DICE’s Creative Director, Lars Gustavsson, recently in an interview expressed that Bad Company franchise will make a comeback although he wasn’t sure when that will happen as DICE has a lot of ongoing projects which includes Mirror’s Edge 2 and Star Wars: Battlefront.
Battlefield 4 is an upcoming title, a new addition to the Battlefield series which will see its launch on a variety of platforms including the next-generation consoles; Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Although ever since DICE revealed that the game would run at 720p and 900p resolutions on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 but the versions will be locked at 60fps, gamers have been criticizing DICE and EA citing that the new Frostbite Engine 3 is not optimized well even in its early stages and that EA is rushing the game for the platforms.
Among all this, Battlefield 4’s Creative Director expressed that they are interested in bringing Battlefield 4 on Linux. Speaking with Polygon, he stated that Linux only requires one ‘killer’ app to kickoff just as Halo was the ‘killer’ app for Xbox for its crazy launch. But that’s not all, he also expressed his opinion about the recent announcements made by Valve which included Steam OS and Steam Machines.
Gustavsson believes that these new products from Valve will open up the market to explore new and better ways of consuming games.
Basically for different ways of accessing customers and giving them possibilities of play, I think it is super exciting…
The only thing I know is that from five or ten years from now gaming and especially how you consume it won’t look like it does today. I do think with streaming services and new input devices and so on, it wouldn’t surprise me if there is less need of hardware and more on demand gaming experience.
He stated that competition is always healthy and can deliver a better experience for the consumer so that everyone in the future can have better games. Gustavsson also said that Indie game development is in a better position to bring Linux’s video game development to light and spread awareness among the masses. Steam OS is also based on a modified Linux Kernel which means that optimizing games and drivers for Linux can also serve them on Steam OS.
So, to me, I think that the possibilities are many and I think indies can build for Linux even though we don’t have enormous audience
says Gustavsson.
But only a ‘killer’ app isn’t the only requirement for Linux to kickoff in to the market. It also needs optimized drivers for GPU cards from their respective manufactures to utilize the GPUs to perform at its full potential. Otherwise we’ll only be seeing half-baked ports of the titles spread across different platforms. Nvidia and AMD are hard at work to release optimized drivers for Linux. Steam OS is also based on Linux Kernel, so we’ll hopefully be seeing optimized drivers for Linux soon.
Currently there is no news about Battlefield 4 coming to Linux or the Steam OS.
Battlefield 4 launches on October 29 for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 whereas the next-gen console versions will debut on November 15 for PlayStation 4 and November 22 for Xbox One.
