Call of Duty developers stressed, Battlefield developers ashamed – PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
The latest rivalry in the Interactive Entertainment Industry is nearing its climax, with both Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 3 less than 40 days away from their respective release dates. With a chunk of the development
almost done, the respective development teams have come out and expressed just how the entire process was working on each game.
Sledgehammer, the studio behind Modern Warfare 3, opted to go with the word ‘stressful’ to define how their development process went. The words came directly from the mouth of Glen Schofield, the former head of EA Visceral Games.
His exact words were, “But there are days when you think: ‘Holy sh*t, this is a monster’. There is a lot of stress.” While that quote on its own did not do enough to define exactly what the cause of the stress was, the next bit of the quote did, “It’s not
crippling, but the thing that worries me most is people going: ‘Look, there’s the guy who brought down Call of Duty!’ That scares the c**p out of me.”
What one can take from that is that the development team behind Call of Duty did suffer from the weight of expectations surrounding the latest iteration of the worldwide phenomenon.
However, Schofield was behind the development of Dead Space and if that is anything to go by, the game is in the right hands if one is looking for quality and polish. On the other hand, the developers of Battlefield feel ashamed of their game. It would be
dishonest to not clear up a few things here.
The first is that the game the developers at DICE are ashamed of is not Battlefield 3, but rather Battlefield: Bad Company 2; and secondly, they were ashamed because they felt they could have done more and not because they thought it was a pile of trash
(which it was not by any stretch of imagination).
It seems the team at DICE set really high standards for themselves, something which ultimately Bad Company 2 did not live up to, despite being hailed as one of the best multiplayer experiences during its time.
Patrick Bach, the executive producer at DICE, confessed, “I don’t know why, but I always feel ashamed about the games I’m involved in making. I can’t even bring myself to start up Battlefield Bad Company 2, our last game, because I feel so ashamed. I know
it is a great product but still I only see the things we could have done better.”
We can almost sense the subtle hints in that statement which suggest that the developer is hinting that Battlefield 3 will be better than Bad Company 2 at the very least.
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