In a new interview with VG24/7, Battlefield 3 lead designer David Goldfarb talked a lot about the singleplayer component of Battlefield 3, and where DICE drew inspiration from to craft the singleplayer campaign. Specifically, Goldfarb mentioned that DICE isn’t looking to emulate Modern Warfare nor are they looking to repeat Bad Company 2 — for Battlefield 3, they’re aiming for a more realistic experience.
"To use the example of Modern Warfare: they’re doing things their way and they’re awesome at that, but we wanted to do things our way, and we hope that we’re awesome at that. And that means we’re doing Generation Kill and 24; that’s closer to what we’re doing, I think."“Generation Kill” is a realistic, cinema vérité-styled TV series that follows a group of soldiers in Iraq. Goldfarb also mentioned that unlike the recent Call of Duty singleplayer campaigns that are constantly high-paced, Battlefield 3 aims for a variety of pacing styles throughout the story, as Goldfarb puts it:
“We are looking for a broad pacing, from 1-10 as opposed to 10-11. I think that’s a pretty big deal for shooters, to try to do that kind of pacing, to have it be slow for a little while and to make people wait. That’s much harder than we thought it was.”Finally, Goldfarb commented on the length of the singleplayer campaign, saying that it’s around 7 hours, depending on what difficulty you play on, and mentioned that they’re rather “
have six hours of awesome than 12 hours of ‘meh’”. We couldn’t agree more.