In a recent interview, Ben Cousins, DICE's executive producer of the Battlefield series revealed that Battlefield Heroes battles will be much smaller than its predecessors' and that it has already been launched.
Battlefield Heroes is the latest installment of the popular online FPS series, Battlefield, and it is free to play. In order to minimize the barrier to entry, the development team opted to restrict the number of players per battle to 16 instead of the usual 64. "We have really good 16-player matches", Ben Cousins explained. "The engine supports up to 64 players and we reduced that because we want to have a sensible minimum spectrum of player and also for the servers - the servers are slightly less costly to run than previous Battlefield games."
"Really we'd like to have huge 64-player crazy Battlefield Heroes matches but that's not possible at the moment - that's something that we'd look at maybe in the future, maybe we would have special access to 64-player games potentially," he added.
Battlefield Heroes is currently in closed beta with more than 10,000 participating to date. But DICE don't plan to "turn on a switch one day and suddenly our audience get's 100 times bigger"; instead, they plan to expand the closed beta gradually to "almost to the point where every hardcore gamer in the world will probably be able to get a key if they want to - it would just be within a closed beta so that we can control the size of it to a degree".
The game will be officially released next summer.
