This trailer features over a minute and a half of gameplay from Battlefield Heroes, the upcoming free-to-play browser-based cartoon shooter from DICE.

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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.

Well, this certainly explains why we haven’t heard much about the game in awhile. It looks like the release of the free-to-play shooter, Battlefield Heroes, has been delayed until later this year. The game was originally expected to be released during the summer, but EA CEO John Riccitiello announced the delay during a conference call today:

“We decided to increase its focus on some of the social networking features,” Riccitiello noted, stressing that the studio hopes to incorporate beta tester feedback and implement new features. “The last thing we want to do is jab it in the marketplace.”

Well, that’s disappointing, but at least they’re putting some time into making sure the game definitely works before they unleash it upon the public.

Via ShackNews

This probably the largest press release I have ever seen – or at least since I have been at Gaming Today. Normally they are pretty much short, to the point, and padded with overly positive and glowing quotes regarding just how fabulous the announcement is to them or how wonderful it is to work with so and so.

I wonder if we will ever get a press release that includes quotes from people who hated to work with one another? For example: “Bob was drunk all the time and kept playing grab-ass with all the female employees” or “John was such a tyrant that I wanted to spit in his tall-quadruple-half-caff-light-foam-latte with soy milk every morning. God I hated that guy” or “Pete stunk so bad that even after I got home of the evening I could taste cabbage in the air – even in my apartment”.

Anyway, this press release is more or less a massive list of upcoming titles from EA and its studios which will be released around the holidays and into next year. These titles will also be showcased at E3 next week with the initial press conference being hosted by CEO John Riccitiello, will also spotlight many of the creative leaders behind the games.

The complete line-up of titles on display at E3 are as follows:

• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
• Crysis Warhead
• Dead Space
• FaceBreaker
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• HASBRO FAMILY GAME NIGHT
• iPhone/iPod Touch Games from EA Mobile
• iPod Games from EA Mobile
• Left 4 Dead
• LITTLEST PET SHOP
• Madden NFL 09
• Mercenaries 2: World in Flames
• Mirror’s Edge
• Mobile Phone Games from EA Mobile
• Mobile, iPhone & iPod titles
• MySims Kingdom for the Wii and Nintendo DS
• MySims, made for the PC
• NBA LIVE 09
• NCAA FOOTBALL 09
• Rock Band 2
• SimCity Creator for the Wii
• Skate It
• Spore
• The Lord of the Ring: Conquest
• The Sims 2 Apartment Pets for the Nintendo DS
• Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 09
• Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 09 for the PSP
• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
• Zubo

For the full press release including more information on each title listed, as well as the prerequisite “sweet as honey” quotes from EA’s John Riccitiello and John Pleasants, read on after the jump.

Via: Press Release

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Marketing did a fine job with Battlefield: Bad Company, and moving forward they’ve got their work cut out for them with Battlefield Heroes. DICE executive producer Ben Cousins gave some insight into the market they’ll be targeting with Heroes, which they call the “frustrated restricteds.”

“So who is Battlefield Heroes for? The marketing guys love to come up with snappy titles for market segments. The market segment they came up with for us was ‘frustrated restricteds’ – people who really want to play full games, and aspire to be gamers,” Cousins said during his keynote at GDC Paris, reports GI.biz.

“But they’re restricted in some way, and this makes them frustrated. Maybe they’re restricted by money, time or skill?

“For example, a 15 year-old boy who can’t afford a PS3 – he’s desperate to play Call of Duty, but can’t afford the console. Maybe a 30-35 year-old guy who is a new dad, who used to play games, but is restricted by time. Or maybe a new gamer who loves the idea of playing games but heard that all people who play multiplayer games are really skilled.”

I hardly fit into any of those categories, and I’m still interested in playing Heroes. And I’m hardly the only one who fits that bill, so won’t all of us self-proclaimed hardcore gamers throw off the curve for the people Cousins is referring to? It’ll be interesting to see how DICE handles that aspect of the matchmaking process.

The console-exclusive Battlefield: Bad Company was released this week, and PC owners are waiting for the free-to-play Battlefield Heroes as I write this. As if that weren’t enough, DICE executive producer Ben Cousins confirmed at GDC Paris yesterday that there are five Battlefield games in development — although you won’t be seeing them all released worldwide.

The first, of course, is Battlefield Heroes, but you already know all about that. One of the remaining Battlefield titles is a collaboration with Neowiz which will be targeting the market in Korea. Electronic Arts holds a 19% stake in Neowiz, which is the company that operates FIFA Online in Korea.

“Since the start of this year I’ve been working as executive producer for the entire Battlefield franchise – we’ve got five titles in development at the moment, which is probably more than you expect,” Cousins said at the conference.

He wasn’t particularly forthcoming with details on the other games, but hopefully one of them is a true Battlefield 3. 2142 was fun, but it certainly wasn’t a major advancement for the series.

via GamesIndustry.biz

If you’re looking to get in on the early action with the cartoony, free-to-play Battlefield Heroes, now’s your time to act. Beta registration has opened, and while the official Heroes website seems to be down at the moment, the sign-up page for the beta is still working and can be found by going here.

I know I’m personally very excited to try out DICE’s radically different Battlefield game as a longtime fan of the series. From what Shawn Elliott has said over at 1UP, though, it sounds like there might be some balance issues with the game’s hardcore players having an advantage with all of the unlocked abilities.

You can check out 1UP’s impressions of the game here.

The free-to-play Battlefield Heroes model is a new one in this hemisphere, at least with a major franchise like Battlefield. Companies have blamed piracy more and more for the reasons for more heavily enforcing DRM and shifting to console development. And it impacted the way Battlefield Heroes‘ model came about, but not in the way you’d think.

You might remember this trailer I posted about in late February that made a quip about downloading the game on BitTorrent. Speaking with DICE executive producer Ben Cousins, GI.biz asked about the joke and if piracy had any effect on Heroes.

If you look at Korea – and really the idea for Battlefield Heroes came from a business trip to South Korea that a couple of guys had a few years ago – Korea and China are markets which are basically killed by piracy on the console side and on the PC side.

As a result this free-to-play model kind of came because people were used to not paying for their games because they were pirating them.

The companies started offering them for free and started monetizing it with micro-transactions. I don’t know whether DICE has been driven by piracy in our games – it’s certainly a problem but we do quite well anyway. It was more the case that the business model itself originally came from piracy back in the old days.

In that movie [the Battlefield Heroes trailer]…I think it’s important – I wrote the script for that movie – that we address the fact the piracy exists and there’s no point in hiding under the carpet or just sweeping it under the carpet.

Piracy is out there and the industry needs to find ways of dealing with it, and one of the ways is free-to-play games.

I’m so excited to get my hands on Heroes. Everything about it fascinates me, from the business model to the gameplay. And you can’t go wrong with something that’s free.

I hate the “PC gaming is dead” discussion as much as anyone, save for maybe Jeff Green, so I do enjoy seeing the counterarguments that just slap proponents of “PC gaming is dead” square in the face.

Cue Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello, who has stated that the PC gaming market has in fact been growing for several years, even if the retail numbers don’t reflect that.

“I certainly recognize that the box-side [retail] of PC is soft. It’s been soft for some time,” Riccitiello said during a conference call Q&A with analysts.

“Frankly, if it were not for The Sims and World of Warcraft PC box sales, it’d be a pretty dismal sector.”

While that might be the case, it won’t stop EA from supporting the PC and its many new(er) revenue streams, such as online subscriptions.

“One thing EA tries to look at is the total business that’s represented by PC game software. And we’re seeing a growth business there. In fact, it’s been growing for several years.

“It’s just been categorized wrongly by looking simply at the box-side of the equation.”

Certainly the most interesting experiment of EA’s in the PC gaming space is Battlefield Heroes. You don’t really expect a major publisher that is mainly concerned with their bottom line to take a risk like they are with Heroes, but if it works out, it could signal a major change in the industry.

via Next Gen

EA has unveiled a new trailer for Battlefield Heroes that shows just how you’ll be able to craft your own goofy, animated avatar for the game. Since the game’s certainly not going for realism that leaves the character customization options fairly open. You can craft a peg-legged pirate, an Old West bandito, a villain from the silent film era, and just about anything else you can imagine, from the looks of it. It’s almost a little sad how this completely free game already looks more interesting than Battlefield: Bad Company.