DICE talks about biggest map ever in Battlefield 3

Developer of the game Battlefield 3, DICE has mentioned about building one of the maps for their upcoming Armored Kill DLC for Battlefield 3, called Bandar Desert on the Battlefield blog. DICE Designer Inge Jøran Holberg wrote about designing the biggest map in Battlefield 3 yet, while taking in player feedback. He said “Reading a number of posts by these players in our forums, I personally agreed that even with maps like Operation Firestorm, Kharg Island and Caspian Border, Battlefield 3 lacked a couple of extra-large maps with huge distances and lots of capture points that they have experienced in some of the maps in earlier Battlefield titles to complete the range.”

Holberg elaborates  the studio’s inspiration for the map. “Since Iran was a major area of operations in Battlefield 3, it felt natural to get inspiration from there as a first step in creating some maps in “Xpack 3”. Seeing the desert scenery from the real Bandar Desert area, I really got inspired, and immediately knew we could create something really exciting out of it.”

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The Bandar Desert.

He goes on to state that Bandar Desert supports 64 players and jets. Everything has to be larger and build more on the vehicle gameplay on a grand scale. It also has to be scalable for the consoles versions of the game, which supports fewer players, without it compromising on the PC version’s 64 player support.

Holberg stated a few of the major requirements that they had set for Bandar Desert. It should support grand scale vechile gameplay with freedom of movement at long range, provide exciting dogfight gameplay for jets in huge mountain ranges, contain diversity in gameplay and intensity between different themes, offer a great visual diversity both in terms of palette and character, support all game modes without compromise, and differ from the other maps in the expansion both visually and in gameplay.

Designing a large map for Battlefield has its own challenges, though. Holberg says, “The challenge with designing a huge map like this is that the size mustn’t lead to it becoming boring and uneventful. There must be no endless, generic travel between point to point like a pointless merry-go-round that never changes speeds.” Holberg also talks about balancing the map. “Another challenge is to enable different player kits in the map – there should not be one kit that rules the entire map. Diversity in gameplay across the map would have to be implemented.”

The map is also set to be huge. According to the post, ”In Conquest Large, Bandar Desert is stretching as far as 1,900 meters from U.S. to Russian deployment, not counting the airstrip at the very end of the ground forces combat area. This is even longer than Fushe Pass from Battlefield 2. Bandar Desert is about as wide as it is long at the middle flags – it measures 1,900 meters from the mountain base furthest from the sea all the way to the beach at the south edge of the map.”

For comparison, Caspian Border is roughly 1,100 meters between the U.S. and Russian deployments - around 800 meters difference in both width and length.

Battlefield 3: Armored Kill is set to release in September. It is one of the five expansion packs included in Battlefield 3: Premium.