EA Games Vice President Patrick Soderlund says there’s more to EA DICE than just its famous shooter franchise.
When you think of the Stockholm-based Electronic Arts studio DICE, odds are the first thing that leaps to mind is the Battlefield franchise. The odds are also good that absolutely nothing else follows, because that’s pretty much all it does. Yet to hear Soderlund tell the tale, the studio actually has a lot more going on than just its its famous modern combat series.
“Well it depends, right? Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” he told OXM when asked whether it was hard for the studio to branch out into new franchises when its primary property is so successful. “The DICE guys are roughly 300 people in the Stockholm studio; not all of them are working on Battlefield things, and that’s intentional, because we don’t want to become a Battlefield factory.”
“The minute we start saying, ‘You’re going to make a Battlefield game for the rest of your life’, they’re going to go someplace else,” he continued. “So for them to make great Battlefield games there need to be other things for them to do as well. That’s why we have people who move around quite a bit. And then obviously we have a boatload of people that just want to make Battlefield because they love it.”
It sounds good, what with variety being the spice of life and all that, but I have to wonder what exactly those non-Battlefield guys are doing. According to the DICE page on MobyGames, the only thing aside from Battlefield that the studio has done since 2003 are RalliSport Challenge 2, the multiplayer component of Medal of Honor and the late, lamented Mirror’s Edge, which by the way is rapidly approaching five years old. I don’t think there’s any question that fresh, new challenges help keep a studio from stagnating, but if that’s really what DICE has cooking, I’d love to see some of fruits of their labors. (And yes, that is a thinly-veiled cry for Mirror’s Edge 2.)
Source: OXM
