Likelihood Of Another Battlefield: Bad Company Is Slim, But Its...

"I would like to play it and see what they wind up doing."

Battlefield's Bad Company spin-offs were probably the last time I properly got into a Battlefield game. But given a choice between a tongue-in-cheek shooter that sold worse than the main series and a surer bet like more mainline Battlefields, unsurprisingly EA keeps going for the latter.

In a chat with Bad Company 2's lead designer, David Goldfarb, he says that he thinks the team would "want to do it", but after all these years they're now spread across the industry—including at Embark, the studio behind Arc Raiders. "So there's that part of it, where that band's not getting back together to make that game. But another band could make it."

But that would require Battlefield Studios—made up of DICE, Ripple Effect, Criterion and Motive—and EA itself to take a massive risk, something the publisher isn't exactly famous for doing.

"If they choose to make it, they are choosing, in their own minds, to make a product that is going to have a smaller subset of buyers," says Goldfarb, "just by virtue of the fact that humour is subjective. And Bad Company 1 didn't sell. Bad Company 2 sold really well, but it didn't sell as well as Battlefield 3."

He reckons Vince Zampella could pull it off, though. "I have faith in Vince Zampella. He knows his shit, obviously. So if anybody could resurrect that franchise—I know he loved Bad Company—I could definitely see that. And Battlefield 6 is great. So if it happens, that would be cool. I would like to play it and see what they wind up doing."

It's strange how these things pan out. When Goldfarb was working on Battlefield, Zampella was his rival, leading Infinity Ward and Call of Duty's development at Activision. Indeed, the first Bad Company was actually pushed back because of the success of Modern Warfare, developed by Infinity Ward.

Now Zampella is the head of Respawn and Ripple Effect, with EA putting him in charge of Battlefield. So Goldfarb's former rival is now the one holding the keys to Bad Company.

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I'd love to see EA return to the spin-off, but as much as Goldfarb has faith in Zampella, he's aware that a project like this would be incredibly risky. "You need people that are willing to put their reputation on the line to back something like that. And be like, 'We just need to lean into this thing that people loved long ago, and it will pay off.' In this ma

Source: PC Gamer