Battlefield 3:"No plans for BF3 mod tools"

[SubZero.it]

This is kind of meh

Frostbite 3 engine is just too much

Battlefield fans that were hopeful that DICE would provide mod tools for its upcoming release of Battlefield 3 are going to be sad to learn that, at least for right now, it isn’t in the cards. In an interview with German site GameStar EA Europe, VP Patrick Solderlund claims that the Frostbite 3 engine would “present too much of a challenge for people.”

The complexity of the destructible environments makes things “tricky” at best for those without extensive experience. In the end, we believe that the situation might change; and while DICE is apparently open to the possibility in the future, currently it does not see people taking on the challenge of making mods for Battlefield 3.

Based on past experience, the mod community for Battlefield 3 has always been quite strong, and we suspect even if DICE does not supply the mod tools you will see modders bringing out mods for Battlefield 3. We do think, however, without DICE providing any tools it will take longer.

We will just have to see if enough Battlefield fans on the PC can get DICE to change its mind about the mod tools for the PC version of Battlefield 3.

Watch the German GameStar interview after the break.

Source

[Vicey]

That reason is a load of rubbish. Frostbite would not be too difficult for people to learn to use. I can't believe he even said that because it's just so far from reality it's laughable.

[Hornet331]

Yeah pretty much, its just an excuse to sell mods by themself. If a current generation engine is to hard to work with, they failed miserably. Also I doubt the NFS team has more experience with Frostbite then any other modder out there. Yet they can "mod" frostbite and build NFS:TR

[naokaji]

We all know the real reason, they just want to sell more DLC...

[G.Foyle]

Most obvious explanation is the one about the DLCs, but they could also be genuinely concerned about low-quality community content. For games with all tools available like UT3 or CS:S there's a real flood of crap made by people who don't even wish to understand and learn how to make good custom content for given engine. Although Left4Dead and TF2 have gained more than they've lost because of public availability of tools, so it shouldn't be a big concern to DICE. Especially that they seem to be proud of how they support the community.

[Hornet331]

Why should crap mods be a concern for them?

If it is crap no one is going to dl and play it anyway. HL1/2 had a bazillion mods, but only very few gained fame and whre popular, hell even some of them where jumpboards for the modders to become professionals.

[zalbard]

We all know the real reason, they just want to sell more DLC...

Agreed.

In the end, we believe that the situation might change; and while DICE is apparently open to the possibility in the future, currently it does not see people taking on the challenge of making mods for Battlefield 3.

We will just have to see if enough Battlefield fans on the PC can get DICE to change its mind about the mod tools for the PC version of Battlefield 3.

It better change, then. Glad I haven't pre-ordered to give them enough confidence to pull off this kind of crap.

[El Mano]

LOL, so many lies from DICE.
In the end we'll receive another console port.
I don't trust them.

[screwtech02]

LOL, so many lies from DICE.
In the end we'll receive another console port.
I don't trust them.

I agree, how may times has the PC community heard "The game engine is too complicated for the end user to use"..... Honestly WTF???? Most noticibly, it's too fukin hard for them to use also, look @ all the "stuck" on rocks/sticks/ect with BFBC2.....

I can smell the "port" coming.....

[crash5s]

Most obvious explanation is the one about the DLCs, but they could also be genuinely concerned about low-quality community content. For games with all tools available like UT3 or CS:S there's a real flood of crap made by people who don't even wish to understand and learn how to make good custom content for given engine. Although Left4Dead and TF2 have gained more than they've lost because of public availability of tools, so it shouldn't be a big concern to DICE. Especially that they seem to be proud of how they support the community.

This x1000. I played a lot of UT2004 and a few of the maps made by the community were good, an even rarer few good for competitive play. However there was a whole ton of junk made and you were constantly cleaning things out. The UTcomp mod was great for competitive play, but a ton of others were junk. Not to mention that the flood of full game mods that came out split the community into various groups and factions and actually made it harder to get a unified community as each mod sucked more people into other directions.

Wanting to sell DLC and wanting to control quality aren't mutually exclusive items either.

[True Brit]

god please no, not another 'this is too complicated for you' console port, this is my last hope, after Crysis 2 i dont think i can take anymore, its been relentless, call of duty - console ops, mass x-box effect 2 and so on.

like most of you, i have a gaming rig sitting here worth hundreds of pounds, if not a £1000+ all to play what?

i swear im going to get a Gameboy and overclock it, and play pong all night.

[Nightcover]

This is by no means new news, they said this on their blog a long time ago (no source just take my word for it). And it's a load of rubbish, if what they say is true, that it is too complicated then we will never see any kind of modding tools from them because it's only going to get even more complicated. If the engine is so complicated as they say then they failed.

[bamtan2]

Source

I hope everyone finds this insulting. Modders have created some of the most important games in history, and they have mastered games with no modding tools, and they have been hired to make commercial games huge successes.

There is one reason BF3 won't have mod tools. Only one. EA cannot profit from mod tools.

I hope everyone understands this. It doesn't matter what DICE has said or done in the past. DICE is owned by EA now.

[crash5s]

god please no, not another 'this is too complicated for you' console port, this is my last hope, after Crysis 2 i dont think i can take anymore, its been relentless, call of duty - console ops, mass x-box effect 2 and so on.

like most of you, i have a gaming rig sitting here worth hundreds of pounds, if not a £1000+ all to play what?

i swear im going to get a Gameboy and overclock it, and play pong all night.

The same games that companies design to run on computers that most people have which cost pennies

If they feel there is enough money to be made or it's worth their time to release modding tools I'm sure they will.

Blaming consoles here is rather silly. The PC gaming landscape isn't what it once was so things are going to change. Companies will adapt to make up for that and survive in it.

[Eastcoasthandle]

Wait a sec didn't they get their start by modding?

[screwtech02]

In "theory", but all of those folks dont work for EA anymore I bet.....

[Pontos]

Blaming consoles here is rather silly. The PC gaming landscape isn't what it once was so things are going to change. Companies will adapt to make up for that and survive in it.

The PC gaming landscape changed because the console landscape changed, and with that the industry in general.

Some developers found out a way to introduce genres that for years were unthinkable outside the K&M scheme and it ended up being a success (Overall quality or experience lost by using an inadequate peripheral aside), making the console market even more desirable.

Developing games went from a few millions to several millions dollars of cost, and the amount of users/gamers grew up noticeably with almost all of them on consoles and not the PC.
The gaming industry became a very profitable market, and as such way too many games are made with that mindset.

About a third and sometimes less of the overall sales of multiplatform games are on the PC, so when you have the other two thirds of the sales coming from two almost identical platforms it's not hard to realize why putting more money and man hours to make the other version be more adequate to its standards is not really worth (Increased graphic capabilities and the possibility to customize them, decent mouse controls, or even revert gameplay element limitations based on the other platforms like map size and design, amount of weapons you can carry, and max players in MP modes).

When the owner of the biggest publisher in the industry has the personal opinion that games suck or are a waste of time (Good ol' Bobby), then you know things are not going the right way.

EDIT: A good example on why the console landscape changed massively and the industry focus with it? The PSN outage: Console gaming used to be about awesome single player or 2+ controllers multiplayer games on the same TV. Now PSN goes down for a month and people freak out saying they can't play anything and a few even sell their consoles because of that.
PSN comes back and the most played game according to tracking statistics is CoD Blops.
That's not how I remember the Playstation world...

[crash5s]

That's not really true.

Regardless of the existence of consoles are not, the PC landscape moved to lower power and less powerful devices, see laptops.

The development costs of games were strictly to do with better graphics, physics, art, what have you. Consoles being there don't have much of an effect on it at all other than giving them a chance to make money.

Even without consoles, desktop PC's that can be gaming are getting crushed by laptops, ultra thin nettops, and tablets.

Be thankful for consoles, because if it was "just desktops woot PC" no AAA games would be worth making at all.

If the powerful desktop PC was still a viable platform to most consumers, they wouldn't need consoles to make AAA titles worth it. But since laptops and other items have stabbed a steak through it's heart, that's where we are. We should be glad for consoles for preventing things from being worse.

[zanzabar]

the main reason for laptops to gain popularity was the lack of need to upgrade to play games or use rich media since those got hindered by consoles, and consoles took out the need to upgrade game engines so there is little need to upgrade pc componants now since the 3-4 year life span will see no change in requirements to play games. once this last gen of consoles came was the same time that portable devices and cheap desktops started to soar so i dont see how they could not be linked. the computer and internet has always been for games and :banana::banana::banana::banana: and people upgrade when they cannot do both.


on bf3, they said previously that they were keeping the vip style system so all pc players should have all map content, so i dont see why they would need to lock down the servers like with bc2, so i dont see why they would need to restrict modding since the only 2 viable reasons is 1) its a full on console port and they did not see that over 70% of active players at any time are on the pc and that over half of the activated vip codes were on the pc or 2) they need the server side drm.


edit- the only thing that this will hurt is making it so u cannot have competative play anymore, unless the game comes with client demos and proper round options (nothign ever did except source and old ut.) i also dont see how ea cannot see that without support from the pc community the game will not sell, if we dont get a good game then mw3 will destroy bf3 in sales since bf dose not have the name recognition for the consolers they have to be told what to buy (just like with cod4)

[EagleRock]

so shall we trash our gaming pc's now for consoles?!! because pc became too complicated lol!!

[Warboy]

Assault their twitter page.....

http://twitter.com/#!/Battlefield

[STEvil]

Looks like more 1942/BF2 in my future....

[Decami]

ok, this sux, and is retarded and i understand the stupidity of this.....but can we stop with the, "we are gonna get a console port" statement, theres been numerous quotes from the development team stating that more focus is being set on the pc version of this game.

calm down, lets not turn a road bomb into a nuclear explosion. I agree with you all, but just because they are questionable about mod tools about this game doesnt mean we are gonna be shipped a console port, crap of a game.

[Syn.]

Looks like more 1942/BF2 in my future....

Really? If you are still playing 1942/BF2 i don't think the fact that BF3 is not going to have any Mod tools is going to impact you in anyway. Come on, its like you are saying that the vanilla BF3 game will be crap and only with a Mod it will be decent.

Other thing i noticed is that even though this is a BF3 thread none is mentioning the BF2 mods as a reason why BF3 needs Mod tools. Who cares about UT, CS, HL and TF2 mods, that's got nothing to do with their decision. BF2 has plenty of mods and some of them are really good and have extended the lifespan of the game. EA and DICE know this, that's why they released mod tools. Besides all those games you guys are brining up are from the previous generation, its a new world out there, wake up and smell the roses.

As far as the official statement regarding the complexity of the game engine is fair. DICE has made their own tool set for the engine and they don't have any resources to take those tools and make them into a simplified mod version. If the professional developers think that their invention, their tool/machine is going to be too complex for you to understand then that is their right of opinion. You have to remember physics in game is still a newbie. Plus with the PC getting FREE DLC from DICE they feel that the lack of Mod tools is going to be compensated by the new content DICE will be releasing. That's right FREE DLC, so there goes your reason for being able to sell us DLC.

People are here a bit too doom and gloom about everything. Its like you got the perfect delicious cake made just for you but the cook didn't give you the can of whipped crème so that you may modify it your self to the way you like. Seriously people its time to start appreciating the work that went into making you this beautiful cake. For once maybe we can sit down enjoy it and tell the cook well done.

Lastly for a forum called XtremeSystems a lot of its member's seem to be misunderstanding the tech industry. Please look at the graphic power of our phones, touchpads, netpads, laptops (AMD APU's FFS!!!). If you still believe that the industry is sliding downwords to lower power then you are just not getting it.

BF3 is going to be a great PC game. Thats all that matters.

[STEvil]

Really? If you are still playing 1942/BF2 i don't think the fact that BF3 is not going to have any Mod tools is going to impact you in anyway. Come on, its like you are saying that the vanilla BF3 game will be crap and only with a Mod it will be decent.

Well, you said it yourself: "If you are still playing 1942/BF2..." Are you saying vanilla of them is not or was not decent and they are/were only good with mods?

Other thing i noticed is that even though this is a BF3 thread none is mentioning the BF2 mods as a reason why BF3 needs Mod tools. Who cares about UT, CS, HL and TF2 mods, that's got nothing to do with their decision. BF2 has plenty of mods and some of them are really good and have extended the lifespan of the game. EA and DICE know this, that's why they released mod tools. Besides all those games you guys are brining up are from the previous generation, its a new world out there, wake up and smell the roses.

New pile, same s***. Also your denegration of other games and mods because they were "older" isnt winning you any points.

As far as the official statement regarding the complexity of the game engine is fair. DICE has made their own tool set for the engine and they don't have any resources to take those tools and make them into a simplified mod version. If the professional developers think that their invention, their tool/machine is going to be too complex for you to understand then that is their right of opinion. You have to remember physics in game is still a newbie. Plus with the PC getting FREE DLC from DICE they feel that the lack of Mod tools is going to be compensated by the new content DICE will be releasing. That's right FREE DLC, so there goes your reason for being able to sell us DLC.

So all 3rd party/dev supplied tools previous to those created/in use for BF3 are of lesser quality and/or easy enough for preschoolers to use? Have you even ever tried BSP mapping?

People are here a bit too doom and gloom about everything. Its like you got the perfect delicious cake made just for you but the cook didn't give you the can of whipped crème so that you may modify it your self to the way you like. Seriously people its time to start appreciating the work that went into making you this beautiful cake. For once maybe we can sit down enjoy it and tell the cook well done.

Except this is a game, not a cake. You can stick your finger in the cake and draw a smiley face... or your most hated developer getting poked with a ****.

Lastly for a forum called XtremeSystems a lot of its member's seem to be misunderstanding the tech industry. Please look at the graphic power of our phones, touchpads, netpads, laptops (AMD APU's FFS!!!). If you still believe that the industry is sliding downwords to lower power then you are just not getting it.

The industry is settling to poorer standards.

BF3 is going to be a great PC game. Thats all that matters.

Hope so. I recall someone who claimed to be a play tester for DNF telling me that it wasnt going to be a console port and i'd be pleasently surprised.

Guess what.

Duke has a terminal case of consolitis and most of the gaming industry is sporting a pretty good infection of it as well.