Modding in Battlefield 3

[Simon Moon]

Leaving the town for less than 48 hours and suddenly news pop up. I need to go away more. Requiem2D has a very nice article about What Everybody Ought to Know About Modding Battlefield 3. Here a small clip.

Official Support

From our experiences as the most played Battlefield 2 mod (Project Reality), the support from the publisher (Electronic Arts) and the studio (DICE – Digital Illusions CE) has left a lot to be desired. We did receive some free BF2 copies and were very thankful to have been invited to the Mod Day in the UK, but these are all items which just barely touch the surface of the work we do. From updated mod tools to newsletter mentions, or infrastructure support, it’s all been non-existent during the life of BF2. Small efforts from the publisher such as a link from an article on the official page would have produced stunning results, but alas being the most played mod only gets us 2-3% of the online player population for BF2. So you can imagine what it’s like to be part of an average sized-mod. Unless you’re one of the top three, you’ll hardly have any player momentum which will ultimately lead to a flat player population soon after release.

In short, the article laments the lack of support from official side. If you start a mod now, it's almost suicide to do it on BF2142, while BF2 has still the majority of "BF" players. And you can grab BF2 cheap as hell. Unless BF3 will make a huge splash and convince a majority of players to switch to it (over 60%) plus the official sides (namely EA and DICE) dish out some more support for the modders, we are looking at a highly bleak landscape in terms of BF3 mods.