DICE GM Says Competitors Are “Getting Lazy”

Battlefield 3 developer DICE has sounded the alarms in a recent interview with Official PlayStation Magazine. General Manager Karl-Magnus Troedsson had choice words for Battlefield’s many competitors, including the juggernaut Call of Duty series.

“Our competitors are getting lazy,” he said. “They’re using the same engine, the same recipe for building a game. At some point you need to take that leap. I haven’t seen them take that leap since a long time ago. We are doing that now; they had better watch out. We are coming for them.”

Troedsson is of course referring to the recurring Modern Warfare, while DICE is sitting pretty with an all-new title. When the first Fault Line episode was unveiled at GDC, running fresh off the finely tuned Frostbite engine, reception was excellent and quickly had people wondering what this signaled for the next Battlefield iteration and how everyone else would keep up with it.

The next Call of Duty game will not be running on a new engine, but it will probably still be enough to give it the nod over every other title in 2011. Robert Bowling defended the need for a new engine, replying to a user on Twitter in a rather blunt fashion: “That would be counter productive. An engine takes years and years to develop and get right.” That’s exactly what DICE has done with Frostbite 2.0, and for now, they’re in the driver’s seat. I’m thinking E3 will be pretty pivotal for the FPS genre this year.

“Our competitors keep building very, very high tempo games,” Troedsson added. “We want to tell a story with more drama curves. It’s not about pumping round after round for six hours.”