In this episode of “Inside DICE”, Lead Designer Niklas Fegraeus talks about the inspiration for going indoors, and what possibilities and challenges this presented.
When designing the new “Close Quarters” DLC maps, developers quickly found that Rush, being a large and progressive mode that takes you on a journey from M-COM to M-COM, simply wouldn’t fit. So instead, they turned their attention to Conquest.
Watch an early test video recorded during a play test and judge the effect of all the new destruction for yourself.
Hi everyone. This is Niklas Fegraeus, Lead Designer on Battlefield 3: Close Quarters. Above is an early test video we recorded during a play test to judge the effect of our new destruction. But first things first:
In 2001, while making games for the Sega Dreamcast, I began a career as a clan player in Counter-Strike. This eventually became a semiprofessional part time job, as I got a sponsor, won several LAN tournaments and competed in the Cyber athlete Professional League.
Now, in 2012, my competitive mouse is put on the shelf, but I consider the experiences from those days invaluable to my role as game designer making Battlefield games.
Counter-Strike is a very tactical and precise art of close quarters shooting, so I can comfortably say I know a little about how those tight shooter experiences play, and how they should play.
Battlefield on the other hand, is a huge game in more ways than one. Even we developers sometimes have a hard time realizing its breadth. You can go from clearing a house of enemy soldiers through careful squad tactics to soaring through the sky in a jet fighter, frantically evading enemy anti-air weaponry, all in the same round.
I can still recall the thrill of that scale and freedom I had when I first tried the game. It was the BF1942 demo on Wake Island (before I joined the crew here at DICE) and I was raging over those damn fighter planes that kept dropping bombs on my head! However, rage and confusion turned to evil grin as I found the AA-guns and used them to good effect!
Three years later, I landed my dream job working at DICE on Battlefield 2! Having worked as Animator and Designer on Battlefield 2, it was especially satisfying to be Lead Designer on Battlefield 3: Back to Karkand and bring some of the most classic maps from Battlefield 2 into Battlefield 3.
When I finished up Back to Karkand, I already knew I needed to start on our next themed expansion pack for release in June. This time, I really wanted to expand Battlefield 3 and give players even more experiences to choose from. But I didn’t know how to approach it.
Then I remembered those nights at my sponsor’s Internet café, where I and my clan for hours on end practiced the best way to attack a well-defended room, using only a few grenades and the business end of our rifles.
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