Since the announcement of PlayStation 4 Neo and Xbox One Scorpio, several game developers have started talking about them. While others have been a bit cold on the subject, stating that they might not make much of a difference, DICE's General Manager Patrick Bach openly proclaimed its excitement in an interview with Metro UK, saying that he only learned about them shortly before the official announcements and he can't wait to get his hands on the new hardware.
I think in general, I’m actually right now most excited about the hardware announcements.
Yes, but very late. So, I was actually surprised myself. [laughs]
Yeah. [laughs] So I got really happy. I can’t wait to get my hands on that!
Since we are on PC this is not a problem for us, we just scale. We just crank it up. When we build the games we build them here [indicates one end of a line with his hands], and then the PC that you can buy today is here [indicates slightly further down the line] and the question is just where are the consoles on this scale? So if they give us a better console we just crank it up and it’ll be more awesome.
This makes sense, since the games made by DICE are often very ambitious from a technical standpoint. This forces them to make sacrifices in the console versions, so with the PlayStation 4 Neo and Xbox One Scorpio console users might actually get a better experience both in terms of visuals and frame rate. The first game to make use of PS4 Neo & XB1 Scorpio could be Battlefront 2, due in Holiday 2017.
In the same interview, Bach also stated that the folks at DICE spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make single player more fun, but he wouldn't commit to saying that this time (with Battlefield 1) it'll be different from the underwhelming campaigns of the past games.
I cannot reassure you. [laughs] I think you are onto… I agree. We are from okay to good, right? We actually have a lot of people that only play the single-player in Battlefield, which to me is… interesting. Because it’s primarily a multiplayer game. It’s always been and it will always be. Our aim is, of course, to make a better single-player every time we do it, and again I won’t sit here and tell you it will be great. Because I think that will just be a sad way of trying to pitch something to someone. [laughs]
I want to make sure that when we show it to people we will show people what it is, rather than what it should be. Because I understand if people get sceptical. I see a lot of cool stuff at E3, but I always wait and see how it turns out. Because it may be that it looks really good and then it turns out crap or it looks okay and it turns out great.Trust me, we’ve been thinking a lot about not only how do you make it good but what’s the Battlefield recipe for single-player? Because we’ve been trying different things to find where the sweet spot is. Because in one way you want to entertain a different part of the audience with the single-player, you don’t want it to be multiplayer. You want it to be different.
But you also don’t want to be like another game, where people say, ‘Oh, it’s like that game’. You need to find your own personality, and I think we’ve done that with multiplayer and solidified that over the years. But I don’t think we’ve reached as far with single-player.
Battlefield 1 will be available for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on November 21.
