Battlefield's second-screen experience, which allows quick access to maps, loadouts, stats, and server browsing, will only be available on next-gen and PC versions of the game.
Speaking to Engadget, Battlelog assistant producer Jesper Nielsen broke the news and explained why Battlescreen, as it's known, won't be available on Xbox 360 and PS3.
It's all born out of a desire to provide a better Battlelog experience. Looking back at the launch of the service with Battlefield 3, Nielsen and his team realised that the experience and engagement levels were far better on PC. Consequently, the service is now entirely web-based, meaning current-gen versions of the game will miss out on Battlescreen second-screen experience.
"Battlelog is powered by the web, and that has a lot of implications. There are a lot of different things you can do, things you can do faster, rather than building stuff in native code,"said Nielsen.
This will also have other benefits, too. "It's going to be a lot easier for us to actually update things from the in-game Battlelog than would otherwise be the case. You'd have to do patches normally; here we can actually do things almost by the flick of a finger," he said.
Other improvements have been made with a view to attracting more users to the system. Nielsen believes one of the bring problems with the service is that it wasn't easy to access – simply put, remembering an Origin password was too big of a barrier for console users. "At some point, maybe half a year before, they connected their Origin account to this email address and now they forgot what it is. And they tried, they can't remember it, so they give up," explains Nielsen. To rectify this, the Battlelog mobile app has a built-in QR code that will let console users quickly, and easily, log-in. "It might sound trivial, but it's actually making something that might be problematic for people super simple," he said.
And while Battlescreen is currently limited to browsing stats and checking your loadouts, Nielsen admitted crafting a second-screen experience was new to the studio, and it was being treated as a "learning experience". He went on to add, "the real test once we get it out to the players and see how they use it, both when they play and don't play. That will teach us a lot and help us innovate even more in this field. We don't have the answers to all the questions in this space yet, so it's definitely a bit of an experiment, but we're very confident with some of the steps we've taken to provide a truly meaningful and valuable second-screen experience."
Battlefield 4 launches on current-gen platforms at the end of October, while next-gen releases are contingent on the release of the next-gen consoles themselves.
If you're interested in second-screen experience, IGN recently conducted a survey of over 30,000 of readers to see what they thought about tablet integration – one of the major trends in video games today. You can read all about the results now.
Daniel is IGN's UK Staff Writer. You can be part of the world's most embarrassing cult by following him on IGN and Twitter.
Source : ign[dot]com
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