Battlefield Heroes to Open with Only Two Maps

The upcoming free-to-play Battlefield game will be launching with only two maps when the beta launches later this year, but DICE has every intention of supplying plenty more – and they’ll be free.

Speaking with Gamasutra, Battlefield Heroes senior producer Ben Cousins talked about a lot of decisions made with the game, including the decision to launch with only two maps – when series vets are used to seeing upwards of a dozen.

So, it’s interesting — what I was thinking about is, you talked during your presentation about shipping with two maps, and that implies to me that you’re planning to upgrade later — I mean, obviously, the game is not going to persist on two maps.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we did is, we come to this from two angles. The first one is that in every Battlefield game, we bust our asses making 50 maps, and then within six months of the game being released, everyone’s playing two maps. The two best maps. So, we just decided to make just the two best maps, and not the other kind of maps.

I understand the rationale, even if I don’t care for the way he made his explanation. 50 maps is quite an exaggeration when talking about Battlefield, and saying they’ll build the two best maps assumes they know exactly which maps the community will best respond to.

And being the cynical bunch of gamers most people are, many people assumed that EA would simply charge for any and all future maps. However, Evil Avatar posted an update from Ben Cousins addressing that claim with an assurance that it simply isn’t the case.

…we have two maps to play at the open beta launch of the game later this year, and we already have another map quite far along in development which will be included in an update soon after launch.

We have no plans to charge people for maps. We want to keep the community of paying and free players together.

Just to re-iterate the business model here. We assume that 95% of Battlefield Heroes players never spend a penny on items. We will be delighted if 95% of players never spend any money on items. This is a free game, supported by advertising, with a small number of paying customers.

I’m glad to hear they’re planning on delivering free maps, as I’m very optimistic about the game’s potential. Let’s just hope Cousins is right and they make the two best maps right off the bat.