DICE: "Each expansion has a soul and a theme"

We chat with Battlefield 4 executive producer Patrick Bach about levelution, what this generation of console has been like, and how players quickly find techniques the dev team never thought of.

Battlefield 4 had a massive presence at Gamescom in Cologne, where players were able to sample Paracel Storm, the new Obliteration mode as well as Conquest and Domination (behind closed doors) on 170 stations. On the subject of testing the game early, a beta for Battlefield 4 will be made available early October.

"It's just a taster. It's something that at least gets you to understand what it's all about. We won't give you the full game as a beta (laughs), but still we want people to try it out. And it's also for us, we want to make sure that everything works as intended. So we have that last minute window to change things if necessary."

Speaking of premium and upcoming plans for expansion packs, Bach offered the following:

"For us it's very important that the expansion pack has a soul and a theme that is very clear. We've done this before in the past and been quite successful with it. And I know the fans like the more focused themes, knowing exactly what they're getting. Right now we're releasing information that we're doing five expansion packs, some of them are in the works or starting up, some of them have not been started yet. Because then we'd put it in the game. So in general we're still working on it. We will collect feedback, we'll ask the community for, you know, help and ideas and try to make them as exciting and cool as possible."

In the EA booth Battlefield 4 was being demoed next to Titanfall ("it's a great game, it's a very different game") made by the former Call of Duty creators at Respawn Entertainment. An illustration of how things change in this industry and on the subject of change we asked Bach to sum up what the current generation has been like:

"It's fascinating to see how much more you can take out of a console, because I'm just guessing that everyone in the beginning of this cycle tried as hard as we're trying now to get the best games on the market for that console. Just looking at the first games coming out for the 360 or the PS3 they look kind of mediocre now looking back compared to the games that are being released at the end of the cycle. If you look at BF4 now, being the first game coming out in the cycle you can just imagine what games will look like in the end of this cycle."