The First Step | Battlefield Heroes - Free to Play, Cartoon Shooter

Ben Cousins, Senior Producer

Hello Heroes,

I'm Ben Cousins, the Senior Producer of Battlefield Heroes. In the coming months, I'd like to give you some insight into the creation of the game. In most game developer blogs they tend to talk about what the team is doing in the 'here and now'. For this one, I'd like to be a little bit different and instead take you right back to the beginning of development, so you have more of a sense of how a project like this gets off the ground.

I've been a fan of DICE's games since I first played a title called Codename Eagle in 1999. At the time I was working as a game tester in London, and many of my lunch breaks and evenings back then were spent playing that game - wing walking on bi-planes, shooting a flamethrower from the seat of a motorcycle and side car and skydiving from Zeppelins. I soon learnt that DICE were based in Stockholm (my fiancée is Swedish), and after seeing the Battlefield series go from strength to strength, I ended up wanting to work for them.

Ben's First Step Notes

In January 2007 I started work at DICE, with a fairly broad goal of heading up new, more experimental projects for the studio. After a month or two of settling in, I found myself in the office of Sean Decker, the Battlefield franchise Executive Producer. He began talking about the games industry in South Korea. That market has become well known in the past few years for creating a new way of delivering games, where they are free to download and play, but where a small number of users pay for inexpensive items called 'micro-transactions', which provide revenue for the project. EA has a FIFA game over there that is doing very well.

DICE have always been keen on trying new things in the online gaming area, and this way of delivering games struck us as pretty interesting, so we started wondering if this might also work in the western world. I volunteered to lead the project - the direction I got from Sean at this stage was (if I remember correctly) 'historical feel', 'existing technology', 'level up one character?' and 'heroic'. I've posted a scan of my first page of notes here. A few people at DICE had previously been working on concepts and ideas for this project over the previous months and I met with them and began working through some more notes as I fleshed out the high-concept.

Early Presentation Slide

I then got James Salt involved, who is now the Lead Designer on Battlefield Heroes. He had finished his work as Lead Designer on Battlefield 2142 a few months before and had been mulling over some new concepts since then, so we both pretty eager to get a new project off the ground. We quickly found we agreed on three clear high-level directions for the project:

1. We wanted to return to the crazy unrealistic feel of Battlefield 1942 and Codename Eagle, games which we had both been fans of.
2. We wanted to make sure that players could 'get to the fun' easier this time - faster, cheaper and easier.
3. We were committed to ensuring that the gameplay would still feel like a legitimate part of the Battlefield franchise, with the core elements and feel preserved.

Within a few weeks we had some pretty clear ideas about where to go with the game design, but we had yet to find an art direction... more on that next time.