There’s no doubt that Battlefield 3 will have some significant disparity between the PC and console versions, most notably in terms of size. PC multiplayer will feature 64 players, while Xbox 360 and PS3 will only handle 24. Despite this, however, DICE doesn’t think the console versions will be of a significantly lower quality.
“The biggest difference between the PC and console version of Battlefield 3 is that we have 64 players on the PC and 24 players maximum on console,” said studio boss Patrick Bach. “The rest is more or less the same: we use the same engine, the same technology, the same animation system, the same lighting system. Our aim is to give the player the exact same experience and not try to dumb down the console version.
“If you want the same quality of game, I would say it’s really, really hard. We tried to get more players in but then you need to scale down all the graphics, scale down all the destructibility, and sometimes you need to scale down all the map sizes. Everything is a compromise on: where do you cut?”
He added that players would be “very upset that it looked worse, played worse and wasn’t as fun as the PC version,” hence why certain areas had to be scaled down for the good of the game. Sounds fair enough to me. I mean, were people really expecting PC-quality visuals and 64 players on an Xbox 360?
