The 'Trade Secret' To Building Battlefield 3

Author: by Staff

In a new feature interview, DICE executive producer Patrick Bach explains to Gamasutra the essential ingredient for keeping a large team functional and on target for a major release. "You could call it a trade secret -- but showing people what they have built is actually magic. Because there are so many people that focus so much on exactly what they're doing, that they never have time to look at it -- and especially look at it together with what everyone else is building," Bach told Gamasutra. "You have all these people that are experts, that the focus is so much on what they do, that they sometimes miss out on the whole picture. And that's what I'm looking at," said the executive producer. "Just showing the game to the team inspires the team to build a better game," said Bach. However, he warned, building a game via formal process inhibits creativity. "If you build things by a process, you will get the same thing that you got the last time you used that process. A process in itself doesn't build good stuff," he said. "So I don't use a process on inspiring people." You can show the game to the whole team, he said, but "It's showing one person what another person is doing. It's bringing the right people together in a room, talking about the problem, or talking about an opportunity to do something better. And then that spark turns into a big fire that creates a great feature." The full feature, in which Bach discusses in depth how the team developed Battlefield 3 -- which has been under development in one form or another at DICE since 2006 -- is live now on Gamasutra.