Bach reveals they ”got a lot of criticism” for not being serious as humour is ”very personal,” and the mass market cares not for laughs. Naughty Dog’s Uncharted ‘found a way’.
“If you make your product more niche, you’ll get more happy fans,” Patrick Bach told OXM. “But that audience will be smaller - some people won’t care, some people will love it.”
”When we did the original Bad Company and the sequel, we got a lot of criticism. Why would I play this? It’s not a serious shooter, I don’t care about this. I want a serious shooter with a more hard-boiled angle,” he continued. “And we thought it was fun. We loved it, we thought it was a great game. The narrative was amazing and the characters were amazing.”
DICE feels Bad Company could never achieve the numbers the humourless Battlefield does.
”It is true that for some reason if you want to make a game for the masses, you need to be more neutral when it comes to things like humour, because humour is very personal,” he admitted. “Some people love it, some people hate it.”
Naughty Dog achieved ‘funny’ in the mass marketed Uncharted with Nathan Drake.
“He’s not really funny,” Bach said. “He’s serious, but he’s kind of ironic. I’m happy for franchises that can do that. I think Bad Company was perhaps part of that group. I love franchises that don’t take themselves too seriously.”
It’s extremely regrettable news if this means DICE will be kept from pursuing more Bad Company simply because it was ‘too funny’ for primetime numbers. Of course even more disastrously the studio could strip out what made it great in the first place to appease the number crunchers over at EA.
Keep on breachin’ those walls Marlowe, Sweetwater, Haggard and Sarge.
