Military themes have always been integral to video gaming, almost a genre unto itself. But the
Call of Duty games -- particularly the record-selling
Modern Warfare -- have become so culturally pervasive that it's easy to see a challenge for other military IP.
But when it comes to Electronic Arts and DICE's
Battlefield: Bad Company 2, senior producer Patrick Bach doesn't feel like he's living in
Modern Warfare's shadow.
Although
Modern Warfare is "great", he says
in today's Gamasutra feature interview, "we don't really see ourselves that way. We would never want to make that game. It's not in our DNA to make a game like that."
The particular difference lies in
Battlefield's the approach to the single-player campaign, which Bach says is nearly opposite to
Modern Warfare's. "We want a game with personality," he asserts. "If you were in the war, how would you behave?"
He continues: "If I was in a war, if you were in a war, what would you say? What would you do? You would do unorthodox things because real people do real stuff, and we would never change that.
Bad Company is a game with personality. It's not something else."
The aim for personality makes
Bad Company what it is -- "if we tried to mimic other games, we would have to cut features away," adds Bach. "We have a wider array of things in our games than most other shooters. That's kind of what
Battlefield is about. But I don't think [their approach] is all negative. It's a different way of seeing things."
That's why, with
Bad Company 2, Bach says he's aiming to prove that guided dramatic experiences and player choice and freedom aren't mutually exclusive. "I think, hopefully, consumers will see that I can play this game in the way that it's "supposed" to be played, but I can also play it in a way that it's not supposed to be played, because that's the kind of system
Battlefield is. You can play it in your way."
The
full feature interview with Bach discusses how the philosophy behind the series has evolved as it has made the transition to consoles -- and how that transition has fundamentally shifted the way the developers think of the series as a whole.
