"What you see in Battlefield 3... that's the beginning"

Patrick Soderlund, who has moved up from DICE to become head of Electronic Arts‘ EA Games label, has been talking about how the Frostbite 2 engine that powered Battlefield 3 and this year’s Medal of Honor: Warfighter is more demanding on hardware than its competitors because they always had the capabilities of future consoles in mind.

When asked if they intentionally overshoot average PC hardware in their system requirements for Frostbite 2 games with the next generation of home consoles in mind, Soderlund said: “Yeah, I’ll be honest with you — Frostbite 2 was built for the next generation. That’s how we started it. We had that in mind and we said, ‘We’re going to have to build something that can scale.’”

“It doesn’t mean that what you see in Battlefield 3 is the end state. That’s the beginning; that’s where we start and then we go forward,” he told Gamasutra in an interview about his new role at EA. “But we have a tech base that makes me feel really confident in how we’re positioned for what’s going to come in the future.”

He also discussed how Medal of Honor: Warfighter originally started out using Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 before making the switch to Frostbite 2: “It was basically a desire from that team, when they saw the results of Battlefield, and they saw the results of what that engine could do at the time. I’m not saying [Epic has] a bad engine — I’m just saying comparing the two at the time it was like, ‘Okay, we can do more of what we want with the Battlefield/Frostbite engine.’”

Source

It's not that surprising really all things considered. Really, as impressive as Epic's UE 4.0 demo is, it's still just a demo and it's unlikely any next gen games will look quite that impressive. On the other hand, Frostbite 2.0 and the DX11 version of CryEngine 3 give EA and Crytek good and proven starting platforms for next gen.

Makes sense. All the time while playing Battlefield 3 I kept wondering how the old Xbox 360 could handle such awesome graphics xD

Who knows, Battlefield 4 may be the last "HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THEM GRAPHICS!"-game :P

(playing Ultra settings on PC)

As I said somewhere else, Battlefield 3's visuals are so good I honestly don't care if technical visuals increase much from here. Other power-related things like A.I., physics (environment destruction), etc, can all be improved a bit, but visually things are fantastic.

I even had a hard time really appreciating all the glory of Battlefield 3's new CQ maps' visual qualities because the game moves too fast. They could improve the graphics by 2x tomorrow and I'd never notice in-game because at that point visuals are only something you compare on static images, not while playing the game and being immersed in it.

Well, isn't that the same thing that Crytek says about the CryEngine 3?

i think it is exactly the opposite. from now on only playing the game will show the graphical improvements  and pictures don't really show the differences aynmore^^

battlefield on ultra looks awesome for pc, but even the fxaa injector or what the name is changes the battlefiled 3 graphics a lot if you change the settings correctly! it looks much much better with that and it's only the same game with few self made changes. i can still see a lot of imporovements, but only when you really play the game and don't look at pictures.

I can't wait for next gen.

Then how come BF3 doesn't look much better than Bad Company 2?

Title misleading. It says "next generation" not just those two consoles.

I feel like when I'm playing the game, the way the game *looks*, polygon count-wise, is one of the lowest things on my list (regarding Battlefield and subsequently future games). Visuals always take a back seat when being immersed in a game for me, and it's now reached a point where I wouldn't enjoy Battlefield 3 any more than I do now if they increased the visual fidelity of it.

As I said though, other power-driven things like physics can see a definite improvement in the future. I'll notice things break or fall weirdly, or don't react how I'd expect them to.