Battlefield Heroes' Changes Largely About Accessibility And Fun

DICE chats about the shift from teamwork to individuals' goals and the third-person camera.

Battlefield Heroes: Better than Team Fortress 2?

Work continues on Battlefield Heroes despite the recent closure of the game's beta, and producer Aleksander Grondal recently talked it up with Gamasutra. Grondal isn't a Battlefield developer veteran, instead having previously worked on Anarchy Online and Dreamfall at Funcom. As such, he brings a different mentality to the team working on Heroes, which he claims is a mixture of half newcomers to the series and half previous Battlefield developers.

The different mentality is largely an MMO mentality -- which is most immediately apparent in the game's new third-person camera which has been one of the main attention-getters ever since Heroes was first shown. Grondal said of the new view:

The main thing about the third person: It's about seeing your character. I don't think many people are interested in investing in their physical, visual appearance of the characters when they never can see them.

Seeing your character, and seeing that the new item that you have is actually on your character, adds a feeling of attachment to him, from a visual standpoint.

The other thing is, we tried to make this more accessible, and I think that seeing your character in the world next to a barrel makes him more connected to the world.

For new players, it might be more accessible, seeing your character -- if I run up to something, and suddenly it stops in first-person, it's, "Oh! I need to look down; there's something there!" But when you're in third-person, you actually see a bit more of the world, and your character's relation to the world.

Initially there, were some concerns, with Heroes, that third-person was wrong for a Battlefield game, but I think that once you actually try to play around with it, it feels pretty much the same. Once you actually get the hang of it, it won't be such an issue anymore.

Another of the major changes to the game's formula is the focus on individual goals rather than previous Battlefield's focus on working as a team towards a singular goal. While the one current game mode in Heroes does involve capping points as a team and eliminating enemies, that's pushed towards the wayside by the mission system, which is ever so faintly reminiscent of Quake Wars. You now select goals before you start playing and then set out to accomplish them by the end of that game. Goals range from getting a certain number of kills on a particular class or running over a certain number of enemies. Grondal explained, "It's like, 'Why is this guy always trying to drive over people?' So I think that creates cool moments that aren't just getting the best kill-to-death ratio; I think it's about cool experiences."

Following the delay that was announced in November, Heroes is now expected to have a proper release in 2009. We'll see then if Electronic Arts' gamble will have been worth it.