DICE on the Attack Again: “Most Sandbox Games Are Boring”

Battlefield 3’s Executive Producer Patrick Bach has followed in the footsteps of his colleague Karl-Magnus Troedsson, but this time he’s not attacking competitors. Kind of. He declared to Edge that Battlefield 3 will not follow the sandbox style of previous Battlefield entries, namely Battlefield 2: Bad Company.

Bach says that DICE has gotten “pretty good” at making sandbox titles, but it’s not the only way to build a game. Plus, coupled with their new Frostbite 2.0 engine, the whole open-world idea has proven tough to implement because of the strain put on the game’s AI.

“I don’t see that as the only way of building games, because then we wouldn’t build campaigns at all,” Bach said about the sandbox development style. “In some cases they aren’t, but in most cases sandbox games are hardcore, boring, hard to get into and they are not very popular.”

It probably won’t matter, anyway. The flurry of Battlefield 3 trailers and screenshots released over the past few weeks have been astonishing, and almost certainly set the tone for some genre wars. It was only last month when DICE GM Karl-Magnus Troedsson sounded off at competitors, calling them lazy and ridiculing other games. “We want to tell a story with more drama curves. It’s not about pumping round after round for six hours,” he said.