It's in the name... | Battlefield Heroes - Free to Play, Cartoon Shooter

Ben Cousins, Senior Producer

Hi, Ben Cousins here, Senior Producer on Battlefield Heroes. In the last blog entry James talked about the process of designing the character classes in the game in the late spring last year. At this point we were pretty far along with the design of the game, and we also had a playable prototype which the team were having a lot of fun playing. So now it was time to present the title to the wider EA.

I'd imagine many people think that working for a big games company like EA is quite 'corporate', with lots of meddling from executives and constant financial update meetings. This couldn't be further from the truth. Battlefield Heroes wasn't really on the radar of anyone outside of the DICE studio until we had spent six months in development -- more than half of our overall development time.

Recently EA appointed a new CEO, John Riccitiello -- one of the changes John has implemented is the division of the EA studios into 'labels', covering specific types of games. The four labels are Casual, Sports, Sims and Games. DICE is part of the Games label, which includes shooters, driving games, RPGs, RTSs and action/adventure. This new label structure gives each individual studio lots of freedom to make the games it wants to make -- the games it believes will be exciting and successful, rather than taking direct orders from 'on high' on what to do. DICE recently announced Battlefield Heroes and Mirror's Edge, two games which are direct results of this new 'City State' model of studio management -- games created independently with very little influence from anyone outside the studio.

Frank Gibeau

This is the system that gave us six months to work on the concept and prototype for Battlefield Heroes before it was seen by the Games Label president, Frank Gibeau. I flew out to the EA HQ in Redwood Shores, just south of San Francisco in early June of 2007 to talk him about the game. Frank is easy to present to, as he's a hardcore gamer (you should see his line-up of World of Warcraft characters -- pretty impressive) and thus you can use the language of games and gamers with him. At this stage I was talking pretty broadly about the concept for Battlefield Heroes -- a free-to-download Battlefield game, focussed on accessibility and fun and with a cartoony graphics style -- we showed him some images of characters, a movie of the new third person camera and talked about the classes and game modes. Frank was really impressed by the concept, gave us a few suggestions (like introducing the Royal Army as the Nationals nemesis, rather than another army we had initially planned) and gave us the go ahead to complete the game.

As soon as you know you are going ahead with launching a game, you start thinking about it's name. Battlefield Heroes wasn't always called that -- DICE gives products codenames so that information can't be leaked about them before announcement. James Salt codenamed Battlefield 2142 'Stella' (after the sci-fi setting and the Belgian beer), Battlefield Bad Company was codenamed 'Next' (as in 'Next-Gen') and Battlefield Heroes was simply called 'West' for the majority of the project (as in a South Korean-style Play 4 Free game brought to the 'western' world).

Title slide from the early presentation we showed Frank

However you can't launch a game just called 'West' -- it gives you no sense of what the game is about, so we set about trying to find a real name for it. I've named quite a few projects in the past -- I was the guy who came up with the name Home when I worked at Sony, and it's an aspect of game development I find interesting, but always difficult. Even when you have found a name that works for the project, you then have to subject it to numerous legal checks to make sure nobody else is using the name and often your favourite choices are already taken.

One thing I've found that makes choosing a name too slow is including too many people in the decision making process -- you end up with endless lists and endless opinions that don't get you any closer to the answer. Sometimes a dictatorship works better, or at least one person coming up with the ideas. With this in mind I spent a few days making a shortlist, and I sent it around to a few people in the studio for feedback. 'Battlefield Heroes' was an early favourite -- it retained the Battlefield name, it communicated the fact that this is a game about creating, customising and leveling up your own unique war hero and it also didn't lock the game into any specific historical setting, so we could go ahead with our fictional world of the Royals and Nationals battling it out over the results of the Cycling in the Olympic games.

So after we decided that 'Battlefield Heroes' might work, we sent the name to the EA legal department for clearance and held our breath. These things can take a long time as the legal team needs to do quite stringent checks on the name to ensure nobody else is using it. After a couple of weeks of waiting, the name came back as 'OK' which was great news! Finally the development team knew what they were working on, and we could start developing logo ideas and moving forward with announcement plans for the game.

Next time -- the importance of playtests and the design and development of the ability system