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MW3 and BF3 Developers Ignore Rivalry
In kind of a nice turn of events, representatives from the development teams of both Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3—arguably the Coke and Pepsi of FPS games these days—have both publicly said they don’t put much stock in the rivalry between the two game franchises. Over the last few months, corporate spokespeople at Activision and EA (the publishers of MW3 and BF3, respectively) have been shooting their mouths off about the competition between the two game series.
But in two separate instances, members of the development teams working on each of the new titles have said that they don’t put much stock in the rivalry between the two games.
“I don’t particularly like all the stuff that’s going on—but I tune it out,” said Glen Schofield, the founder of Sledgehammer Games, which is co-developing Modern Warfare 3. The comments were made in an article on Eurogamer today, in which Schofield goes on to discuss his attitude toward the supposed conflict between the two franchises.
“My competition has been Modern Warfare 2,” Schofield is quoted as saying. “There’s definitely a mutual respect at the development level…The guys at DICE are great, they’ve made great games over the years and I think they have the same respect for us. We need to make a better game for the fans.”
On the other side of the FPS fence, a post on Strategy Informer from Friday offers the perspective of Patrick Liu, producer of Battlefield 3 at developer DICE. Liu expressed sentiments in the same vein of Schofield’s comments. When asked about the “war of words” between EA and Activision, Liu said that the developers just keep their heads down and make the best game possible:
“Yeah, it [the cross-company rivalry] can get kind of tiring—well, it DOES get tiring at some point. The only thing we can do to handle it is to focus on our own game, focus on making the best game we possibly can. We put pretty high bars for ourselves, and the main pressure comes from within the team.”
Here we had two perfect opportunities for the developers of the FPS mega-games of the holiday season to escalate the war of words—and they both opted to just shut that shit down and talk up their own games. This kind of instance really highlights the fact that most of the smack-talk between companies (and fanboys) is all pretty much just smoke. Some people like Coke. Some people like Pepsi. Some people think cucumbers taste better pickled. Where it counts, the people who are actually making the game aren’t really concerned with the manufactured rivalry between the franchises.
Now be nice to each other while you shoot video game guns at strangers.
Via Eurogamer and Strategy Informer
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Nice to know. I’m most looking forward to BF3, but CoD looks a pretty good game too, gotta give ‘em to both I guess
I’ve never actually heard of a developer making a game with the specific goal of beating out another developer. The day that happens… well hopefully I’ll be dead before that ever happens.
Its good to know that developers just care about making the best product unlike their superiors who down talk their competition.
I look forward to these two games. In all honestly, whoever can afford both should play both. At the end of the day, they’re both very good games, just that some people may preference one over the other.
Well this is totally unsurprising,the devs are on crunch time right now,they have no time to think about each other’s games,geez.
This is good to hear. The whole “rivalry” thing is just silly.
Rivalry is what company’s have when they do the same thing and they sell to the same markets. To say there is no rivalry is silly. There is and its a huge one! Perhaps not between the game designers themselves. The company heads have huge incentives to knock the wheels out of there competitors particularly of all places in the FPS genre and the mmo genre. Nothing to really worry about for the consumers though now is it? Thats only because monopoly’s in the gaming world is very much a ridiculous idea given the nature of the industry.
I cant wait to play both games i love FPS games and many games from other genres as well (Minecraft)
making a game just for the purpose to beat another out is dumb, thats not their goal, their goal is to make a great game that sells huge so they can get paid and pay all their employees and fund future projects. beating call of duty is more of a fame dream than a wealth dream. EA and DICE have made plenty of money.
when time spitters 4 comes out may as well say bye to cod
Actually really curious to see what they would do to the Timesplitters multiplayer, it wasn’t exactly balanced but DAMN was it fun.
I hope they leave it that way, not sure how it’d work on a large online scale though. I can just see everyone running around as Monkey with dual P90s. I imagine if they had a restricted starting weapon choice and just put the weapons around the map Halo style it’d be pretty fair and so much fun, damn I love that game. (I actually think this is how the multiplayer was, my memory isn’t serving me too well.)