DICE has revealed details on Battlefield 3’s singleplayer mode along with the length in hours. Lead Designer Goldfarb said “I would say it’s a pretty decent length, it’s not Skyrim but it’s not three hours or anything like that.”, when comparing it to Modern Warfare 2 which is estimated at six hours, he said “I’d say it was probably slightly more than that. Based on our play-times it’s probably more than that, but it’s not twice as long. But, again, we’ll see. When you play it on hard difficulty, it’ll take a lot more time.
It’s all about making sure the experience is as awesome as possible, I’d rather have six hours of awesome than 12 hours of “meh”.”, rightly called. I can clear Final Fantasy X in about 25 hours and love it, but I’ve clocked over 100 on XII and my overall opinion is that it’s above average but not great.
On some details I dug up, even though it’s common for FPS games to recycle or adapt single-player stages to multiplayer, Battlefield 3 does no such thing, having maps for single-player, multiplayer, and co-op mode. “They’re completely different.” to put it into David’s words. Singleplayer has its own story, multiplayer has its own story and works in the context of singleplayer but also breaks free of it. “We do all share the same context, but with MP we look forward into the future, to what might happen, and so we give people a bit more of a fantasy. I guess you could say that MP might be where SP leaves off in some cases. The reasoning is to give people enough latitude as they can have to design the maps.”
There will be some limits to what players can do in Battlefield 3 which may upset several players. One cited remark being shooting civilians. Patrick Bach, the executive producer said “If you put the player in front of a choice where they can do good things or bad things, they will do bad things, go dark side, because people think it’s cool to be naughty, they won’t be caught.”
Because of immature people in this world who cannot tell the difference between fiction and reality, DICE would get their heads bitten off if players could kill defenseless civilians and children. “We would be the ones to be blamed. We have to build our experiences so we don’t put the player in experiences where they can do bad things.” The end result of this is that civilian casualties wont be possible in Battlefield 3 despite being a perfectly acceptable target in many other games, with Patrick saying he doesn’t “want to see videos on the internet where people shoot civilians.”
I personally disagree strongly with such an outlook, believing that everybody in a game should be a fair target. Women, children, animals, unarmed civilians, all of them. Games like Jagged Alliance allowed you to murder children and civilians, but it would rip your reputation to shreds very quickly and if you had militia troops, all 30 of them would turn against you.
alucidzombie
i think it was a ballsy decision to not be able to shoot civilians and i support it entirely. someone has to try to uphold morals in society, and this lends an air of responsibility to the game industry that we don’t often see.
Chris Hernandez
Morality in games is a bit different than real life morality, though considering the context I would agree that the inability to kill civilians is totally admirable.
Rian Quenlin
I prefer it when I’m given the choice to kill them freely, but there are consequences associated with it. Remember that PSX Star Wars game? If you killed innocents and believe me there were a lot of innocents, then important NPCs would refuse to speak to you meaning you can’t progress through the level.