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DICE producer shares secrets of Battlefield’s success

Daniel Matros, a producer at Stockholm-based games studio DICE, is in South Africa. He’s in town to show off the awesome-looking Battlefield 4, which is being released for every gaming platform you can think of (including Xbox One and PlayStation 4) later this year. More specifically, he’s here to show off BF4 at rAge, the Really Awesome Gaming Event which takes place in Jo’burg from tomorrow (4th Oct) to Sunday – but on his way there he was at Wits University last night to chat with students about how to make games great.

Apparently it’s just like anything else: clarity of vision and quality of execution should be your guiding principles in everything you do, which is easy to say of course. Slightly harder to put into practice where new features get added as you go along, and when a game can take years to develop it’s easy to fall into the trap of suggesting ‘improvements’ to the original plan and forgetting to focus on the basics.

The clearer the outline is, of course, the easier it is to focus on the overall quality of the game – and that’s what’s important as it draws people in and creates a good first impression, and having a vision of what that could and should be really helps in making it a reality. Even when making a small, independent game, he recommends approaching it with a triple-A mentality.

He also recommended that the game’s elements be kept simple and accessible, yet offer quite a bit of depth at the same time. The user interface in particular should have a lot of attention paid to it, and buttons should do exactly what the user thinks they will do.

Matros used the example of the Deploy button in Battlefield 4 as an example: at one point in development it was an image of two arrows crossing over one another which clearly didn’t convey what the button actually did, leading to confused players. The solution was elegant yet simple: change it to the word DEPLOY. Problem solved.

The realism of the game must be balanced with fun, he said. He spoke about a new feature in Battlefield 4 as an example, the ability to bring down a skyscraper in the middle of a game. In DICE’s initial testing, when the building came down it killed absolutely everyone around it and kicked up a huge dust cloud; while that was realistic, it killed the fun of the game and had to be tweaked to be less destructive and create less dust.

He also had some wise words to would-be developers who want to get into the gaming industry. First and foremost, they shouldn’t be afraid of failure, for failure is how you learn and grow. Secondly, they should build up a portfolio of work that can be used to sell their skills to prospective employers and that they shouldn’t be afraid of taking up jobs within other industries that employ their skills, like animation and advertising, as those too add to their experience and portfolios over time, invaluable assets when it comes to securing a job at a studio. 

All in all, it was a very interesting talk. I look forward to hearing more from Matros at rAge this weekend, and seeing Battlefield 4 in action for myself.

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