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Have your heart set on transforming Battlefield 3 into a glorious reproduction of the climactic forest confrontation from Return of the Jedi – replete with frighteningly accurate Ewok destruction physics? We love you. But also, it just got a lot harder.
"As of now, we are not going to make any modding tools, no," EA Senior VP Patrick Soderlund told GamerStar (via GameSpy). "If you look at the Frostbite engine, and how complex it is, it's going to be very difficult for people to mod the game, because of the nature of the set up of levels, of the destruction and all those things… it's quite tricky. So we think it's going to be too big of a challenge for people to make a mod."
Granted, the phrase “as of now” leaves a teensy, perhaps claustrophobically small amount of wiggle room for “later,” but only time will tell on that one. You win this time, Ewoks. But enjoy kicking off the slow, torturously painful downfall of our favorite film franchises while you can, because – when you least expect it – you'll have yubbed your last nub. Or something.
Comments are closed on this article
Mighty BOB!
July 06, 2011 at 11:45pm
Too complicated my ass. Either they are severely underestimating the abilities of their fans (unlikely) or they just don't want people poking around in the engine (which is either for trade secret junk, or because Frostbite might have a terrible back-end, which I doubt).. well I guess it could also be because they have to pay the engineers to code up SDK tools and don't want to spend the money on it even though it will dramatically increase the life cycle of their game.
In the unlikely event that it is actually the former and not the latter, then that would mean they have never looked at the creations of their own fan base or at moddb.com. I happen to work with people who make mods that look as good as BF3 as a hobby in their spare time. EA's explanation of "complexity" is a thin veneer that is weakly disguising some other reason.
Vano
July 06, 2011 at 6:11pm
Oh, wow, and they just insulted us! "You are too stupid to understand how all this works"
F.YOU, EA!
Nimrod
July 06, 2011 at 11:58am
Ill buy the game as soon as its ava on TPB. Cracked servers will be up and running within a month.
Holly Golightly
July 06, 2011 at 11:25am
How unfortunate that they underestimate their own users' knowledge.
jnwoll
July 06, 2011 at 9:59am
I was hoping the modders at Nations at War would be able to put their twist to this. Oh well. I hope it's good. NAW certainly made BF2 incredible.
Antherz
July 06, 2011 at 9:39am
I think EA is more afraid a modder will out do the actual design team use thier own engine...EA likes being the King..which is why it's buying so many game companies. It doesn't like to be upshowed. But i agree with the trade secret comment. and I don't care still gonna buy the game =)
chronium
July 06, 2011 at 4:31am
It just means modders are going to have to hack the game to make their mods. I don't by the "complex" excuse but I would have believed them if they said they wanted to keep their engine a trade secret for EA and the other games that are going to be using it.
kixofmyg0t
July 06, 2011 at 9:17am
Why? Consoles never get mods anyway...
DICE is clearly pointing the finger at the PC gaming crowd, since it's such an "elite" bunch DICE has basically said "nopes, PC gamers are n00b's kthxbie"
AETAaAS
July 06, 2011 at 1:27pm
This could just be me being cynical, but its exactly for the reason you mentioned. Because console gamers don't expect mods, EA thinks "why bother developing modding tools when people will buy BF3 with or without it?"
