BF Heroes’ Minimum Spec Requirements Preventing Larger Battles
By Chris on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 6:29 PM PST In Battlefield, Computer, Electronic Arts, Game Companies, Game Platforms, Games
There are a number of things DICE has to do with the free-to-play Battlefield Heroes in order for it to become the mainstream, anyone-can-play shooter that they and EA are hoping for. Not requiring a high-end machine PC is among their parameters, but the drawback of that is the impact on what they’re capable of DICE can do in the game.
Ben Cousins, DICE’s executive producer of the Battlefield series, revealed in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz that Heroes’ low set of specs has forced them to scale back the number of players you can have in a game. He explained, “We have really good 16-player matches [but] the engine supports up to 64 players and we reduced that because we want to have a sensible minimum spectrum of player and also for the servers – the servers are slightly less costly to run than previous Battlefield games.”
Thankfully there’s still hope that they could be later implemented. “Really we’d like to have huge 64-player crazy Battlefield Heroes matches but that’s not possible at the moment – that’s something that we’d look at maybe in the future, maybe we would have special access to 64-player games potentially,” he added.
There are already more than 10,000 players in the closed beta at this point, with plans to continue expanding it “to the point where every hardcore gamer in the world will probably be able to get a key if they want to.” The game won’t have a grand opening like your average retail game does — as far as Cousins and the team at DICE is concerned, the game is “already out,” despite EA’s announcement that the game has been delayed.
It’s very much a new style of releasing something in the games space. Cousins drew comparisons to the way Wikipedia and Facebook have grown over time without a huge initial release, claiming the “network effect” would be what they relied on to see the game’s community grow.
Many will be watching, as the success or failure of Heroes will be setting a major precedent going forward. This Korean MMO-style game has yet to really catch on in the West, so it’ll be interesting to see how the public reacts as the closed beta continues to expand.
the closed beta sucks, i cant get a key, as soon as they make a quiz about it 10k ppl does it 5 secs so it impossible :/ they should just release the beta for free download like the other free to play games :/
Or, they could limit the number of people in a testing phase of their project. Odd, I know.
What is it with people who demand access to an early build of a game that’s not out yet? The WoW expansion is another classic example of this. Why do people feel so entitled?
I don’t see how 64 players has anything to do with the minimum specs, Battlefield 1942 worked fine with 64 players and more for me and my computer’s a bottom of the barrel bargain PC from four years ago. Counterstrike: Source and Wolfenstein: ET, too.
Yeah that seemed like bullshit to me. You say you don’t want 64 players because it might be hard on someones pc? For 1. you made the game for shit pc’s. 2. They could just go play in a 16 player game…. Way to fail dice.
or they could do a key givaway on a fileshare site like filefront just like ever 1 else does
yea, they failed hard. I mean, it’s not like your CPU HAS TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING THATS GOING ON INCLUDING WHAT YOU CANNOT DIRECTLY SEE
for example, insane amounts of explosions and people screaming. if your cpu can’t handle that AND your battle, its gonna freeze your PC…
Think about the CPU, it’s not just the useless ‘brain of the PC’ everyone seems to think (directed at Duddee, Jetsetlemming and anyone else who’s got no frigging idea)
I played on 32 player BF1942 servers on a 1.1GHz T-bird, 512MB RAM, a geforce 2 ultra and dial-up. But in DICE’s defense I’m sure they’d prefer smooth gameplay over huge numbers of player per server. 16 seems low, 32 would be alright. Any higher and you’ll end up with the extra players standing on the airfield TKing for plane respawns.
LOL ICE YOU HAVE NO IDEA. I have a quad core 2.4 processor, dont tell me what a processor can and can’t do. You are also totally missing what any of us are saying. Were arguing the fact that they are restricting the battles because “SOME” people can’t run them. We think thats bs, noone was saying anything about cpus. Where the hell did you get that from? Please, graduate 5th grade.
16 players? WTF? This aint some underpowered console for crying out loud.
Ice that statement was just plain ignorant. First off all, cpu has got next to nothing to do with online gaming as far as number of players goes. RAM has much more to do with tons of players on screen then cpu. Its more random data that the cpu needs access to not tons more math (or at least none that the cpu hasnt already done).
“Really we’d like to have huge 64-player crazy Battlefield Heroes matches but that’s not possible at the moment – that’s something that we’d look at maybe in the future, maybe we would have ***special access*** to 64-player games potentially,”
There’s the real reason
^ Oh ok, another way of milking the so called “free game” .. EA in a nutshell.