Battlefield 3 Is “Grounded In Authenticity”

Battlefield 3 lead designer David Goldfarb talks up Battlefield 3’s plausibility and assures us it’s going to be more Dark Knight than Adam West. So no shark repellent spray DLC then.

Talking about Bad Company 1 and 2 in EA’s Battlefield 3 ad-journal thingie the Battleblog, Goldfard wrote “They were great fun, they had their own theme, they were light-hearted. In essence, they were adventure flicks. Indiana Jones with an assault rifle.” Battlfield 3 is apparently keeping the assault rifles but dropping the Indiana Jones part.

“With Battlefield 3, we knew we had to really divorce ourselves from those characters and those themes.” He goes on. ” We had to go somewhere else and do something different and push a different set of buttons. We’re telling a war story now, and that means it needs to feel credible, it needs to feel contemporary, and it needs to connect with things and emotions that we have never really tried or had the means to properly connect to before.”

To that end, the game will feature authentic military-themed gibberish – Goldfarb claims Dice ” going closer to the slang of the modern warrior.” It also won’t be all shooting, all the time. “We are mixing tension building passages with the chaos of suddenly erupting firefights,” he says. That sounds promising. A lot of modern shooters, especially those of the “gritty and (supposedly) realistic” variety, tend to hurl the player from one firefight to the next with no regard for pacing or tension, blasting them with a constant stream of stabbing and shooting so hectic it begins to lose all coherence and meaning.

The story in Battlefield 3’s single player campaign will be a non-linear affair, with the player dumped into the boots of numerous different gun-toting characters around the globe Whether they’ll be actual characters, or simply a gun duct taped to a camera with a name badge, remains to be seen. Regardless, Goldfarb promises that the game will ask the characters, and by extension the player, difficult questions. In particular, “What would you really do for your country?” My guess is that the answer may be “shoot a whole lot of people.”

While the trailer Goldfarb released with his post (top right there, kiddos, or take a closer look here) is light on character development, it doesn’t scrimp on atmosphere. It’s dark, oppressive, frantic and actually quite frightening in its own way.

“Tone is vibe. It’s style. It’s a feeling. It’s why The Dark Knight is awesome and the 60s Batman is not, the difference between Saving Private Ryan and Hogan’s Heroes,” writes Goldfarb. “It’s one of those things which, if you do it right, affects everything. More than anything else in Battlefield 3’s single player story, this is where we set out to do something different.”

Battlefield 3 is due October 25th for 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.