isn’t the first game announcement in the industry to get this kind of attention. When Valve announced that Left 4 Dead 2 would be released almost exactly a year after the original, a very vocal boycott group was formed in protest. While one could argue that L4D2 received more support than L4D in content updates, the argument is a little harder to make for Battlefield 3, whose Premium Edition will contain an additional 20 levels over those in the base game.
“Battlefield doesn’t go away,” Bach said. “We’re starting to understand this after seven years. Oh yeah, people tend to buy Battlefield for quite some time.”
Source: Eurogamer
Published: Aug 24, 2012 08:03 pm