DICE: Halo, Call Of Duty Inspired Battlefield 3's Battlelog

Author: by Kris Graft, Christian Nutt

Battlefield 3 developers -- Stockholm, Sweden-based DICE -- know that games are not developed in a vacuum -- that just developing a game is no longer enough. In a recent interview, Battlefield 3 producer Patrick Liu told Gamasutra that "Eventually, all games will be services, in my mind," and Battlelog, the social network layer for the upcoming online military shooter, is clearly a reflection of this belief. When developing it, Battlelog producer Frederick Loving made sure to check out the major social players both inside and outside of games. That includes eyeing the competitors' products, including the social networks for Bungie's Halo and Activision's Call of Duty. "I looked at all social networks from Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, to of course [Halo] Waypoint and [Call of Duty] Elite. We looked at everything," he told Gamasutra in a recent interview. "That’s inspirational for me just finding out what other people do and just sort of grabbing the good pieces out of it," he added. To Loving, social networks take all kinds of forms and layer on top of various products, but they all have their fundamental underpinnings, which were taken into consideration when designing Battlelog. "Of course we’re inspired by a lot of the social networks that are out there and they’re all pretty common if you look at them," he said. "They have the similar feeds, they have similar likes, they have similar comments so there’s a lot of common features amongst all social networks." Gamasutra will have more from Loving on Battlelog in an interview to be published on Thursday.