The Next Battlefield Game Will Be Free
By Shaun Hatton - March 26th, 2008
Battlefield Heroes features super stylized visuals.
The popular Battlefield war series will return this summer with Battlefield Heroes, a game that will be free to play. It’s EA’s first title to be released through their new Play 4 Free business model.
Battlefield Heroes will offer online matchmaking so you won’t find yourself up against players from other skill levels. Additionally, the game seems to have taken a design cue from Team Fortress 2 and even Battalion Wars 2. All the character and vehicle designs are intentionally cartoony, blocky, and bright.
The game’s currently in development and is being worked on by DICE in Stockholm, which is the same team behind the outstanding Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 1942 titles.
“Online gaming garners a massive audience,” says Gerhard Florin, EVP Publishing Americas-Europe at EA. “People want to play games in new ways, with easier access that is quick to the fun. With Battlefield Heroes, EA brings its first major franchise to North America and Europe with a new distribution model and pricing structure adapted to the evolving way that people play.”
Check out battlefield-heroes.com for more information. The site’s updated semi-regularly by the dev team with screenshots and news. They even recently posted a video. From these early glimpses, it looks like the game is going to be absolutely hilarious and outstanding.
I’m really not sure about this one.
I love that it’s free, and I think stylistically it’s pretty interesting (TF2’s look was fantastic).
However in order to make the money, they need a lot of people playing. So it’s very much targeted at the “mass” market. So the game isn’t going to be as deep as previous battlefields, no first person camera, few vehicles, no squad systems etc.
All of this means it could very well end up as a novelty game. Fun to play every once and a while for short periods, but not deep enough to keep you coming back and wanting more. But in order to be successful they *need* people coming back.
I’m DEFINITELY going to be giving it a try though. It’s very interesting and I’m totally curious to see how it ends up.
I think that as long as it’s free, people will flock to check it out. If it’s fun on top of that, people will stick around. Seeing as DICE has a pretty good track record (in my opinion, anyway), I don’t see how they can make a game that won’t be enjoyable. If they end up removing a lot of the mechanics that give Battlefield its in-depth gameplay to make it accessible to more players, they’ll have to balance the trade-off there.