Battlefield 3 Dev: Modern FPS “Stale”

Speaking to Edge Online and as per gamesindustry.biz, Karl Magnus Troedsson, DICE general manager, has called the current trend of having a shooter in a modern setting 'stale'.

"I think we're going to start seeing people moving away from the modern setting, because every now and again settings or themes start to get stale and then everyone jumps over," Troedsson told Edge Online. "You know, at some point dinosaurs are the hottest thing and everyone is making games with dinosaurs, but there are trends. It used to be WWII, and recently it's been the modern era and people are now moving towards near future."

It's interesting that Troedsson has said this, given the fact that his studio and published, with Battlefield, is in direct competition with Activision's Call of Duty and the latest Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is set in the near-future.

It doesn't seem like good PR to go out and say that your competition has managed to innovate before you. Although he has said that he doesn't see this as true innovation:

"But it's a bit cheap to just say, 'Okay, we're going to switch and go back in time or into the future and that will be innovation'. It will definitely drive the franchise forward for whatever game, but it's not true innovation, it's more a thematic change that has a perceived value to the gamers out there. But as a developer you can only make so many games in one particular era, and then you personally start to get a bit bored with it," he says.

What does this say about the next, inevitable, Battlefield franchise? And what does it say about shooters in the next five years? Will Call of Duty and Battlefield enter a sci-fi setting eventually?