IGN and Gamasutra have posted up new articles today that talks with DICE development director Bjarne Rene about Battlefield Heroes. Check them out below:
Be sure to read the rest of these two articles to learn more about the development of BFH.
IGN
There's also the simple visual style of the game which, if you've seen it, is quite difficult to call unappealing. Battlefield fans will notice the game has shifted back to a third person perspective, something DICE's development director Bjarne Rene says allows for players to see the cosmetic changes to their character models as a result of their equipped items. Had the game been in first-person like other Battlefield titles, these details would have been hidden.
Rene spoke at Austin GDC 2008 about what it was like putting the game together and the various challenges of building up a game alongside a web platform. "It all comes down to money," said Rene, "average revenue per user. If we look at like Madden the boxed product, sixty dollars a year per user. If we look at the only place where [microtransactions] are really popular in the moment which is in Korea and Asia, the dollar figures are a lot different." A slide shown on a projection screen indicated it was about 3 to 6 dollars per user per year. "That meant some consequences for us. We needed to increase the number of users and we needed to cut costs. That basically drove all the decisions we had for Heroes." Read more...
Gamasutra
Rene has repeatedly encountered a cavalier attitude twaords the project. "How hard can it be?" they ask. "People know web stuff! It can't be that hard!" He responds, "Actually, it is."
His advice for those attempting a project like this, is to get people who understand the web. DICE hired a web development director, and a web producer. "Without those people, we would have never made it as far as we have," he says. He also recommends a web tech director, which DICE did not need to hire "because we had a team in DICE who were pretty strong." Read more...
There's also the simple visual style of the game which, if you've seen it, is quite difficult to call unappealing. Battlefield fans will notice the game has shifted back to a third person perspective, something DICE's development director Bjarne Rene says allows for players to see the cosmetic changes to their character models as a result of their equipped items. Had the game been in first-person like other Battlefield titles, these details would have been hidden.
Rene spoke at Austin GDC 2008 about what it was like putting the game together and the various challenges of building up a game alongside a web platform. "It all comes down to money," said Rene, "average revenue per user. If we look at like Madden the boxed product, sixty dollars a year per user. If we look at the only place where [microtransactions] are really popular in the moment which is in Korea and Asia, the dollar figures are a lot different." A slide shown on a projection screen indicated it was about 3 to 6 dollars per user per year. "That meant some consequences for us. We needed to increase the number of users and we needed to cut costs. That basically drove all the decisions we had for Heroes." Read more...
Gamasutra
Rene has repeatedly encountered a cavalier attitude twaords the project. "How hard can it be?" they ask. "People know web stuff! It can't be that hard!" He responds, "Actually, it is."
His advice for those attempting a project like this, is to get people who understand the web. DICE hired a web development director, and a web producer. "Without those people, we would have never made it as far as we have," he says. He also recommends a web tech director, which DICE did not need to hire "because we had a team in DICE who were pretty strong." Read more...
Be sure to read the rest of these two articles to learn more about the development of BFH.