DICE on Battlefield 3 PC as lead platform: "people don't understand that the PC is more powerful"
DICE general manager Karl Magnus Troedsson has been talking to Eurogamer about why the PC is the lead platform for Battlefield 3. Console players have been concerned about the fact that the footage and screenshots of Battlefield 3 have mostly come from the PC version so far.
"I have to say that this discussion is a bit over the top because people don't understand that the PC is more powerful than a console - they haven't looked under the hood and in detail," says Troedsson.
"We always want to show a platform that we have chosen to be our lead platform. In this case we did choose PC as the lead platform; it's the one that has been, mostly, driving development forward. That is the reason why we have spearheaded a lot of the key assets with this as well."
Troedsson tells Eurogamer that DICE uses PC as the lead platform in order to create the "unique" features that are only possible with the extra power of the PC, 64 player maps being the main one. Troedsson says that large scale battles are "not possible" on consoles because of demanding requirements "like destruction, like scale, vehicles and this kind of thing."
You can get a sense of one of those 64 player battles from the Battlefield 3 Caspian Border trailer , filmed on a PC of course.
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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.