What Everybody Ought to Know About Modding Battlefield 3

Many of you have probably seen the Battlefield 3 Screenshots floating around the net and they definitely look up to par with today’s technology. A lot more freedom is made available through increased use of indoor environments as well as destructible assets. With what seems to be the theme title, Battlefield: Bad Company or for us just BF3, the game will also once again open up the modding circuit for various willing teams. Although this is a great opportunity to work with a fresh engine within a successful franchise, there are a couple of items Mod Teams must be aware of before embarking on this long crusade.

Official Support

From our experiences as the most played Battlefield 2 mod (Project Reality), the support from the publisher (Electronic Arts) and the studio (DICE – Digital Illusions CE) has left a lot to be desired. We did receive some free BF2 copies and were very thankful to have been invited to the Mod Day in the UK, but these are all items which just barely touch the surface of the work we do. From updated mod tools to newsletter mentions, or infrastructure support, it’s all been non-existent during the life of BF2. Small efforts from the publisher such as a link from an article on the official page would have produced stunning results, but alas being the most played mod only gets us 2-3% of the online player population for BF2. So you can imagine what it’s like to be part of an average sized-mod. Unless you’re one of the top three, you’ll hardly have any player momentum which will ultimately lead to a flat player population soon after release.

 

Tough Competition

Modifications are a great way to refresh the experience after you become bored of the original game. Electronic Arts understands that and through the creation and distribution of their official expansion packs, they have created a financially viable product that continues to extend the life of their Battlefield releases. A player population for any game is always limited, which means that if you’re dominating the majority of players, someone’s losing out. Modifications do not have the marketing budget or general clout to compete against expansion packs, this in turn results in a much smaller pool of players which are willing to download and play 3^rd party modifications.

Knowledge Loss

As a side-effect of the above points, modders have found it increasingly harder to successfully release modifications on the Battlefield platform. This has lead to valuable leaders and coders pursuing their dreams with other games that are either more popular or offer increased support. With their departure they take along their extensive knowledge and experiences which could otherwise be of incredible help to teams looking to mod BF3. My first point, “Official Support”, is something that can be fixed almost overnight, however losing this sort of coding knowledge is devastating and can hardly be recovered from in the short term.

Conclusion

To round it up, if there was a metric that would show how much time in minutes/hours a mod team needs to invest in order to acquire a single consistent and dedicated player, you can safely assume that the effectiveness of this value for newer Battlefield titles will be below average given the above-mentioned factors. Also take into consideration that out of the whole franchise, BF2 currently occupies about 65-70% of the player base. The rest can be attributed to Battlefield 2142, Battlefield 1942 and believe it or not, some people still play Battlefield Vietnam. So not only are you against all odds to begin with, you need to realize that battlefield players are also diluted amongst the various releases. At the moment, Battlefield 2142 has even smaller online numbers than Team Fortress 2, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory or Call of Duty 4, so you don’t even have much to begin with. The bottom-line is, you don’t want to work on a small to medium sized modification just to end up having put more hours into it then people have played. This will most likely be the case for Battlefield 3 again, only the very large with existing coding knowledge and a history of releases will survive, new mods are better off trying their luck elsewhere. Modding aside, BF3 or Bad Company looks like it will be a lot of fun to play, see the links below for pre-ordering.

 

Pre-Order Battlefield: Bad Company:

Xbox 360 - Amazon US - UK

PS3 - Amazon US - UK

 

Note: Project Reality has made no announcement for moving to Battlefield 3 and it will be at least a couple of months more till this will be addressed within the team, so no need for speculation!

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