Battlefield 3 has a campaign that, although it received mixed reviews initially, has grown into a nostalgic favorite for many fans of FPS stories from the Xbox 360 era. It turns out that some parts of the campaign came from an earlier, very different idea for Battlefield 3, one that was actually supposed to be more like an MMO than a typical shooter.
DICE veteran David Goldfarb shared this during an interview with NoClip. Goldfarb worked on the campaigns for both Bad Company and its sequel. When the team was making Bad Company 2, many developers were secretly working on what was called “the big project”, a very different version of Battlefield 3.
Goldfarb described this version as “more of an MMO, really.” There aren’t many details about what exactly this MMO-style Battlefield 3 would have been like, but it seems the team struggled to find a solid design for it. The project, codenamed Venice, was DICE’s main focus for years, but it never quite came together and was eventually canceled.
After the MMO project was shelved, the leads from the Bad Company 2 team stepped in to create a more traditional sequel. Their goal was a game with single-player, co-op, and multiplayer modes that could compete with Call of Duty. Goldfarb took charge of the single-player campaign, and while the final Battlefield 3 was essentially a new game, it did utilize some leftover assets from the canceled MMO version.
One example was the Paris setting. Goldfarb explained that the team had these assets from Project Venice and figured, “What are we gonna do with Paris?” That led to the creation of the Paris mission called Comrades, featuring Russian Spetsnaz forces. Goldfarb insisted it had to be entirely in Russian to stay authentic, saying, “Not gonna do some fucking bullshit. The whole mission’s gotta be in Russian.”
If you’ve been wondering why Battlefield 6 has taken so long, it’s worth remembering that game development often involves big changes and unexpected turns, just like it did back in 2011 for Battlefield 3. The process isn’t always smooth, even for big studios like DICE.
