Activision: Fans right to be sceptical of console BF3

Sledgehammer Games’ GM and co-founder Glen Schofield has said gamers looking forward to playing Battlefield 3 on consoles should be a “little scared” at this point in time.

Schofield was being quizzed by Ausgamers at E3 on Battlefield 3’s Frostbite 2.0 engine, in particular its superiority over the engine powering Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

“We really re-vamped this engine,” said Schofield. “We put a whole new audio system in and it is as competitive as anybody out there. You can go out and name your engine and call it whatever you want, right. You know, I’ve done that before; I’ve seen that trick and the bottom line is, this game will run at 60 frames a second. Not sure any of our competitors will.

“Not sure I’ve seen any of our competitors on the console especially running at 60 frames a second and I’d be a little scared at this point – in June – if I was looking forward to a particular game that wasn’t on the console and running at 60. And I think 60 is our competitive edge and you just don’t throw that away.”

And for this reason, Activision has taken an incremental approach to improving the Call of Duty game engine, rather than implementing a complete overhaul.

“What you do is you build upon it, right? And build and build and build. And we build new tools that make us more efficient,” explained Schofield. “We built brand new tools so that we could put more stuff in. That’s why, you’ll see a level and you’ll come out of the water; so we’ve built all this water. You’ve got New York in the background; you’ve got explosions going on; you’ve got skyscrapers, then you have this huge submarine coming out of the water. We’re able to put so much on the screen because it’s an engine and it’s well-known, it’s very clean and we’re able to easily upgrade it.”

Schofield concluded: “So I don’t know what the future holds for the engine. But you don’t ship an engine, you ship a game.”

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will be released worldwide on November 8, a few weeks following the September 28 launch of Battlefield 3.

Since Schofield’s comments, Battlefield 3 has been seen running on PS3 and while it did feature a noticeable drop in visual fidelity over the PC version, remained hugely impressive looking. The Xbox 360 version is yet to be publicly displayed.

That said, a pretty game doesn’t make a good game and the 60fps gameplay of Call of Duty gives it a very strong advantage over rival titles.