KarlMagnusTroedsson
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The best 'Battlefield' is finally playable on Xbox One
The pinnacle of the Battlefield series is at long last backward compatible on Xbox One. Of course, I'm talking about Battlefield Bad Company 2, which came out way back in 2010. There have been four games in the franchise since (Battlefield 3, 4, Hardline and last year's Battlefield 1), but the developers at DICE still haven't gone back to the Bad Company well.
Can Electronic Arts make a 'Battlefield' game that works?
I stopped playing Battlefield this year. Why did I stop playing the massively popular first-person shooter? Because it never works when it launches. For those who haven't experienced the promise and defeat of a Battlefield launch, it goes as such: A multiplayer beta precedes the launch, often by a slim few months, which is chalked up to server testing. Players enjoy the beta, which is sometimes buggy, but often stable enough. And hey, it's a beta. The game launches; millions of players splash into online servers; and it becomes unplayable for days, weeks and often months at a time. Battlefield games come out every year. This was not always the case, but in the past four years, we've seen three Battlefield games. Zero of those three worked at launch (I actually wrote about this back when Battlefield 3 came out, at our sister site Joystiq). Battlefield 4 launched last October; it just started operating consistently. At E3 2014, EA announced this year's entry in the series: Battlefield Hardline. It's with this tremendous amount of baggage that I approached our interview with Battlefield studio head Karl Magnus Troedsson.
Talking Frostbite, Battlefield 4 and Mirror's Edge 2 with EA DICE's big boss (video)
EA's DICE studio is the motor that powers several of gaming's most popular franchises. Need for Speed and Battlefield are just two of the enormous series that DICE's Frostbite engine is behind, and EA's pledged the engine's support to many more of its titles. It's with these things in mind that we met up with DICE General Manager Karl Magnus-Troedsson at E3 2013, where we discussed Frostbite 3, Frostbite Go, Battlefield 4 and even a little Mirror's Edge 2 for good measure. Troedsson had a headline spot during EA's E3 stage briefing, where he helped to narrate a live demo of a 64-player match. Beyond a showcase for Battlefield 4, the presentation was perhaps the most stunning demonstration to date of the DICE studio's Frostbite engine and the power it's able to wield when harnessed by skilled developers. And for the first time ever on next-gen consoles, Battlefield's console versions (at least the next-gen ones) are identical with that of the PC one. Massive online battles and incredible in-game events -- such as a Shanghai skyscraper being brought toppling down, all while naval scraps and helicopter dogfights are taking place -- are possible on both PC and the next-gen boxes from Microsoft and Sony. We discuss all that and more with Troedsson in the video we've dropped just below the break.
