Electronic Arts has a number of studios hard at work right now, but none probably harder than DICE, who isn’t just tackling the return of Star Wars: Battlefront, but also a highly anticipated return of the first-person action/adventure Mirror’s Edge with a sequel. The studio’s general manager, Karl Magnus Troedsson, recently spoke to GamesIndustry International on a number of topics, mainly fan feedback.

“The amount of feedback is just crazy,” Troedsson said. “It’s gotten to the point that there’s no way to respond to it all. In many cases, we have had to step back and become a little bit of a silent listener.”

Fan feedback has been quite positive for the company, even in the face of online problems with the company’s latest product, the 2013 release Battlefield 4. However, not being able to respond to fans directly has created a new challenge for the developer.

“I think gamers expect more direct communication with developers today than in the past,” Troedsson said. “In the beginning when you have a small community, you’re there, they know you’re there, and it’s easy to talk to them. But in the journey of Battlefield, we started to become pretty big, and maybe we lost contact a little bit with our players. We want to get closer to our players as much as possible. And some people are going to say, ‘That’s buzz word bingo, direct-to-consumer, feedback, whatever.’ But it is very important for us. We want to listen to what our players have to say.”

Along with forums, DICE communicates with others through a Battlefield Community Test Environment, where players can test out new updates before they roll out to the public. This allows the company to more effectively crush bugs in the software, rather than seeing them in the final product, as with Battlefield 4.

“It’s very easy for us to miss things, but also get things over-dialed up,” said Troedsson. Because that’s the other thing as well. Not every feedback we get is good feedback. There’s a lot of opinion. Some people want to take Battlefield and combine it with this game and that game and that would be their dream game. And some people just want to go back to Battlefield: 1942, the way it was in the past.

“Any great game team that delivers a great game has a very strong idea of what they want to do,” he continued. “If you have a game team who starts listening to every piece of feedback, you can feedback your game to death just by having people like me and executives and everyone else pulling the team in different directions. ‘You should do this or you should do that. Change that, do this.’

“But the team itself needs to have the integrity to stand up and say, ‘No. This is not in line with our vision. Remember, this is what we said is the core of the game. That’s great feedback, I’ll take that. We can mold that into it. No thank you, that’s not good; we’re not putting pink elephants into the game.’ You need the integrity of the game team to do that, and usually that’s one or a couple of people who have that vision in their head of what they want to create.”

As far as Mirror’s Edge‘s return, which is slated for new consoles sometime next year, DICE is taking the cautious approach. “You could market research any product to death if you’re not careful,” Troedsson said. “In the same way, you can go out on a limb without knowing anything about the market and make mistakes that way as well. When it comes to this product, as we do with all our games, we take a sound look at them from different approaches. We take a look at it from a gamer perspective: Is this something we want to play ourselves Do we believe in it What does the heart say What does the gut say And then we take the business approach and look at it with the mind as well. Do we believe that this has the opportunity to make the numbers we need for this to make financial sense And then there are a lot of people in the organization spending a lot of time analyzing markets.

“But somewhere between the heart decision and the brain decision, you just need to make up your mind. Mirror’s Edge is definitely one of those products. We’re so passionate about this product; it’s a game that needs to be built, basically. Is there an element of a leap of faith here, no pun intended Yes, there probably is, as there is with all games as they’re being built. You don’t know if they’re going to be a smash hit from the beginning. But do we feel like we’re swimming out into an unknown ocean Absolutely not.”

It’ll be interesting to see how the company’s 2015 line-up turns out.

Source: GamesIndustry International