The year-long search for Battlefield 3’s most demanding easter egg has ended thanks to the efforts of diligent YouTuber JackFrags. The hidden voice-over gag was first teased by a DICE developer in April of last year, but has remained unheard by the public until this week.
Tomas Danko, then voice-over producer at DICE, left a few cryptic yet oddly specific hints as to the undiscovered easter egg’s whereabouts in 2012. He suggested that a US faction player would need to stand less than 350 metres from a teammate, who themselves must be less than 110 metres from hostile anti-aircraft, to trigger it. Anti-aircraft appear only on select maps, including Kharg Island, Wake Island, Caspian Border or Operation Firestorm.
Danko couldn’t confirm whether players would also need to be playing in the last light of the sun as night fell on Durin’s Day.
“It’s the hardest one to find,” he admitted at the time. “It’s probably ridiculously hard to spot it, and you can’t really repeat it at will.”
JackFrags recently tracked down Danko, now working at another games company, for more clues. Though the VO specialist couldn’t remember every detail of the easter egg’s requirements, he could provide a new hint: the voiceover track would single out a specific team member at DICE as a “hostile”.
After trawling several gigs’ worth of Battlefield audio, Jack began to search the files for specific developer names. Patrick Bach. Karl Magnus Troedsson. Eventually, he happened upon a ‘vo_us_mp_comrose_spotted_dave_r 3 2 0.wav’.
“We have spotted a hostile Goldfarb. I repeat, hostile Goldfarb in your area,” said the file, when played. “Proceed with extreme caution.”
You might remember that a Battlefield lead designer named David Goldfarb left DICE in August last year. In fact, the same Goldfarb caught up with our Rob this E3 to talk about his new game, Payday 2.
Nobody has yet reported having replicated the conditions to hear the clip in-game. But it’s there, nestled somewhere in your Battlefield folder, just waiting to be fired.
Do you think there are any more stones left unturned in Battlefield 3? Surely not, a year and a half on?