EA open new DICE studio in LA
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EA have stumped up the cash to expand their beloved DICE westwards, setting up a new studio in Los Angeles - though nobody’s admitted what it’s for as yet.
EA have stumped up the cash to expand their beloved DICE westwards, setting up a new studio in Los Angeles - though nobody’s admitted what it’s for as yet.
Images allegedly taken from an EA customer survey reveal features planned for the upcoming Battlefield 4. It’s difficult to to tell whether this is A) real; B) EA testing the water and not actually talking about features in the game; C) not all a load of baloney.
If it is real then Battlefield 4 will let you flood maps by destroying dams, cut the power to a base by destroying power lines, and Mass Effect 3-style battlepacks are finding their way into multiplayer.
When I first heard that EA were breaking off their licensing agreements with arms manufacturers I naively assumed it was for ideological reasons, that the publisher had found it was no longer comfortable funding businesses whose primary goal is developing tools to kill people. Nah, it’s because EA reckon they can’t be sued if they don’t pay up.
Since the weekend, Battlefield 3 players on PC have been beset by disconnection issues - and as far back as Sunday, DICE were working to fix them. Only this morning, however, has it become apparent that the outages are the result of malicious intent. Battlefield’s servers are currently struggling under a barrage of distributed denial-of-service attacks.
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The future of Star Wars’ long and occasionally fruitful flirtation with our fair medium has been uncertain since LucasArts vanished in a puff of financial logic just over a month ago. Not so now. EA have inked a deal which gives them exclusive license to publish and develop “core” Star Wars games, and have handed the keys to three of their favourite children: DICE, Visceral, and BioWare.
Look at these men playing with VR goggles, twisting their heads around and having fun. The man who resembles a young Graham Linehan is Nate Mitchell, who works for the Oculus Rift team and still smiles every time he watches people wear his virtual reality headset. Meanwhile the man actually wearing the contraption works for DICE, developer of, among other games, Battlefield 4. Earlier in the year EA and DICE were reportedly investigating the possibility of bringing Oculus Rift support to the Frostbite Engine, which powers Battlefield, Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Now, it seems, they're investigating it a whole bunch.
EA have reportedly laid-off up to 10% of their entire workforce, with various sources reporting that the EA Partners label and two Vancouver game studios have become casualties of EA’s ongoing restructuring.
Over the past couple of weeks, EA have been cutting jobs across the company, particularly at studios focused on mobile platforms. In a statement explaining the lay-offs, EA have said they are pursuing new “priorities in new technologies and mobile”. If EA really have let go 10% of their workforce, that would mean around 800 people have lost their jobs so far in this reorganization.
Forget your electronic entertainment expos, the work of spin magicians thousands of miles away. Your Nintendo Directs, broadcast from boardrooms on the other side of the world. The game announcement has gone local. Fancy knowing more about the next Battlefield or CoD? Simply rummage through the storage rooms of your nearest supermarket, or frequent the online listings of your favourite obscure retailer. That’s what BF4Central did, and you’ll never guess what they found.
We know DICE still think about their time in 2142. Remember that future-drone easter egg in End Game? When the grim, blue darkness of the contemporary battlefield gets too much, I imagine they think back to that holiday in Christmas 2006, when the future seemed so mechy.
Paradox man Gordon Van Dyke worked on the Battlefield series in 2006, and would love to see DICE dive into the 22nd century again for a Frostbite-gnawed sequel. But he doesn’t know whether the developers’ man-parts are of sufficient proportions for the job.
After nearly four years of incredulous existence without them, free-to-play shooter spinoff Battlefield Heroes is to get the whirlybird treatment.
Battlefield 4’s ginormous 17-minute trailer was a helluva thing. Remember that bit when Bonnie Tyler shot the window and the water came running in like Rainbow Six? I think I remember that. Anyway, DICE reckon that if you watched hard enough, you can “extrapolate a lot of features that you can then translate into either the singleplayer or the multiplayer”. Reason being: Battlefield single player is taking more of its cues from the online arena of death and dirtbikes this time around.
Source: MP1st.com
Source: MP1st.com
Speaking to Heise.de, AMD’s corporate vice president of global channel sales Roy Taylor said that “you can expect that Battlefield 4 will be part of [future] Never Settle bundles”. Confirming that DICE’s upcoming shooter will be bundled with AMD cards, the announcement also suggests that it will be the next generation of graphics cards rather than the current set on sale.
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