[BF2 News] Battlefield 2 Interview: Lars Gustavsson

Winters

From EA.

Battlefield 2 Interview: Lars Gustavsson
The Battlefield Franchise is going on three years old now. With games like Battlefield 1942™ and Battlefield Vietnam™ behind them, the team is now working on what could very well be their most triumphant release, Battlefield 2™. Driving one of the production efforts for Battlefield 2 is gaming vet and lead designer Lars Gustavsson. Lars agreed to sit down with us for a quick interview to find out more about this highly anticipated game.

EAGAMES: Hi Lars, can you give us a bit of background on yourself and how you came to be the Lead Designer for Battlefield 2?

LARS: Hi! Well I started up as an artist at the DICE, Stockholm office, which at that time was a separate company called Refraction Games, and worked on Codename Eagle with my main focus on the levels. After that I went to be Lead Artist for Battlefield 1942 for a year before I became the Executive Producer which I remained until it shipped. Then I turned into Lead Designer and started planning for Battlefield 2 while I also was involved in Secret Weapons of WWII as a Producer from the Stockholm office (while the product was done at our Canadian office) giving advice from our previous experiences with Battlefield.

EAGAMES: Wow, you've been busy! What’s a typical day in the office for you? For example, what did you do yesterday?

LARS: Hmmm…yesterday… it was a busy day since it’s Milestone delivery today so a list of things that I did would look like this:

* Added adjustments to a number of design documents like Medic Design, Ammo Design.
* Worked on the design for tweaking of our game modes.
* Loads of meetings to ensure that we would get everything into the Milestone as promised.
* Planned for the next Milestone.
* Reviewed the progress in the PS2-version being done in Gothenburg.
* Had a team meeting to lay out the plan for the autumn.
* Reviewed the current status of our vegetation systems and how they are performing.

As you can see, no day looks like the previous and there are a million things to look into, that’s the beauty of this job.

EAGAMES: Let’s talk about Battlefield 2. How far along is the game and what has you most excited about it?

LARS: Battlefield 2 will ship during the spring of 2005, so while the whole team is working hard to get all the features and content in, things are coming together to shape the game that we set out make. I think that right now when we are testing, it’s all the new high-tech weapons that thrill me the most. But if I step back and look at it on a larger scale, it’s the improved teamplay with Squad and Commander that gives the gameplay a totally different feel. There’s nothing like having a good Squad that you lead into battle.

EAGAMES: How easy will it be for a Battlefield 1942 or Battlefield Vietnam player to jump into Battlefield 2 and play?

LARS: They say that you should never change a winning formula, but in our case we feel that there are still so many things that could take the Battlefield experience another step forward. If you have played any of the previous products there is no doubt that you will feel “at home” in Battlefield 2. We have tried to add additional layers of gameplay depth, instead of totally changing the experience. This means that you can play more or less as you did in Battlefield 1942 (with the addition of loads of new features like ducking in turrets, stabilized vehicle guns, new communication interface etc). But if you want to, you can go one step further and try a new game mode, join or even create a squad so that your gaming experience gradually grows until you sit there as the Commander to watch your troops conquer the world… Muhahaha!

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EAGAMES: What, to this point, has been the most difficult thing to overcome with the product?

LARS: Overall I would say that getting into the mode of managing a much larger team, while having to maintain a good production pace, has been most challenging, and we still learn new things every day. On a personal level it's having to decide what features to keep and what to cut. You go home from work sobbing since you had to cut your favorite “darling” feature, but in the end, it's cutting the right things that make a good game.

EAGAMES: Tough job... Can you talk to use about the "single player” component of the game? How does it differ from Battlefield 1942 and what type of new features is being brought to the table?

LARS: Our singleplayer team has gotten scaled up for Batttlefield 2 in order to give us a much more convincing A.I. We are still working with many of the features and the tweaking of the whole experience so I can't reveal too much here in this interview. But stay tuned and more information will come during the autumn.

EAGAMES: Ok, Lars, one last question, with so many FPS war games out there, why should people buy Battlefield 2?

LARS: I would say that even though there are more and more FPS games out there that have turned their focus away from dark tunnels and out into open worlds, Battlefield still rules the vehicle based FPS genre and we intend to make that gap even bigger with Battlefield 2. In the end we are just trying to make a game that we as gamers always wanted to play.

EAGAMES: Thanks, Lars. Let's talk again when we get closer to shipping the game!

Irish_Kamikaze

OMG! I can't wait.

Big Nelly

Sounds good alright!