DICE responds to Battlefield 3 leak

Over the weekend, developer build footage of Battlefield 3 on Xbox 360 was splashed onto the internet. EA subsequently yanked it down.

DICE general manager Karl Magnus Troedsson told Eurogamer this afternoon that this wasn't how he wanted people to experience Battlefield 3.

"As people have probably noticed, when we show our games - we are very proud of what we're doing - we always want to show it in the best light. We want to show the product as good as possible.

"Watching the game in crappy 320x200 resolution on YouTube is not the way that we want people to experience the game.

"We'd rather have them wait for us to show it in its real HD glory," he said. "There are a lot of hard hours that have gone into this from the team, and naturally we're disappointed. But, yeah, things happen.

The leak raised questions about why DICE hasn't yet released proper video fotoage or screenshots of Battlefield 3 on console - besides the off-screeen footage seen on US chat show Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and on-stage at the EA Gamescom press conference.

"Watching the game in crappy 320x200 resolution on YouTube is not the way that we want people to experience the game."

Karl Magnus Troedsson, general manager, DICE

"I understand you mostly see PC footage. It's all part of what kind of strategy we use for what we want to show and when, and what the lead platform is," explained Troedsson.

"People shouldn't worry. We play the 360 and the PS3 version every day in the office. I don't expect people to be disappointed by this."

"We always want to show a platform that we have chosen to be our lead platform. In this case we did choose PC as the lead platform; it's the one that has been, mostly, driving development forward. That is the reason why we have spearheaded a lot of the key assets with this as well.

"We'll show this on console as well," he added, "and when the beta goes live people will be able to play it on console and they can make up their minds for themselves if they believe we've been hiding something."

The PC was picked as lead platform, Troedsson explained, to build "unique" features "we felt we really needed in the game". Things like 64-player multiplayer, which is "not possible" on console when combined with aspects "like destruction, like scale, vehicles and this kind of thing".

"I have to say that this discussion is a bit over the top because people don't understand that the PC is more powerful than a console - they haven't looked under the hood and in detail," Troedsson elaborated.

"What we're really striving to do with Battlefield 3 is make the most out of each and every platform. And that also means between PlayStation 3 and 360, because they're quite different under the hood. So we've been spending a lot of time with all of these.

DICE recently revealed how Battlefield 3 uses near imperceptible black lines to fill the screen and fit a native 720p resolution on console. This allows DICE to save memory and boost performance.

What DICE won't do on console, however, is scrap jets.

"No, that's not true," said Troedsson. "If you play on console you will be able to play with jets as well."