http://bf3blog.com/2011/04/battlefield-3-campaign-will-be-more-scripted-less-sandbox-styled/
According to a recent interview given to EDGE magazine, DICE’s Patrick Bach has gone on record saying that Battlefield 3′s single player campaign will be more scripted and linear, as opposed to the open, sandbox type campaigns employed in Bad Company 1 and 2. Bach said:
“I don’t see it as an absolute goal for all games to be sandbox games. We’ve been building sandbox games for quite some time and we’ve got pretty good at it, but I don’t see that as the only way of building games, because then we wouldn’t build campaigns at all.
“In some cases they aren’t, but in most cases sandbox games are hardcore, boring, hard to get into and they are not very popular.”
DICE is clearly taking cue from the latest Call of Duty games, which have been criticized for being too linear. One of the ways the recent Bad Company 2 games have stood apart from other FPS shooters, is that they were open, that a goal could be attacked from different points. In terms of storytelling, linear campaigns have a clear advantage, but as a result, they often tend to be too scripted and predictable.
So far the gameplay we’ve seen of Battlefield 3 singleplayer campaign looked quite linear and scripted, on the other hand, the gameplay only represents a tiny portion of the overall campaign. The full interview will be revealed in the next issue of Edge magazine, which hits the news stands on April 12.
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it's such a shame that the industry is starting to pride it's-self on going backwards in game development :/
from sandbox to scripted
from dedicated servers to p2p
from server list and custom games to random matchmaking
never thought I'd ever see a linear Battlefield, I'm expecting Bad Company 3
