‘It is a discussion about niche and mass market’
It was reassuring to hear that some people within DICE were interesting in working on Battlefield: Bad Company again. I quite like straight-faced Battlefield games — their multiplayer, anyway — but the Bad Company titles have such a wonderful personality to them. A quote from Patrick Bach about the series, however, doesn’t inspire much confidence.
Speaking to OXM, the executive producer of Battlefield 4 said “When we did the original Bad Company and the sequel, we got a lot of criticism. Why would I play this? It’s not a serious shooter, I don’t care about this. I want a serious shooter with a more hard-boiled angle. And we thought it was fun! We loved it, we thought it was a great game. The narrative was amazing and the characters were amazing.
“So it’s not that we’ve buried the crew, so to speak,” Bach explained. “But it is true that for some reason if you want to make a game for the masses, you need to be more neutral when it comes to things like humor, because humor is very personal. Some people love it, some people hate it.”
If we are lucky enough to get another Bad Company and its humor is cookie-cutter as a result of all this, I’ll be so very disappointed. Not every game has to be a mass-market game. I think DICE realizes this, but when there’s a limited amount of resources at your disposal and only so many projects can be taken on, that mass-market money will prove difficult to turn down.
Battlefield: Bad Company’s humour limited its appeal, says DICE [OXM]
