Battlefield: Bad Company 2

The artistic crew at DICE use Frostbite, Destruction 2.0 and a whole lot of talent to create new battle levels in Bad Company 2.

CGSociety :: Game Production Focus
20 May 2010, by Paul Hellard

Battlefield: Bad Company Two is primarily a squad based first-person shooter. Similar to previous titles in the series from EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE), the game is played out on large maps with vehicles, aircraft, turrets, unmanned aerial vehicles armed with hellfire missiles, and so on, but the majority of the game is based around infantry combat.

"Battlefield Bad Company One was a good looking game but it didn’t have a lot of visual variety," says Art Director Gustav Tilleby. So when he started looking at developing and populating the new Battlefield Bad Company Two, adding variation was a big focus.

"The most obvious thing we did was to add the jungle and snow settings to the already existing woodland and desert settings, giving us four distinct settings in total," Tilleby describes. "In addition to the new settings we focused on adding more variation into the levels themselves. Every five to ten minutes of gameplay, a change was to be presented to the player, for instance going from a narrow section to an open section, by changing the weather and lighting or by presenting a vista."

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

Characters
There are a whole bunch of extra characters in the story of Battlefield Bad Company 2. Characters with personalities that stay true through the missions. Many players in Multiplayer mode report finding some characters quirky to the extreme. Their demeanor and behavior stays carefully authored throughout the mission.

Frostbite
The crew at DICE also wanted Battlefield: Bad Company Two to feel really big and epic.

The Frostbite Engine is a game engine created by DICE, developers of the Battlefield series. DICE has confirmed a Frostbite 2 engine is being developed that will support DirectX 11 on PC.

Frostbite has other capabilities like HDR Sound, which is able to adjust different types of sound loudness and let the player hear important sounds clearly even if there are many other noises being generated. There are two noticeable versions of the engine; Frostbite v1.0, used in Battlefield: Bad Company One and v1.5 used in Battlefield 1943 and Battlefield: Bad Company Two featuring Destruction 2.0 which has Bullet Drop and ability to destroy whole buildings instead of walls only. DICE is currently developing Frostbite v2.0.

"Frostbite is good at rendering large environments so that was definitely something we wanted to take advantage of by creating vast height maps with long view-distance," says Tilleby. "In addition to the large heightmaps we did a lot of cheating with backdrops, effects and scripted events to make the world seem bigger than it actually is."

In some cases the DICE artists added matte paintings of mountains, or silhouettes of cities far into the background. Also, more subtle things were added like a powerline cutting through the landscape, hinting at some city or town out of view. Scripted events were also added like jets swooshing by overhead or tracer fire. Perhaps smokepillars and explosions on the horizon. These were all designed to give the impression of a larger, living world where stuff happens even without player interaction.

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

Concept Art
As Art Director, Gustav Tilleby had two guys working full time with concept art during the production of Battlefield: Bad Company Two. One was primarily focused on storyboarding and level visualization while the other focused more on moodboards and character concepts.

"We really wanted to storyboard a lot of the actual game and not only cinematics so the concept artists worked close to the design team while creating the framework for each mission to visualize their ideas at an early stage," explains Tilleby. "In addition to creating concept art an extensive photo reference catalog was created. The intention was never to recreate reality but we were very inspired by the actual locations when building Bad Company Two.

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

Destruction 2.0
In Bad Company One, there was a good cross section of destruction. There was deformable terrain and you could destroy most walls and props. But in Bad Company Two, the spectrum was broadened by adding fully collapsible buildings, a kind of macro destruction, by adding more and smaller pieces to props: micro destruction. "Combined with the ability to just blow stuff up, it gives a more satisfying experience where you can destroy your opponents' cover piece-by-piece with handguns," says Lead Designer David Goldfarb. "A player could level the entire battlefield with a heavy vehicle, with grenades or rockets."

All tanks, APCs, Jeeps and helicopters are based on real vehicles. The quad bike, jetski and the UAV are not. When creating a made up vehicle it’s still important to make them feel authentic so we collected a lot of reference that were used as inspiration when creating those.

Levels
When the levels in Bad Company Two were created, the art team started by defining a rough framework. Firstly there were the overall themes: in Panama Canal it was destruction; in Atacama desert there was a sandstorm; in Nelson Bay it was a night assault.

After that, they created a rough heightmap with some basic object placement. "During this phase, we started to define how the visuals would change as the player progressed through the map and what each area would look like," says Tilleby. "In the Arica Harbor, we wanted the theme to give the impression of a long ongoing battle around the area so we added huge smokeplumes on the horizon."

This level itself has several distinct areas. It starts at a desert highway and a temporary military base, then moves into a more urban environment and afterwards moves down towards a harbor. Designing like this not only gives each level its own theme and gives the players a sense of progress as they play through them, but also helps navigation and readability by making it easier to differentiate and interpret each part of the level.

Battlefield Bad Company Two is available for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

Discuss this article on CGTalk