Battlefield liked to ‘take the p*ss’ out of Call of Duty, but it was a ‘very healthy rivalry’ that pushed DICE to do its own thing

As rivalries go, you don’t get much bigger than Call of Duty versus Battlefield. Two of the largest, most expensive series around, both of them covering wars both past, present and future—of course there’s going to be some competition.

David Goldfarb, who served as lead designer at DICE for Battlefield 3 and Bad Company 2, even found ways to throw some punches in the script.

“Even lines I wrote in Bad Company 2, they’re in a chopper and Sweetwater says, “He’ll just send some special ops douchebags with pussy-ass heartbeat monitors on their guns instead of us.” Something that directly references Modern Warfare. I did take the piss out of those guys, more than once. Not because I didn’t like them, but because I did.”

Goldfarb tells us that DICE pushed itself “to do stuff maybe you wouldn’t do if they were not there”. Particularly during the days of the first Modern Warfares, which he calls “tremendous games”.

“I haven’t ever seen that kind of shooter executed at that level,” he says, “and I probably won’t ever again. They were works of art, almost. We couldn’t compete with that, so we had to do our own thing.”

Call of Duty was looming over things even as Goldfarb joined DICE, too. “I came on to work on Bad Company 2 as lead designer, but that actually isn’t what happened. What happened was Bad Company 1 got pushed back because COD 4 was as good as it was. So we spent more time working on BC1. And then I think I worked on Mirrors Edge at the end.”

There was a negative side to the rivalry too, however, but that mostly took the form of pressure for the higher ups. “The negatives are usually, ‘Well, we need to sell X units, and they’re going to sell Y.'” And the competition meant that EA wanted DICE to do things “that maybe aren’t the best things for the game.”

Goldfarb is no longer at DICE, but the rivalry continues. This time, it looks like Battlefield 6 is in the lead, revitalising the long-running series while Call of Duty flounders a bit.

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