Battlefield 3

Daniel Matros, Global Battlefield Community Manager at DICE, threw a few tweets out this morning making some pretty optimistic comments regarding Battlefield 3. Can you really please everyone with one game? Daniel seems to think so...

"Harcdcore [sic] audience, casual audience, tactical audience, esport audience, fanboys, gaming networks.. everyone is going to be happy!"

With endless comments of how Call Of Duty dismisses the hardcore to focus on 12-year-ols in between their collecting of Panini Official Premier League Stickers (kids still do that, right?), DICE are turning up the heat claiming to appeal to not only the hardcore and casual audience, but pretty much everyone else.

"Adding depth into the game without making it overly difficult. Next kill instead of overkill ya know.."

Of course, to do that, balance will have to be perfect. You've got to be actively, desperately hunting down that new headshot rather than sitting up in your helicopter, mindlessly raining hell for 30 seconds.

What will be interesting to see is quite how they implement 'balance'. There's the obvious, age old method of just making sure no one player has a significant edge on the battlefield, but this can often lead to stalemate and boredom as everyone steals a quick kill, dies, and repeats.

Another, increasingly common style, is the use of the 'Team Fortress 2' method. Everything is always unbalanced, but this constantly shifts from team to team, keeping it new and exciting. One team might be owning with a slew of Heavy + Medic combos, so the other team then switches to a surplus of Spies, backstabbing all the Heavy troops, meaning those players turn to Pyros and smoke out the Spies, who spawn as Heavies, and so on. It's an exhilarating ride as you're always either on top, or being crushed, adding a flow to the gameplay which just draws you in for 'one more go'. Of course, get this wrong, and you'll have a very angry community on your hands.

Modern Warfare 2 often swung too far out of sync, with helicopters and harriers swiping you down as your respawned, leading to more killstreaks for your rival. It was a cycle that was difficult to get out of, and infuriated many players. Can Battlefield 3, with a possible 64 players and fully destructible buildings, ever hope to be perfectly balanced?