Ben-DutkaWhen you have a new engine, you're a little more confident that you're keeping up with technology.
DICE has said several times that Battlefield 3 will push both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 to their limits, and the studio isn't frightened of new consoles, either. DICE executive producer Patrick Bach told CVG that the upcoming FPS would be one of the best-looking console games of the year, but he'll "prove it rather than talk about it." And furthermore, he claims their Frostbite 2.0 engine "could cope with a new generation:"
"I don't know what the big corporations are thinking but definitely we are desperate to move on into the next generation. I think Battlefield 3 will look like a next-generation game and all the technology we're building, the whole Frostbite 2 system – the animations, audio, everything – is trying to aim for a couple of years in the future, rather than looking at what we have today.
We are already there. If [Microsoft or Sony] were to release a new console tomorrow, the engine would scale onto that platform, because we have been looking at not only the PC technology today but also speculating what will happen tomorrow when it comes to these things. So everything from our streaming technologies [to] rendering technologies is scalable onto future platforms."
Planning ahead is always a good idea. If you have an outdated engine and your productions look outdated on current consoles, you can't possibly be in a good position for the next round of systems. But DICE appears to be in the opposite position…and we're all sorts of excited for Battlefield 3 .