It’s been over two years since the release of the latest Battlefield installment, and fans are eager to learn more about what’s coming next. While the series has been almost synonymous with destruction since Battlefield: Bad Company, that hasn’t always been the case. Battlefield 2042, for instance, focused much more on map-specific extreme weather events like sandstorms and tornadoes.
Internet sleuths have now discovered new information from the job listing for VFX Director at Ripple Effect. As you might remember, DICE LA rebranded to Ripple Effect back in July 2021, and it is one of the main developers of the franchise alongside DICE itself.
According to the job listing, the VFX Director (who will work in one of the studio’s Canadian offices rather than the Los Angeles one) will help develop the ‘most realistic and exciting destruction effects in the industry’, suggesting that the next installment will focus on destruction more than ever before.
Some Battlefield fans have taken it to be a sort of challenge to the former colleagues who left DICE and founded Embark Studios to build The Finals. The popular free-to-play competitive multiplayer first-person shooter features excellent destruction, which has the added benefit of being server-based so that it can be exactly the same for everyone. Here’s what Embark said about their technology:
Server-side movement & destruction has been a holy grail in game development for a long time
and we’re really proud to have made it a reality in The Finals. Rather than having movement
physics running on the client-side, environment movement happens on the server. That implies there’s a single truth for physics, for all players at the same time. In turn, that allows for physics-driven movement on indeterministic surfaces. It means that players can move at the same time on moving platforms, in a multiplayer setting. Or that you and your friends can experience being in the same collapsing house together, in sync. It’s an exciting topic, and it fundamentally changes the way dynamic multiplayer can be played.
Of course, The Finals has a significant advantage over Battlefield: it is very small-scale, featuring only four squads of three players each. That’s a total of twelve players in the same match, whereas Battlefield games have long allowed 64 or even 128 players to duke it out in the same session. Needless to say, having synchronized destruction for ten times as many players would be difficult, but perhaps that’s just what they are working on at DICE.
It’s probably a bit early still to expect any news. After all, franchise director Vince Zampella hinted future entries would be given more time to cook in the oven. It’s also going to be a multi-studio collaboration between DICE, Ripple Effect, Criterion, and Ridgeline Games. The latter team was established (by Marcus Lehto, former creator of Halo and Disintegration) to work specifically on the single player campaign.
